Cleaning House

https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-April/024388.html

by protomyth • 13 years ago

167 65 13 years ago

lists.webkit.org

cpeterso• 13 years ago

Will Android and Windows become "tier 2" platforms in Apple's WebKit tree? Who, besides Google's Chrome team, cared about WebKit on Windows?

amackera• 13 years ago

Well, Apple does. They use WebKit to render the iTunes store.

glasshead9694• 13 years ago

https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-April/024...

It seems like it up to QT port to handle windows.

greenyoda• 13 years ago

Apple also supports Safari on Windows.

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1531

mbrubeck2• 13 years ago

Maxthon and Qihoo are both major browser vendors in China who provide dual-engine (Trident and WebKit) browsers for Windows. I don't know whether they contribute code to the Windows WebKit port, or whether they do/will use Chromium/Blink.

pyre• 13 years ago

How do dual-engine browsers work? Do you manually switch between engines? Is there some sort of automatic "this page looks better in this engine" determination that happens?

deminature• 13 years ago

Valve's Steam gaming platform uses Webkit to render their Store and have a 40-million strong userbase at most recent count http://gamespot.com/news/steam-crosses-40-million-users-6348...

ConstantineXVI• 13 years ago

Steam doesn't use bare WebKit but Chromium, presuming they stay up to date (my install registers as Chromium 18, so doubtful) and don't switch, they'll be running Blink instead.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_F...

(Unrelated: their embedded Chromium seems to be hard-coded to Windows-like shortcuts; even in the address bar)

Negitivefrags• 13 years ago

A bunch of games use webkit for in game UI. Many of them run on windows.

I think quite a few use Webkit directly but there are some middle-ware libraries for the purpose. Awesomium I belive is reasonably frequently used. Their website says that it uses "Chromium/WebKit" though so I suppose that they may be moving to Blink as well.

bonzoesc• 13 years ago

The Steam overlay uses WebKit, as well as every Source game that renders HTML.

ceautery• 13 years ago

I noticed a striking lack of snark in this link and the prior announcement of Blink. Either these are pros who are working in good faith toward their respective ecosystems, or there's bad blood and vitriol all around that goes deep enough to not get expressed right away.

I'm hoping for the former, but human nature being what it is...

zethraeus• 13 years ago

The lack of responses to the announcement post makes me sad. https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-April/024...

onli• 13 years ago

There is one now. And the author of the mail posted in the thread linked here and offered help, seemed professional to me. Of course, I don't know whether there was any arguing going on before that decision, but that thread doesn't seem to point to that.

krakensden• 13 years ago

Probably because there is little to no hobbyist community involved. It's no one's baby, just their day job.

randomfool2• 13 years ago

Strongly disagree- many people have put years into these projects and are incredibly passionate.

They will all still have to cooperate on standards committees and I'm sure there will be a lot of interaction- the browser community is fairly small and all of the companies collaborate to some degree (even Microsoft, somewhat ;).

No reason to burn bridges, I see it as more of a sad separation of ways- each knowing it was for the best.

ZeroGravitas• 13 years ago

So it seems you'll need to choose Blink+v8 or WebKit+JSC, I had thought WebKit+v8 was relatively common but perhaps its just Google.

https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-April/024...

signed0• 13 years ago

Opera planned to adopt WebKit+v8, but since they are moving to Blink they will be fine.

azakai2• 13 years ago

Opera was planning to move to Chromium all along, not WebKit. So it was a given they would be using v8.

glasshead9694• 13 years ago

I was expecting something similar, but looking at the responses it seems like it was just there mostly for google. Any way , supporting v8 on webkit would be a burden when it's main developer is no longer there.

nod• 13 years ago

Phantom.js does use WebKit+JavaScriptCore, though they were musing about moving to V8: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/phantomj...

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

Back in 2011, I got my first exposure to WebKit and OSS in general as I was hanging out at my friend's office in downtown MV, 9pm on some random weekday.

I recall him working on submitting a patch (which I think got accepted after a few necessary revisions) to WebKit, and him explaining to me how WebKit is behind both Safari and Chrome, and how even though the companies and its fanboys are grabbing at each others' throats, the developers are happily working together, conversing casually on the mailing list and on twitter. It reminded me of the great sports rivalries, where the fans and media rile up the heat and hatred, but the players themselves remain respectful to their brethren on the other side of the lines.

In the years since, I've been able to help out some OSS projects as a non-coder, and I look back and think that learning about the collaboration behind WebKit certainly nudged me a little bit towards this direction.

It's a bit sad for me to see the Google and Apple teams split in this manner, since it was such a visible and prominent example of how OSS can bridge corporate divides, but I am hopeful that down the line we'll all look back at this moment in history with fondness.

general_failure• 13 years ago

There's nothing to be sad about. Some people seem to think this is some sort of tragedy and failure of webkit the opensource project. It's not.

The fork happenned to a large extent for a want of control on the code base. So, it's mostly technical. WebKit has atleast 8 ports in trunk. Every part of it - networking, os, javascript engine, bindings, plugins, graphics has been hacked to death. And it has abstractions galore.

Now imagine you worked for WebKit. If you wanted to commit something, you had to test it against 8 ports. Many of these ports are cross platform. So, you are really talking about like gazillion combinations (mac, windows, linux, retina vs non-retina, os versions). It was not a happy place to develop and everyone in the project recognized this.

The pace of development was getting very slow because of the above. Apple faced this and said WebKit2 is all theirs and nobody else should really use it. Google faced this and decided to fork.

In short, most webkit devs are happy about this. It's worked out well for everyone.

macrael• 13 years ago

What about the ports? They seem to have lost out

geoka9• 13 years ago

> In short, most webkit devs are happy about this. It's worked out well for everyone.

I can't say the same about front-end web devs. They are potentially looking at yet another browser family that can have its own quirks (sure, safari and chrome were different enough already, but this fork means that now they can be different at a lower level).

jerf• 13 years ago

It sounds like in a lot of ways, there was already a de facto fork in progress. In the limit case, when you have "one" browser codebase that in fact has two subsystems for every function and one and precisely one is used by each of the two "browsers", you don't have a shared codebase so much as a Frankensteinien horror with two hearts and two livers and perhaps five kidneys. You've got two people sewn together and you're calling them one, but they really aren't, and all it does is complicate matters, and inspire horror movies.

Of course this is not necessarily that limit case but it's not hard to imagine that what everybody is saying is perfectly technically true, and all that's really happening is that the fork that has already long since happened is merely being formally acknowledged, and now the shambling horror can be surgically partitioned and reassembled into two fine upstanding citizens. (And an extra kidney. How long has that been here‽)

suyash4• 13 years ago

Yay...common Safari beat Chrome!

pjscott• 13 years ago

What? Safari is substantially less common than Chrome. I'm confused.

badgar2• 13 years ago

You are responding to a stray Apple fanboy who spelled "come on" as "common." I recommend disengaging.

suyash4• 13 years ago

I'm trying to express my anger and joy at the same time. Just like how chromium has abandoned webkit, it's Webkit's time to return the favor, get it?

Samuel_Michon2• 13 years ago

“Safari is substantially less common than Chrome.”

Last I checked, Safari has 544 million users, whereas Chrome has 260 million users.

(There are about 1.4 billion personal computers. Chrome is on 16.45% (230 million) of those computers, Safari is on 5.31% (74 million) of those computers. There are about 30 million Android devices with Chrome. There are 470 million iOS devices with Safari.)

Given how fast the mobile market is growing (while the Windows PC market is shrinking), and given that many Android devices are sold with other browsers than Chrome, I'd say the gap is only going to get wider.

fierarul• 13 years ago

They seem really eager to make the forks as hard to merge as possible.

badgar2• 13 years ago

Undo a fork is at least an order of magnitude more difficult than making the decision to fork in the first place. Nobody has that on their minds right now.

hackernewbie• 13 years ago

Google pumping and dumping. Seems kind of shitty to me. E: I do realise it's a very long term pump. But it has that feel.

sdqali• 13 years ago

Could you explain how this is "pumping and dumping"? What I have learned from the material floating around is that there are fundamental difference in the architectures of Chrome and Safari and how they talk to WebKit. Google decided to go their own way because maintaining the common code base was a pain for both sets of developers.

glasshead9694• 13 years ago

There is no pumping or dumping. Google and apple have different goals and ideas to how the projects should move forward.

rurounijones3• 13 years ago

Unless I am mistaking things* it looks like there is a rather big problem brewing regarding the JS engines in webkit.

Webkit guys want to remove support for V8 (and any JS engine apart from their own JSC engine) due to maintenance and complexity conerns BUT:

* Qt 5.x uses V8 in Qt's Webkit

* Samsung uses V8 (In a unofficial fork of WebkitGTK+ by the looks of it).

* Oracle want to add support for their own JS Engine to webkit.

Resolving this one amicably should be interesting. If you want to use Webkit on windows with anything other than JSC it looks like you might want to start investigating blink in detail.

* I probably am.

blinkingled• 13 years ago

FWIW, I thought of the exact same thing. I think Samsung/Oracle/BB etc. are going to end up maintaining their own WebKit or Blink forks. (Not sure why Google will agree to add stuff that doesn't benefit their cause. Just like how Apple is saying JSC or bust Google might down the line say V8 or bust.)

rurounijones3• 13 years ago

Yea, it looks like we might have some pretty severe fragmentation ahead.

azakai2• 13 years ago

Out of curiosity, why would you have a strong preference for one of the two over the other? Both are open source and very fast,

http://www.arewefastyet.com/#machine=12&view=breakdown&#...

each beats the other on some benchmarks. Is there another reason for your preference?

rurounijones3• 13 years ago

I personally have no stake in this, I am just observing from an outside perspective so I cannot really say why some groups whose webkit + V8 over JSC, you would really have to ask them.

I am guessing there are probably non-technical points (eas of commit access, architecture, roadmap etc)

bradleyjg• 13 years ago

The Oracle project[1] is pretty interesting and uses neither. Instead it has a native java implementation.

[1] Nashorn - http://openjdk.java.net/projects/nashorn/

randomfool2• 13 years ago

There is no way that V8 remains viable in WebKit.

There will be no-one to maintain it and a lot of the friction between the platforms was the JS engines. Both WebKit and Blink are excited to rip out the conflicting codebases and I think they've both learned lessons about maintaining multiple JS engines.

jdboyd• 13 years ago

Qt5 uses V8 for QML and JavaScriptCore for QtWebKit.

bdash• 13 years ago

The Qt port of WebKit uses JavaScriptCore, not V8.

sudhirj• 13 years ago

So which browsers on the market are currently using webkit proper? I've heard that Apple uses their port called Webkit2 for Safari, and now with Chrome and Opera using Blink, who's left?

Or will Webkit2 and Blink still pull changes and improvements in from Webkit?

glasshead9694• 13 years ago

Webkit2 is a branch of webkit project supported by parties other than apple.

Cleaning House

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