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WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

ejohn.org

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Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#91

Post by goldfeld »

jeresig wrote: post #69
pcwalton wrote: post #63

Increasingly, jQuery is not just an implementation, but is rather an API. That's why we're seeing the rise of alternatives like zepto.js that match the jQuery API de-facto standard but are implemented better (smaller, dropping IE6 compatibility). Replace "jQuery API" with "Web API" and this actually argues against John's point. Multiple implementations are better for everyone.

I'm not sure Zepto could be defined as "better" considering that it only implements a small subset of the jQuery API. In the browser world you can't get away with implementing a small subset of a specification, it'll be consider broken and people won't use it. I'm not arguing against multiple implementations. If Mozilla were to switch to WebKit, rewrite its DOM implementation to be 20x faster, and then release that -…

In as much as I consider jQuery a kitchen sink approach, anyone who tries to trim it down to the core (and dropping old browsers which need lots of ifs and elses) may well be better in my opinion.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#92

Post by ripter »

phpnode wrote: post #47
oinksoft wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, don't provide a test like "you'll be in the hospital by #20" if you haven't vetted the results of it first. My personal advocacy for the Closure Tools does not discredit my views on other tools, and I'm hoping this ad hominem nonsense doesn't fly in such a forum. Quite a few people come into the IRC channel and are using the Closure Compiler with jQuery and I don't give them shit. I take no issue with you using…

you're right in that I should have checked first, and really if you think about it it's no surprise that YouTube, Yahoo, Google etc are using their own tools. That does not detract from the point that jQuery has massive, ridiculous mind share and completely dominates the web though. Your point about it being impossible to build a gmail style app in jQuery is extremely dubious. There are an awful lot of complicated JS…

If you check you are right. Amazon, eBay, and MSN all use jQuery. (at least on their homepage).

You can't simply look for the global `$` or a single file named jquery.

I work on large corporate applications and we use jQuery, but we would fail the `$` and jquery file test. We don't expose the global `$` and jquery gets combined and minified with our own code.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#93

Post by MatthewPhillips »

snprbob86 wrote: post #80
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Linux isn't even close to being the only kernel being worked on. Neither absolutely nor from a marketshare perspective.

What's your point? There's also Trident (IE) and Gecko (FF), just like there's NT and BSD.

There are dozens if not hundreds of kernels in development today. Some developed as small niche side projects. Some in proprietary embedded products. Some purely as research experiments. I do not see that type of diversity in browser engines and I think it is absolutely as important.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#94

Post by gcp »

bobsy wrote: post #90

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…

I don't know how committed they are to it.

Extremely, especially in this context. The reason why Opera is switching (web compatibility issues if you're not the dominant implementation) is exactly the reason why Mozilla would fight a switch with tooth and nail - and remember that unlike Opera they cannot care for profit when doing so.

Here's an extensive reply from a Firefox developer: http://www.quora.com/Mozilla-Firefox/Will-Firefox-ever-drop-...

I wonder what would have happened if Microsoft, Mozilla or Opera had open sourced their browser engine with WebKit.

I have no idea what you mean.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#95

Post by lttlrck »

flyosity wrote: post #32
oinksoft wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather, the practice of providing a DOM API compatibility layer runs the web, jQuery being the most widely used library of this sort. When you step out of the god-object API jQuery provides and look at the internals, jQuery, MooTools, and Closure look surprisingly similar. I find the latter to provide the best compatibility (so does Google), but that is another discussion altogether.

Your opinions on what JavaScript libraries provide "the best compatibility" has little bearing on your original statement, that jQuery is not as popular as it actually is.

"jQuery is not as popular as it actually is"

Hmm.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#96

Post by bzbarsky »

pkulak wrote: post #85
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…

One rendering engine that has some serious limitations, like not being very parallelizable, because of highly entrenched implementation choices.

Which means that if you want hardware capable of rendering the web it can't be low-power highly-parallel hardware; it has to be high-power-consumption fast-serial-operation hardware. Why is that bad? I guess that's a matter of perspective. I think that would be a terrible outcome, personally.

I should point out that I'm not aware of any compiler that has implemented C++ perfectly, and I doubt any ever will given that it's a moving target. So why bother having multiple compilers or a C++ standard at all? For example, why does the WebKit argument not apply to gcc? And note that in compiler-land not being able to compile some codebases is OK as long as you can compile the codebase your user cares about, while the Web equivalent (only rendering some websites but not others) is a lot more problematic, because the typical compiler user compiles fewer different codebases than they visit websites. And also because using different compilers for different codebases is a lot simpler than using different browsers for different websites.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#97

Post by ripter »

snarfy wrote: post #54

"This page best viewed in Internet Explorer". Remember those days? This is not a good thing. The HTML spec should be the standard, not WebKit's bugs.

The difference is that WebKit is open source with several large companies contributing to it. If it doesn't follow the HTML spec you (or anyone else) can fix the bug.

IE was closed source and Microsoft disbanded the team that developed it (IE6). If it had a bug, there wasn't anything you could do about it. You just made your site work around the bug, possibly breaking it on other browsers.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#98

Post by oinksoft »

ripter wrote: post #88
oinksoft wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You ought to read comments before replying to them. I clearly said that only those four are using jQuery, and that the remaining sixteen do not. I checked all of them by hand before stating this, except for Wikipedia because it is common knowledge that MediaWiki uses jQuery.

Also, your idea below about sniffing for $ is a bit embarrassing. Firefox, Chrome, etc. have come with $ for many years as an ID or query selector, and it has nothing to do with jQuery. Prototype and MooTools also provide $, and probably a dozen or more similar libraries you haven't heard of.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#99

Post by bzbarsky »

bobsy wrote: post #90

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…

Uh.. Mozilla's browser engine has been open source since 1998 or so. It predates WebKit even existing.

Re: WebKit is the jQuery of Browser Engines

#100

Post by Moto7451 »

bobsy wrote: post #90

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…

Mozilla has been open source since day one.

Mozilla's engine at one point was the go to for a cross platform embedable browser but things changed: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.embeddin...

Edit: Should clarify, Mozilla as an entity that releases web browsers, not "Mozilla" as in the Netscape days.

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