4 ms·

Mozilla is at least partially responsible as well. WebKit only became as dominant as it did because it was readily and easily embeddable, highly portable, and n

Mozilla is at least partially responsible as well. WebKit only became as dominant as it did because it was readily and easily embeddable, highly portable, and nearly language and toolkit agnostic. Gecko easily could've become a major player as well, but instead of looking ahead and making Gecko more appealing to developers and OEMs, they dropped support for embedded Gecko entirely and doubled down on Gecko and Firefox for all practical purposes being one in the same and forcing anyone interested in using Gecko to wrestle around with XULRunner. So today WebKit is everywhere (even where Chrome/Blink isn't) and is the bar all others are measured by. Had Mozilla been more amicable to projects like Camino and K-Meleon things might be different now.

pcwalton 10y ago
KHTML was hardly embeddable, portable, or language/toolkit agnostic at the time.
- lmm 10y ago
  It was absolutely embeddadble - the KPart was a first-class supported way of using it (widely used in other KDE applications) - and at least somewhat portable (KDE on windows predates WebKit).
  - gcp 10y ago
    But didn't KPart rely on KDE (libs)? That's hardly embeddable in any meaningful sense. Gecko was embeddable too if everything you wrote was XUL :-)
    - lmm 10y ago
      Kdeui was (and remains) a first-class toolkit for writing arbitrary applications (and widely used as such) in a way that XUL has never really been.
      - pcwalton 10y ago
        I think "embeddable" means at least "I have an arbitrary Charles Petzold-style Win32 app and I want to put KHTML in it without adopting my whole app to a framework". KParts was never really designed for this.
djsumdog 10y ago
Google donated to/funded the Mozilla foundation, promoted a better web browser, and then released a closed source web browser based on both Gecko and Webkit. Yes, Chrome (at least its rendering engine) is open now. But back when it was released, and the way it was released, was taken by many to be Google taking a big heaping dump on the OSS community.

pcwalton 10y ago

KHTML was hardly embeddable, portable, or language/toolkit agnostic at the time.

lmm 10y ago
It was absolutely embeddadble - the KPart was a first-class supported way of using it (widely used in other KDE applications) - and at least somewhat portable (KDE on windows predates WebKit).
- gcp 10y ago
  But didn't KPart rely on KDE (libs)? That's hardly embeddable in any meaningful sense. Gecko was embeddable too if everything you wrote was XUL :-)
  - lmm 10y ago
    Kdeui was (and remains) a first-class toolkit for writing arbitrary applications (and widely used as such) in a way that XUL has never really been.
    - pcwalton 10y ago
      I think "embeddable" means at least "I have an arbitrary Charles Petzold-style Win32 app and I want to put KHTML in it without adopting my whole app to a framework". KParts was never really designed for this.

djsumdog 10y ago

Google donated to/funded the Mozilla foundation, promoted a better web browser, and then released a closed source web browser based on both Gecko and Webkit. Yes, Chrome (at least its rendering engine) is open now. But back when it was released, and the way it was released, was taken by many to be Google taking a big heaping dump on the OSS community.