WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines • Hacker News Board

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#81

Post by kenjackson » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 4:57 PM UTC

etherealG wrote: post #73

kenjackson wrote: post #71

The web is not open and becoming increasingly less so. People love to talk about how the web is about open standards and such, but it really is rather quite closed. It's driven less by standards and more by de-facto implementations. Soon we can get rid of the standards committee and just talk to the implementers of webkit to define the "standard". And I think even worse has been the wholesale discounting of plugins.…

if the code for the de facto implementation is open source, does it matter? i see the code and the standard as the same thing in different languages personally.

Of course it matters. The "standard" becomes driven by the peculiarities of a specific implementation, rather than the best thing for the base of customers that are served by the standard.

I think it's fine to have a reference implementation, but we need a broad set of implementations (with actual users) so that the standard doesn't get blinders on it due to an implementation decision made on a de-facto standard.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#82

Post by papsosouid » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 4:58 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #45

cs702 wrote: post #4

WebKit and jQuery -- and Bootstrap -- are becoming the new 'Win32 API.'

Why say Win32? Why not say WebKit and jQuery are the new Linux? It's actually a better analogy. Software monoculture is not inherently a bad thing; it can be a good thing. Re-inventing the wheel isn't progress. The world is much better off with Linux than 20 different Unix variants. And the world is likely better off with WebKit than dozens of different browser variants. The issue isn't having a software monoculture,…

Because that would be a terrible analogy. Using linux as an example actually goes against your point. We do have "20 different unix variants". Just because you live in a linux bubble, doesn't mean there isn't a world outside of that bubble. Almost all software that runs on linux isn't using the linux api, they are using a gradually munged up collection of APIs from over the years, including posix, bsd and sysv APIs. That software works on on dozens of different systems. Software written to a common API that is implemented by dozens of different systems seems a lot more like an argument in favour of more rendering engines implementing a common API.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#83

Post by jeresig » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 4:59 PM UTC

tolmasky wrote: post #78

etherealG wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the code for the de facto implementation is open source, does it matter? i see the code and the standard as the same thing in different languages personally.

They are different things because its unrealistic to fork WebKit and get any significant market share. So even though you might make a worthwhile change to the engine, realistically you need that change to be accepted by WebKit proper for it to matter.

Forking WebKit is effectively the same as writing your own browser, with regards to standardization. At the end of the day you want to get everyone to agree on the standard -- having an implementation that everyone can use only helps to sweeten the deal.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#84

Post by etherealG » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 5:00 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #81

etherealG wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the code for the de facto implementation is open source, does it matter? i see the code and the standard as the same thing in different languages personally.

Of course it matters. The "standard" becomes driven by the peculiarities of a specific implementation, rather than the best thing for the base of customers that are served by the standard. I think it's fine to have a reference implementation, but we need a broad set of implementations (with actual users) so that the standard doesn't get blinders on it due to an implementation decision made on a de-facto standard.

i see what you mean yes, that does make sense. to keep it honest so to speak.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#85

Post by pkulak » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 5:00 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #71

The web is not open and becoming increasingly less so. People love to talk about how the web is about open standards and such, but it really is rather quite closed. It's driven less by standards and more by de-facto implementations. Soon we can get rid of the standards committee and just talk to the implementers of webkit to define the "standard". And I think even worse has been the wholesale discounting of plugins.…

And that's bad why? So the web only works with one rendering engine. One rendering engine that's open source and can be used and modified by anyone for any purpose.

Standards are great for things like protocols (even languages), but an entire web browser is a tad more complicated than TCP or even C++. No two browsers have ever implemented HTML/JS/CSS perfectly and they never will. If that's the case, then what's the point of a "standard" anyway?

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#86

Post by papsosouid » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 5:03 PM UTC

fideloper wrote: post #3

Not to derail the topic, but did anyone else read that headline as a negative, only to find that it wasn't (necessarily)?

Yeah, same here. I assumed this was going to be some article about why webkit is bad for the web somehow. Funny how statements like that can have such dramatically different interpretations.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#87

Post by jahewson » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 5:05 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #71

The web is not open and becoming increasingly less so. People love to talk about how the web is about open standards and such, but it really is rather quite closed. It's driven less by standards and more by de-facto implementations. Soon we can get rid of the standards committee and just talk to the implementers of webkit to define the "standard". And I think even worse has been the wholesale discounting of plugins.…

proprietary binary plugins != open web

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#88

Post by ripter » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 5:08 PM UTC

oinksoft wrote: post #38

phpnode wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly you have some kind of issue with jQuery but just because you don't like it doesn't make it any less popular, useful or prevalent. Here's a fun drinking game - open up the top 1000 websites and do a shot for each one that uses jQuery. You will be in hospital by about #20 I think.

None of the top five websites use jQuery. Of the top 20, I've got one fifth of them using jQuery: Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, and MSN. Not in the hospital yet.

I just checked Amazon, eBay, and MSN they use jQuery.

The only one you listed that doesn't seem to is Wikipedia. You really should actually try the websites before you list them.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#89

Post by tolmasky » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 5:08 PM UTC

jeresig wrote: post #83

tolmasky wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are different things because its unrealistic to fork WebKit and get any significant market share. So even though you might make a worthwhile change to the engine, realistically you need that change to be accepted by WebKit proper for it to matter.

Forking WebKit is effectively the same as writing your own browser, with regards to standardization. At the end of the day you want to get everyone to agree on the standard -- having an implementation that everyone can use only helps to sweeten the deal.

The response was more in regards to the grand-OP's desire for a lower level extensible runtime and lamentation about plugins, more than a comparison to standards now that I think about it. In other words, which web is more open:

1. One in which all the code is open source but there are huge hurdles to releasing your own browser, and any new feature is thus at the mercy of just a few big companies (Apple, Google, etc.).

or

2. One in which perhaps all the browsers were closed source, but adding new features to any such browser really was just a matter of referencing a script on a web page?

The questions is more or less only useful as a thought experiment by this point of course, and in particular I don't feel that the "standards" process was ever particularly open to begin with, so I don't think things have, or will, necessarily get much worse.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#90

Post by bobsy » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 5:10 PM UTC

I think it is obvious that WebKit has won and by a margin when it comes to browser engines.

For Opera it is the best move for them. They can now focus the majority of their development time on making the browser great instead of putting a decent chunk of their development time in effectively replicating what WebKit does. I think in the coming year or so Opera will be become a far better browser for it.

As for Mozilla and IE. You would expect Microsoft have more than enough resources to keep working on Trident/Lynx whatever it is called.

For Mozilla is their OS tied to their own engine? I don't know how committed they are to it. For all the releases of Firefox tabs still aren't sandboxed and phpmyadmin often freezes the entire browser when looking at monster tables... perhaps they would benefit from spending more time improving the browser and less time working on rendering.

I wonder what would have happened if Microsoft, Mozilla or Opera had open sourced their browser engine with WebKit. Perhaps we would have seen a split and more competition in this area.

Now it is who has the $$$ to continue to develop their own propriety engine.