Fear of a WebKit Planet

http://hypercritical.co/2013/03/04/fear-of-a-webkit-planet

by orofino • 13 years ago

120 62 13 years ago

xutopia• 13 years ago

"As someone whose memory of perceived past technological betrayals and injustices is so keen that I still find myself unwilling to have a Microsoft game console in the house..."

I wonder how many war refugees from that era feel the same way. I won an xbox and gave it away to charity because I didn't want it in my house either.

brianwillis• 13 years ago

I certainly do feel that way.

The market has handed Microsoft several monopolies. Many times they've squandered those opportunities, leaving a bunch of pissed off customers in their wake.

I don't really see any evidence that anything has changed recently at Redmond.

jiggy2011• 13 years ago

I wouldn't go that far, I have Xbox and Windows. But I always feel a little dirty when I buy anything from Microsoft and if I end up liking it I feel a little guilty for liking it.

Cigano• 13 years ago

I think it's difficult that the current state of things fall into stagnation. Firefox, for instance, still supports Gecko, which is open source too.

amartya916• 13 years ago

True. Unfortunately, Gecko doesn't have the weight behind it that Webkit has and the most contributions to Gecko stem from Mozilla itself. Slightly off-topic: since a customer doesn't care what rendering engine they are using, I believe Firefox is making a mistake by not releasing a WebView based Firefox browser for iOS (like Chrome did). If only to provide tabs/booksmarks syncing.

zimbatm• 13 years ago

Fear is irrational.

mythz• 13 years ago

Except when its justified.

jamesaguilar2• 13 years ago

That is certainly not the case in general. There are a lot of things people don't do because they fear the consequences, and for good reason. E.g. why do I not swerve my car into oncoming traffic? Why not quit my job and play videogames all day? Why not do any number of foolish things? Because of fear.

"A man who has no fear has lost a friend."

CodeMage• 13 years ago

"A man who has no fear has lost a friend."

I like that quote, where's it from? My google-fu can't find anything like it.

kevincennis• 13 years ago

This is a great article. I think a lot of people are assuming that WebKit plays a much bigger role than it really does in browsers.

pcwalton3• 13 years ago

"Consider all the embedded applications of WebKit, from game consoles to theme-park kiosks, and the idea of a homogenous, stagnating WebKit monoculture seems even more unlikely."

This is attacking a straw man. I'm not worried that WebKit isn't going to continue to improve. I'm more worried that WebKit is going to dominate so much that WebKit's implementation quirks result in de facto standards. Take the HTML Hard Disk Filler from a few days ago: the reason that WebKit can change to fix that bug is that the Web doesn't depend on the semantics that WebKit implemented. If Web sites relied on subdomains' quota not counting toward the parent domain's quota, as WebKit implemented (contrary to the recommendations of the spec), then that security issue would be much harder to fix without breaking sites.

"The proliferation of WebKit will be a rising tide that lifts all boats."

Assuming that no better engine comes along. If the Web starts to depend on WebKit's implementation, then the Web will basically be defined by this large pile of C++ code, presumably in perpetuity. That might be better in the short term, but it doesn't seem like a good long-term bet.

jcsiracusa8• 13 years ago

The concept of "WebKit's implementation quirks" implies that WebKit is a single thing when in fact it's (already) a huge diversity of different things.

http://paulirish.com/2013/webkit-for-developers/

WebKit is also constantly changing, so even the current (small) set of "implementation quirks" that really are 100% identical in all products that use WebKit will not stay the same very long.

pcwalton3• 13 years ago

The HTML Hard Disk Filler bug was (and still is) present in all versions of WebKit.

azakai8• 13 years ago

> I haven’t forgotten the past. A single, crappy web browser coming to dominate the market would be just as terrible today as it was in the dark days of IE6. But WebKit is not a browser. Like Linux, it’s an enabling technology. Like Linux, it’s free, open-source, and therefore beyond the control of any single entity.

This seems very arbitrary. So WebKit isn't a "browser". Is the author saying that a monoculture at another level is ok, but the "browser" level is somehow special and we want to keep diversity there? No, I think we need diversity at all levels.

Speaking of Linux which is the main example in the article - yes, if Linux were to become completely dominant then that would be a bad thing, even if the author calls it an "enabling technology" and is somehow ok with a monoculture there. I am a huge Linux supporter - I am running on Linux right now, my desktop has been linux for many many years now, and I encourage people to switch to it and abandon proprietary OSes like Windows and OS X - but we still don't want Linux to dominate the OS kernel space.

Thankfully Linux is not doing that. It might dominate the open source kernel space, but there is still Windows Server and OS X Server. And applications written portably can often run on all of those.

Linux is a great kernel, but it has downsides like any software. If everything ran linux, it would be very very hard to invent something better than linux and get adoption for that new thing. The same is true of WebKit.

slurgfest2• 13 years ago

A Linux monoculture is never going to happen. But what would actually be wrong with it?

azakai8• 13 years ago

As I said, it means that code would be written to Linux specifically. What works on linux, what is fast on linux, etc., would be what people write to.

So if someone invented a new kernel that is better than linux, it would have two problems: The usual problem of getting adoption and interest in a new project, but also the problem of all existing code being designed with linux in mind.

Whereas today, people generally try to write code that runs well not just on linux but also on other kernels. Not because they have lofty ideals necessarily, but because there are other kernels.

If we had only linux, that wouldn't be the case.

This is the basic question of standards. Open source is great - as I said above, I have been a huge supporter for a very long time - but standards are an orthogonal issue to open source, and just as important. Writing to standards instead of the bugs/idiosyncrasies of a single implementation is the only thing that makes it easy for new implementations to show up. And standards are dead when there is a single implementation.

fpgeek4• 13 years ago

A Minix monoculture never happened. But what would actually have been wrong with it?

Think of all of Tanenbaum's design decisions that Linus ended up changing. One big reason we know, in detail, what would have been wrong with a Minix monoculture is that it never happened.

jcsiracusa8• 13 years ago

It's not an arbitrary distinction. I see a continuum between products and "infrastructure technologies," and I think it's increasingly reasonable (and, eventually, desirable) for there to be more collaboration on a single, shared project (and less wheel reinvention) as we move toward the infrastructure end of the spectrum.

None of this precludes a changing of the guard in the future. Just ask the gcc guys about egcs and llvm…

azakai8• 13 years ago

> None of this precludes a changing of the guard in the future. Just ask the gcc guys about egcs and llvm…

By all means, ask the LLVM people about all the work they had to do to overcome the single-implementation status of gcc. clang must support gcc's arguments and behavior very carefully, and still cannot build all open source projects, simply because so many open source projects - including the linux kernel btw! - have been designed with only gcc in mind.

LLVM managed to overcome that through a lot of effort. LLVM is funded by Apple, a massive multinational, one of the largest tech companies in existence and of all time. Not all new projects have that luxury. In an ideal world, you don't need those kind of resources to challenge an existing implementation.

pcwalton3• 13 years ago

LLVM is still fighting GCCisms. (They even had to implement a subset of GCC RTL to compile the inline asm!) The sheer amount of effort they had to go through in order to compile, say, Linux, is incredible.

Besides, by your argument, LLVM should never have been started, because they should have contributed to GCC. Yet I'm very glad they did, because LLVM is much more hackable and this flexibility has enabled many new projects, like Emscripten and llvmpipe.

fpgeek4• 13 years ago

As some one who (peripherally) lived through the gcc/egcs schism, I'd certainly love to hear their perspective on open-source monoculture. Somehow I don't think it would be nearly as monoculture-friendly as you do.

Shorel• 13 years ago

> Like Linux, it’s an enabling technology. Like Linux, it’s free, open-source, and therefore beyond the control of any single entity.

As SQLite3 is.

Bring back WebDB!

bhauer• 13 years ago

I fear that you are allowing your memory of the past cloud your judgment of the present. I steadfastly resisted IE even in the days of IE 4, where it was clearly superior to Netscape 4. When Microsoft allowed IE to go dormant, my hatred for it blossomed in the same manner that affected many of us here. And today, I will freely admit that I retain leftover bitterness about Internet Explorer. I remain absolutely committed to the Mozilla cause as a result.

And yet I acknowledge that I am closed-minded in my religious support of Mozilla. I have had my bouts of doubt, and most recently wrote about my awe over Microsoft's IE 10 benchmarks [1]. Obviously I want to rationalize the benchmarks as tilted toward IE, but to be honest with myself, I have to admit that IE 10's performance--rendering performance in particular--is quite shocking.

Observing the hardware acceleration of IE 10 on my i7 3770K with a discrete nVidia GPU fills me with regret that I cannot stomach the use of Internet Explorer. I know I am squandering CPU and GPU cycles using a browser that is decidedly less efficient. And simply because I am familiar with my favorite browser's UI and because I like its particular quirks more than the other guy's quirks.

Here is how I rationalize my behavior, though: I love that Mozilla has two competitors. I love that they are being motivated to continuously improve their hardware acceleration (among other things) by attacks on two fronts. I'd like even more competition, but two major competitors will suffice. I feel that the good-natured rivalry between the three major teams is a very good thing.

My fear is that without a sufficiently wide field of competitors, certain areas of innovation will shrivel away. As evidenced by the IE 10 benchmarks, especially those related to hardware acceleration, both Mozilla and Apple/Google have not to-date made hardware acceleration a priority. At least not on the desktop, which is where I do most of my web consumption.

I am hopeful that IE 10's kick in the rear will give them a little incentive to snap out of their complacency. I would love a Firefox build with the hardware accelerated rendering performance of IE 10.

I'm not worried about a monoculture insomuch that the particular rendering quirks of Webkit will be deemed the Holy Standard of the Web. To a degree, that's already the case, at least on mobile. As regrettable as that is, it's not my particular worry. Rather, I am worried about a monoculture because it inevitably reduces innovation, oftentimes in subtle ways that aren't immediately obvious and that we may not be able to perceive because the alternate possible course of history is closed off.

If Microsoft were not pushing the hardware acceleration envelope, evidently no one would be. (Actually, to be clear, we'd simply accept the degree to which Google, Apple, and Mozilla are focused on hardware acceleration to be a reasonably degree of focus because there would be no counter-example available.) And we would probably all consider the rendering performance of Chrome and Firefox to be good enough. "Good enough" sucks, as I have ranted at length about elsewhere. Good enough is one of the worst sentiments in technology.

No, it's absolutely not good enough that the background animation of my blog causes lesser computers to bog down to a crawl (go ahead, take a look and post your complaints). It should not be so computationally intensive to do relatively trivial SVG/SMIL animation in a browser. (Irony: IE 10 doesn't support SMIL, so I can't vouch for its ability to animate my background; what I do know is that it makes the section navigation animation look absolutely effortless compared to Chrome and Firefox.)

I fear the loss of competition because of what that means for innovation. It entrenches "good enough," and I hate that.

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/lets-all-use-webkit

pyre3• 13 years ago

With respect to IE 10 performance, Microsoft only has to worry about one platform (debate-ably two if you want to talk about Win8 on ARM).

  | I fear the loss of competition because of what
  | that means for innovation. It entrenches "good
  | enough," and I hate that.

Being Open Source gives us a leg-up over the IE monoculture era. People with the willingness can improve it; fork it if necessary.

saurik• 13 years ago

Can we please always try to remember that before the scourge that was IE, we had the scourge that was Netscape? If you go back and read through the W3C mailing lists people really really hated Netscape (the by-far dominant web browser at the time, for which books on HTML would have sections dedicated to optimizing for and would even go as far as to say being Netscape-only was fine) for seemingly making up HTML as they went along (almost all of the stuff in HTML that is deprecated, including all of the markup that was for style and presentation only, were Netscape-only HTML extensions) and refusing to take up the charge of CSS. Microsoft was even occasionally described as the potential savior that would come in with a second implementation that paid attention to them (and in fact you then find a ton of praise on the list from Microsoft publishing open DTDs from IE).

kbrosnan• 13 years ago

Firefox has a very similar hardware acceleration to IE. The IE demos are often constructed to expose optimizations that IE does and other browsers don't [1].

[1] http://robert.ocallahan.org/2011/03/investigating-performanc...

abhishivsaxena• 13 years ago

There's something to be said here about the constituents of the Webkit Project and to compare it to Kernel.org.

Somehow I feel secure knowing someone like Linus is in-charge. Maybe because the Linux project isn't maintained by people whose ultimate goal is profit?

sparkie• 13 years ago

If the success of Webkit is analogous to the success of Linux, does that mean we can expect a "Webkit Standard Base" in a few years?

cgh• 13 years ago

Something people often seem to miss is that if everyone switches to building their browsers with Webkit, then if you come up with a better engine, you have immediately leapfrogged all of the competition at once.

Servo, I am looking at you.

kevingadd• 13 years ago

You can't leapfrog the competition if rendering modern websites requires implementing the competition's feature set bug-for-bug at near 100% levels. Remember IE and Netscape?

trafficlight• 13 years ago

Remember Chrome?

Apocryphon• 13 years ago

Wouldn't monocultures be susceptible to the innovator's dilemma? Consider if WebKit, or Linux, hypothetically became completely dominant. It would eventually collapse under its own weight and become bloated. If a rising new kernel or rendering engine is sufficiently better than the dominant "standard", then it could become a real challenger to it. From a very superficial perspective, I view the growth of Chrome at the expense of Firefox as such a phenomenon.

bdcravens• 13 years ago

"Linux is the canonical open source success story"

Couldn't help but pause and reread that.

mempko• 13 years ago

There has been a browser available for free for over 13 years for anyone to take. It comes from a little foundation called Mozilla. Webkit is not novel here

olgeni• 13 years ago

> Linux solved the Unix problem—for everyone.

Uhm... not exactly.

trumbitta2• 13 years ago

This. "The proliferation of WebKit will be a rising tide that lifts all boats."

Fear of a WebKit Planet

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