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I read that one of the biggest driving forces of Google forking WebKit into Blink was an increasingly large gap in the direction that the two companies wanted t

I read that one of the biggest driving forces of Google forking WebKit into Blink was an increasingly large gap in the direction that the two companies wanted to take the engine, including differences on things that both parties agreed should be implemented (I seem to remember there being a difference of opinion on how to implement multi-process architecture for example), making it progressively more difficult for the two to coexist on the same codebase. Was that not true? Certainly today WebKit and Blink are significantly different engines with very different performance profiles.

saagarjha 4y ago
That's about right. WebKit continues to be used by Apple, and finds its way embedded into a lot of platforms like game consoles.
eyelidlessness 4y ago
This is correct, although I wonder how much they still contribute between the projects. Apple is notoriously secretive about employee OSS contributions (and everything, natch), but individual contributors pop up contributing to all sorts of things. And WebKit isn’t as isolated as it might seem, just today I saw tweets about some big perf improvement contributions from the creator of Bun who’s definitely contributing for his own purposes. If I had to guess, coordination between WebKit and Blink is far less centralized than it was before, but I’d be shocked if it isn’t a going concern in places they don’t have different goals. It’d be a terrible waste of energy to have subject matter experts duplicating efforts like that.
- sharikous 4y ago
  > Apple is notoriously secretive about employee OSS contributions Really? I see a lot of contributions from Apple engineers to the LLVM codebase
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago
    My understanding is that, apart from high profile involvement in certain projects (like LLVM), Apple engineers generally contribute “as individuals” without much to indicate they’re working for Apple. I could be wrong, but that’s how I’ve heard it.

saagarjha 4y ago

That's about right. WebKit continues to be used by Apple, and finds its way embedded into a lot of platforms like game consoles.

eyelidlessness 4y ago

This is correct, although I wonder how much they still contribute between the projects. Apple is notoriously secretive about employee OSS contributions (and everything, natch), but individual contributors pop up contributing to all sorts of things. And WebKit isn’t as isolated as it might seem, just today I saw tweets about some big perf improvement contributions from the creator of Bun who’s definitely contributing for his own purposes. If I had to guess, coordination between WebKit and Blink is far less centralized than it was before, but I’d be shocked if it isn’t a going concern in places they don’t have different goals. It’d be a terrible waste of energy to have subject matter experts duplicating efforts like that.

sharikous 4y ago
> Apple is notoriously secretive about employee OSS contributions Really? I see a lot of contributions from Apple engineers to the LLVM codebase
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  My understanding is that, apart from high profile involvement in certain projects (like LLVM), Apple engineers generally contribute “as individuals” without much to indicate they’re working for Apple. I could be wrong, but that’s how I’ve heard it.