4 ms·

"Adopting Google's engine" is an interesting turn of phrase. There's still more Apple-contributed code at the core of Blink than Google code. It's not like Goog

by derefr 5y ago

"Adopting Google's engine" is an interesting turn of phrase. There's still more Apple-contributed code at the core of Blink than Google code. It's not like Google did a full rewrite when they forked Webkit to create Blink. When you think about it, at this point the Chromium project (including the Blink engine) has "contributions" in some sense or another from Microsoft, Google, Apple, and KDE. Certainly, it's a project mostly run and stewarded by Google employees in their off-hours; but there are actually a lot of interests involved! (Especially now; I expect Microsoft has likely switched their Edge browser engineering team to to writing PRs for Chromium.)

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>in their off-hours Is that really the case, I always imagined they had a full time team on it.
- gsnedders 5y ago
  They've the largest browser team, by a decent margin.
- zaphar 5y ago
  They do. Google employs a lot of engineers on fully open source work including but not limited to Chromium.
- crakenzak 5y ago
  That's not true, there's plenty of people working full time on Blink. Source: I work at Google on the Chrome team.
- derefr 5y ago
  To be clear, what I meant is that projects with open stewardship (which I believe the Chromium Project is? unclear from the project website) don't tend to want employees of companies, in their capacity as employees-of-companies to be directors/core maintainers for the project. Which is different from being regular developers on those projects. Open-stewardship projects tend to be happy to accept contributions from companies; and they tend to be happy to accept the stewardship of individuals who happen to work at companies; but they don't want to be beholden to the interests of those companies in their direction, so projects with community/foundation stewardship don't usually allow companies to pay their employees for their time spent sitting on that foundation's board. (I.e. they let companies pay employees to write code, but they won't allow companies to pay employees to do the work of deciding whether that code belongs upstream.) Instead, the software foundations that manage FOSS projects usually legally restrict corporations or their representatives from participating in their capacity as representatives of corporations in directorship/steering committees/etc. for the foundation. Instead, they expect/require each person with decision-making authority in the foundation to have their own individual voice—to not be just a sock-puppet of a company, saying whatever the company wants you to say. When you vote for things in the foundation, you have to be able to vote for the interests of the project itself, even if those interests are against the interests of the company you work for—without that endangering your job. Which usually means that employees of such companies must do their foundation maintainership "off the books" of the company they work for, e.g. at non-work hours using non-work equipment. Just as if they were trying to avoid IP cross-pollution. Source: worked at a company with an "open core" product, where the core was an Apache Software Foundation project, and most of the ASF project's maintainers happened to be employees of the company. Those people could push a PR to the ASF upstream for consideration from their work account, as a representative of the company; but they then had to don their personal-gmail-account, separate-profile, no-corporate-affiliation hat to handle the PR and discuss it with the other maintainers.
  - seba_dos1 5y ago
    > To be clear, what I meant is that projects with open stewardship (which I believe the Chromium Project is? unclear from the project website) Your belief is wrong.
Jyaif 5y ago
> There's still more Apple-contributed code at the core of Blink than Google code. Not sure about that. Even before the Blink fork, Google was the main contributor to WebKit. See the first two graphs at https://hypercritical.co/2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home https://hypercritical.co/2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home
- throwaway744678 5y ago
  Also, a large part of the browser is the javascript engine, which I believe they do not share.
  - ronsor 5y ago
    V8, the JavaScript engine used in Chrome, is fully open source. Many projects (including node.js) use it.
    - pas 5y ago
      Maybe the parent comment meant that Chrome and Safari don't share the same JS engine. (As Safari uses JavaScriptCore aka. Nitro.)
eitland 5y ago
The code will probably be available. As far as I can see the bigger problem isn't the code but a viable ecosystem, somewhere customers can go if Google doesn't behave. Let me explain: As long as Firefox is alive and kicking Google cannot kill ad blockers on Chrome as they realize that will create an enormous backlash, massive PR and users flocking to Firefox. Once Firefox is gone the network effects will be strong enough that they can eventually kill adblocking and people will be stuck with Chrome anyway. Blame it on regulations or big media or whatever but I am certain they will do it if they get a chance. Chromium source code might still be available but will not work on Gmail or Google Docs or Netflix, only on enthusiast websites :-/
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  Ad blockers are already dead on Android Chrome. I wish more people would use ad-blocking browsers, perhaps Firefox, but Fenix is somewhat slower than Chrome, and is a software train wreck of bugs.
  - trulyme 5y ago
    What bugs? Ff had an upgrade not long ago where they made it difficult to use extensions, and the UI has been made worse (or I'm just old and set in my ways), but bugs? It just works. If it is slow, I never noticed.
    - nyanpasu64 5y ago
      I'm using Firefox Nightly, but many of the issues are present on release too: - Saving images doesn't send the cookies, so you can't save images gated behind a login. (over 1 year old, not fixed, #17716) - Switching tabs (by swiping the address bar) sometimes shows the old tab's contents/interaction, with the new tab's address bar. (unsure if reported, I should report it.) - The menu shows a "sign in to sync" or similar prompt. When I click it, the settings screen shows me as logged in. When I close the settings screen, the menu shows me as logged in. (#19657, possibly #19036 too) - Reopening a tab moves it to the very top of the list, before your oldest open tab. (fixed in nightly, #10986) - Opening the tab menu scrolls you to a random place, rather than the currently open tab. (got fixed a few days ago. #20637, possibly #20960 too.) - Reader mode randomly switches to default theme (fixed a few months ago, #17865) The tracker is at https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues. The impression I get is that Firefox Mobile is shipping broken code and unwanted redesigns, and testing in production. Perhaps it's from a lack of engineering culture and management. Looking at issues like https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/pull/21038 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/pull/21038, I feel Mozilla is more interested in marketing, design, and analytics, than solid engineering. It's nauseating and depressing to see Mozilla fall so far.
mda 5y ago
I don't think your claim is entirely accurate. Google's blink and Webkit are probably very different after all these years. And even at the very beginning of Chrome, Google had to make quite a bit of changes because of Chrome's process / sandboxing model , which was the main reason for the fork later (also related adaptations for skia graphics engine and v8) See [1]. Besides html rendering is only a portion of what makes a browser. considering today's Chromium codebase as a whole, I would guess probably >80% of it was written by Google engineers (and certainly not in their off hours). Still I would consider it a successful open source project as now it has quite diverse contributors, (Non Google contributors now amount to ~30% [2], biggest are Microsoft, Igalia, Intel etc.). [1] Slides from 2013 https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slides/slides.pdf https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slid... [2] BlinkOn 14 keynote: https://youtu.be/VrEP7SPfQVM?t=408 https://youtu.be/VrEP7SPfQVM?t=408
- derefr 5y ago
  > and certainly not in their off hours To clarify: I implied that Chromium is run and stewarded in Google employees' off-hours, which is different from the project being developed in Google employees' off-hours. Of course Google pays people to work on Chromium. But do they pay people to decide what makes it into Chromium? If so, that's a very bad look for a FOSS project. One of the central points of having a separate standalone community-driven FOSS project in the first place (rather than a corporate "source-available and we accept PRs if you assign us the IP" project), is taking steering of the project away from the corporation that created the code, and placing it instead in the hands of the community. If Google employees serve in their capacity as Google employees as directors for the Chromium Project — and so Google can tell its employee-maintainers to reject a PR from Chromium because it's not good for Chrome — then how could a browser vendor producing a competitor to Chrome based on Chromium, trust the direction of Chromium to do what's best for all Chromium-based projects, rather than just Chrome? I assume this is not the case; that Google employees not only don't direct the Chromium Project with backroom Google-internal decision-making, but are restricted legally from so doing. Though I can't find anything on the Chromium Project site to support that assumption...
  - 5y ago

by derefr 5y ago

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

>in their off-hours Is that really the case, I always imagined they had a full time team on it.

gsnedders 5y ago
They've the largest browser team, by a decent margin.
zaphar 5y ago
They do. Google employs a lot of engineers on fully open source work including but not limited to Chromium.
crakenzak 5y ago
That's not true, there's plenty of people working full time on Blink. Source: I work at Google on the Chrome team.
derefr 5y ago
To be clear, what I meant is that projects with open stewardship (which I believe the Chromium Project is? unclear from the project website) don't tend to want employees of companies, in their capacity as employees-of-companies to be directors/core maintainers for the project. Which is different from being regular developers on those projects. Open-stewardship projects tend to be happy to accept contributions from companies; and they tend to be happy to accept the stewardship of individuals who happen to work at companies; but they don't want to be beholden to the interests of those companies in their direction, so projects with community/foundation stewardship don't usually allow companies to pay their employees for their time spent sitting on that foundation's board. (I.e. they let companies pay employees to write code, but they won't allow companies to pay employees to do the work of deciding whether that code belongs upstream.) Instead, the software foundations that manage FOSS projects usually legally restrict corporations or their representatives from participating in their capacity as representatives of corporations in directorship/steering committees/etc. for the foundation. Instead, they expect/require each person with decision-making authority in the foundation to have their own individual voice—to not be just a sock-puppet of a company, saying whatever the company wants you to say. When you vote for things in the foundation, you have to be able to vote for the interests of the project itself, even if those interests are against the interests of the company you work for—without that endangering your job. Which usually means that employees of such companies must do their foundation maintainership "off the books" of the company they work for, e.g. at non-work hours using non-work equipment. Just as if they were trying to avoid IP cross-pollution. Source: worked at a company with an "open core" product, where the core was an Apache Software Foundation project, and most of the ASF project's maintainers happened to be employees of the company. Those people could push a PR to the ASF upstream for consideration from their work account, as a representative of the company; but they then had to don their personal-gmail-account, separate-profile, no-corporate-affiliation hat to handle the PR and discuss it with the other maintainers.
- seba_dos1 5y ago
  > To be clear, what I meant is that projects with open stewardship (which I believe the Chromium Project is? unclear from the project website) Your belief is wrong.

Jyaif 5y ago

> There's still more Apple-contributed code at the core of Blink than Google code. Not sure about that. Even before the Blink fork, Google was the main contributor to WebKit. See the first two graphs at https://hypercritical.co/2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home https://hypercritical.co/2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home

throwaway744678 5y ago
Also, a large part of the browser is the javascript engine, which I believe they do not share.
- ronsor 5y ago
  V8, the JavaScript engine used in Chrome, is fully open source. Many projects (including node.js) use it.
  - pas 5y ago
    Maybe the parent comment meant that Chrome and Safari don't share the same JS engine. (As Safari uses JavaScriptCore aka. Nitro.)

eitland 5y ago

The code will probably be available. As far as I can see the bigger problem isn't the code but a viable ecosystem, somewhere customers can go if Google doesn't behave. Let me explain: As long as Firefox is alive and kicking Google cannot kill ad blockers on Chrome as they realize that will create an enormous backlash, massive PR and users flocking to Firefox. Once Firefox is gone the network effects will be strong enough that they can eventually kill adblocking and people will be stuck with Chrome anyway. Blame it on regulations or big media or whatever but I am certain they will do it if they get a chance. Chromium source code might still be available but will not work on Gmail or Google Docs or Netflix, only on enthusiast websites :-/

nyanpasu64 5y ago
Ad blockers are already dead on Android Chrome. I wish more people would use ad-blocking browsers, perhaps Firefox, but Fenix is somewhat slower than Chrome, and is a software train wreck of bugs.
- trulyme 5y ago
  What bugs? Ff had an upgrade not long ago where they made it difficult to use extensions, and the UI has been made worse (or I'm just old and set in my ways), but bugs? It just works. If it is slow, I never noticed.
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    I'm using Firefox Nightly, but many of the issues are present on release too: - Saving images doesn't send the cookies, so you can't save images gated behind a login. (over 1 year old, not fixed, #17716) - Switching tabs (by swiping the address bar) sometimes shows the old tab's contents/interaction, with the new tab's address bar. (unsure if reported, I should report it.) - The menu shows a "sign in to sync" or similar prompt. When I click it, the settings screen shows me as logged in. When I close the settings screen, the menu shows me as logged in. (#19657, possibly #19036 too) - Reopening a tab moves it to the very top of the list, before your oldest open tab. (fixed in nightly, #10986) - Opening the tab menu scrolls you to a random place, rather than the currently open tab. (got fixed a few days ago. #20637, possibly #20960 too.) - Reader mode randomly switches to default theme (fixed a few months ago, #17865) The tracker is at https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues. The impression I get is that Firefox Mobile is shipping broken code and unwanted redesigns, and testing in production. Perhaps it's from a lack of engineering culture and management. Looking at issues like https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/pull/21038 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/pull/21038, I feel Mozilla is more interested in marketing, design, and analytics, than solid engineering. It's nauseating and depressing to see Mozilla fall so far.

mda 5y ago

I don't think your claim is entirely accurate. Google's blink and Webkit are probably very different after all these years. And even at the very beginning of Chrome, Google had to make quite a bit of changes because of Chrome's process / sandboxing model , which was the main reason for the fork later (also related adaptations for skia graphics engine and v8) See [1]. Besides html rendering is only a portion of what makes a browser. considering today's Chromium codebase as a whole, I would guess probably >80% of it was written by Google engineers (and certainly not in their off hours). Still I would consider it a successful open source project as now it has quite diverse contributors, (Non Google contributors now amount to ~30% [2], biggest are Microsoft, Igalia, Intel etc.). [1] Slides from 2013 https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slides/slides.pdf https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slid... [2] BlinkOn 14 keynote: https://youtu.be/VrEP7SPfQVM?t=408 https://youtu.be/VrEP7SPfQVM?t=408

derefr 5y ago
> and certainly not in their off hours To clarify: I implied that Chromium is run and stewarded in Google employees' off-hours, which is different from the project being developed in Google employees' off-hours. Of course Google pays people to work on Chromium. But do they pay people to decide what makes it into Chromium? If so, that's a very bad look for a FOSS project. One of the central points of having a separate standalone community-driven FOSS project in the first place (rather than a corporate "source-available and we accept PRs if you assign us the IP" project), is taking steering of the project away from the corporation that created the code, and placing it instead in the hands of the community. If Google employees serve in their capacity as Google employees as directors for the Chromium Project — and so Google can tell its employee-maintainers to reject a PR from Chromium because it's not good for Chrome — then how could a browser vendor producing a competitor to Chrome based on Chromium, trust the direction of Chromium to do what's best for all Chromium-based projects, rather than just Chrome? I assume this is not the case; that Google employees not only don't direct the Chromium Project with backroom Google-internal decision-making, but are restricted legally from so doing. Though I can't find anything on the Chromium Project site to support that assumption...
- 5y ago