Announcing WebKit2

https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2010-April/012235.html

by tlrobinson • 16 years ago

232 59 16 years ago

lists.webkit.org

mbrubeck• 16 years ago

Ooh, and with multi-process coming to Firefox and other Mozilla apps (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis), soon we'll have multiprocess/async web browsing everywhere.

xpaulbettsx3• 16 years ago

Dropped Linux support in the process :-/

andymoe• 16 years ago

"Currently WebKit2 is available for Mac and Windows, and we would gladly accept patches to add more ports." does not sound like they are dropping anything.

othermaciej4• 16 years ago

We're also not deleting any of the existing APIs - we expect there to be a gradual migration to the new model.

xpaulbettsx3• 16 years ago

I only worry that if Linux isn't an official platform, it won't get the same updates that the real ones will and will fall into bitrot.

malkia• 16 years ago

I understand the need for each process to be in a separate process, but would've all this special code (to separate processes) would've been needed if Windows had implemented fork()?

jfoutz• 16 years ago

I'm not sure if you're kidding :)

No, you still need all of the parent/child communication. if a child tab dies, who cleans up the mess? If the user changes rendering preferences, how do you update all the client process? At the very least there's some infrastructure to coordinate parent and children. It's likely they do clever things so each visible window can be rendered by multiple processes, without the ui getting fubared.

Hoff• 16 years ago

If you're not kidding about that...

fork() is a long-standing thorn when porting code onto some platforms; it's seldom used for what it was originally intended for, and (when it is) the copy-on-write memory semantics and the file descriptors and network contexts and such aren't widely adopted.

About 95% of the cases reviewed during the ports were using fork() as a way to start a process; as a way to do a vfork()/exec() and to create a separate process. The remaining 5% of those applications were using the memory address spaces and the I/O channels and the rest of the process context. Which makes those really difficult to port to a platform that lacked a full-on fork().

xpaulbettsx3• 16 years ago

Trivia time, the Windows kernel actually does implement fork, it just doesn't expose it to the Win32 subsystem. I keep trying to convince the kernel devs to expose it, because it'd be extremely handy for UAC if you had a ForkAndElevate() function that would create a forked child with elevated Admin privileges.

mlinsey• 16 years ago

Someone once told me that the NT kernel is designed so that with a couple config changes you can make it behave like Unix or OS/2, with Windows being just one "personality" on top the device, supposedly because MS was contracted to build several different OS in the early 90s. Is this what you are referring to by "the Win32 subsystem"? Does that still work? Or have there been so many changes over the years that something crazy would happen if you tried to run NT OS/2?

LoupSolitaire• 16 years ago

Once webkit 2 released, they may add a feature that split lines at 80 characters in their MUA :)

briansmith• 16 years ago

Or, the mailing list archive software could just render it reasonably like good MUAs do.

sjs• 16 years ago

s/Or/And/

emit strictly, accept liberally. then we'd have 2 lines of defence.

chbarts• 16 years ago

Given that email doesn't have markup, this opens up the possibility that formatted text will be ruined by the MUA.

nailer2• 16 years ago

80 characters wouldn't make sense: most people view text in variable width fonts, which are generally considered easy to read.

A better idea would be to contain the text in something.

toisanji• 16 years ago

What are the pros and cons for allowing other clients to use it as opposed to what Google Chrome offers?

olliej2• 16 years ago

WebKit is used by many different applications and browsers (eg. Epiphany, Arora, Omniweb, Shiira, etc) -- by incorporating multiprocess support directly in webkit all of those applications can make use of it.

othermaciej4• 16 years ago

WebKit is also used in lots of other applications that are not browsers, but may be getting untrusted content from the network, or that may be rendering complex content but need total responsiveness. For example, Mail, iChat, Adium, Colloquy, lots of other chat clients on Mac too.

MikeCapone2• 16 years ago

This can only be a good thing for the web.

In a twisted way, I'm kind of disappointed, though; it'll make the choice between Chrome and Safari a lot harder. Right now I'm using Chrome 95% of the time, but if Safari becomes much better, I might end up sitting between two chairs.

Anyone knows what the implications of this are for Chrome? They use Webkit. Will they stay on Webkit1 while Apple splits with V2?

pavs4• 16 years ago

Safari has bigger issues than rendering engine. (at least for me)

I don't even have to open a website, just open a new tab and its starts beachballing just to load the new tab. Also extensions are a big part of my browsing experience. Safari doesn't have large extension community like firefox and Chrome.

Simply put, for me, chrome is more than its rendering engine. Overall its just a well rounded piece of software with very frequent updates, which is very unique among browsers.

MikeCapone2• 16 years ago

I would be very surprised if Apple took the time to re-write the rendering engine but didn't also work on the UI. I suspect that when this new rendering engine launches, it will probably wrapped in a UI that copies most of the innovations of Chrome (and hopefully improves on them) in the same way that Chrome took a lot from others.

cpr• 16 years ago

If what you say is true (beachballing when open a new tab), you've got some serious issues particular to your system.

acdha• 16 years ago

Do you have top sites enabled? That's a comically inept botch (loading a 300MB image pack?) but with it disabled the difference versus Chrome is pretty minimal - it's mostly down to Chrome's ability to segregate CPU-hungry apps at that point.

rimantas• 16 years ago

On Mac if I need to have lots of tabs open (which I do when I visit photoline.ru and want to see all the photos of the day: I just click on thumbnails to open them in background and then go through them. Sometimes it resutls in several hundreds of tabs, weird I know) Safari handles that much better than Chrome. Chrome is my default browser, but I swtich to Safari just to browse said site.

othermaciej4• 16 years ago

WebKit actually has multiple different API layers. There is the Cocoa API used by Safari on Mac, a Gtk API, a Qt API, and a special API just for Chrome. WebKit2 is really a peer to all these APIs, although we also hope it can be a tool for building new tightly integrated APIs that support multiprocess and nonblocking operation.

The bottom line is that Chrome and Safari will not be sharing any less WebKit code than before - the WebCore layer, the part that does most of the heavy lifting in rendering Web content - remains unchanged. We may actually have the opportunity to share more code since we'll now be facing many of the same problems.

We also hope the Chrome team someday decides to go more in a WebKit2 direction and do multiprocess inside the WebKit API boundary instead of outside, so they can share more code with other port. But that's up to them, and they already have a lot invested in their current path.

elblanco• 16 years ago

I'm personally very excited about this. We use Webkit a bit and really really like it.

bbatsell• 16 years ago

Honestly, I'm not all that enthused about this. Once Safari segregated plug-ins to separate processes, I've literally not had a single crash from a stable version (there was a buggy nightly build about a week or so ago that crashed twice in a day — oh, the humanity!). I use my browser pretty much 16 hours a day, and can easily have 50+ tabs at any given point in time. Even though Chrome has extensions that I would appreciate, since each one of Chrome's tabs has to set up its own address space, it uses a significantly higher amount of RAM than Safari altogether — which makes Safari the browser I use 95% of the time.

zefhous• 16 years ago

If Apple waited until they needed something like this, it would already be too late. That's why they are doing it now. It's not that WebKit isn't good enough as is, they just want to make it that much better.

jollojou• 16 years ago

I have always wondered why people keep so many browser tabs open. From my point of view, open tabs represent unfinished tasks or web pages I should go back to as soon as possible.

At work, I have four browser instances open: three Chromes and one Firefox. I have placed two of them on the same virtual desktop, and the remaining two browser instances are on separate virtual desktops. On the first virtual desktop I manage my work-related tasks, such as company email, Hudson and VersionOne, a project management tool for agile software. The browser on the second virtual desktop is for developing software: the web application I develop is on it. The third virtual desktop is for fun and free time use. Altogether I have about ten browser tabs open; even that is too much. I feel that the more tabs I have open the more fragmented my attention is.

sohooo• 16 years ago

I loved the Omniweb tabs sidebar for this high amount of open pages. Sadly, the development of it kinda stalled.

othermaciej4• 16 years ago

Memory use is one of the things we're going to watch out for as we make progress on the new model.

ash• 16 years ago

How do you read it without horizontal scrolling? I've tried Readability, but it doesn't help...

cool-RR• 16 years ago

I did "View Source"...

PostOnce• 16 years ago

Valid suggestion, though copy + paste into a word processor might be easier/yield better results. Whoever downvoted you has too much spare time.

dmm• 16 years ago

Same way I read everything, in emacs.

roc• 16 years ago

Instapaper's "Text" bookmarklet worked for me.

cninja• 16 years ago

Opera -> View -> Fit to Width

pistoriusp• 16 years ago

I just read it by scrolling sideways. Holding down shift whilst using the mouse wheel.

erikwiffin• 16 years ago

I did not know you could do that. Thank you.

Timmy_C• 16 years ago

Firebug --> HTML tab --> inspect <pre> element --> edit --> change <pre> tag to <p> tag

abdulhaq• 16 years ago

I guess Apple are now working on a switch that will prevent the running of Cappuccino, GWT and pyjamas web apps - they don't use 'raw' javascript.

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