5 ms·

Could WebKit be a viable alternative to Blink, should Mozilla bite the dust?

by brnt 4y ago

JohnTHaller 4y ago
Blink is a fork of WebKit. Apple manages WebKit development. Google manages Blink development.
- no_way 4y ago
  It is a fork, but that was really long time ago, most parts of both engines were completely rewritten so for all intents and purposes these are completely different engines.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Maybe not really long time ago, maybe around ten if I'm remembering correctly. But, maybe in web time, that's pretty long time ago.
  - filmgirlcw 4y ago
    They’ve splintered a ton over the years for sure, but there are still similarities. But yes, this isn’t like the first few years when Blink was just WebKit with V8. But on the whole, Blink is still more similar to WebKit than it is to Gecko.
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
1. Yes 2. No
- olliej 4y ago
  right? We already have an IE-esque level of monopoly and associated behavior from chrome/blink. Making it just blink+webkit seems like it would be even worse - even though they have diverged significantly it's also wrong to think they're "different" in the sense of gecko and blink/webkit or even presto. I think the real problem is the gecko and spidermonkey seem to be falling significantly behind on real user experience. This is ignoring the Firefox application itself which I find super irksome. But as their gross built in tracking+advertising shows they are at least somewhat hurting for cash which does not help, and encourages gross stuff like said spam+tracking. It doesn't help that the google folk keep shoving out half-assed specs for whatever some google team has decided they want/need with specs but little thought of generally of how to make more universal solutions. That just means you've got constant pressure to implement ever increasing numbers of standards just to stay in place - if apple (and technically MS in the past) has difficulty keeping up with the constant "spec" spam it's hard to see Mozilla managing in the longer term.
vbezhenar 4y ago
If that’s the same WebKit powering Safari, why not. It’s the second most popular browser after all.
- brnt 4y ago
  AFAIK, Apples control over WebKit is not any less than Googles over Blink, which many say is the source of many of the webs problems. I remember the days Apple posted tarballs infrequently. I'm wondering if this move may open development up, and thus may become a codebase more widely 'owned' than Blink's.
  - GeekyBear 4y ago
    > Apples control over WebKit is not any less than Googles over Blink, which many say is the source of many of the webs problems I'd say that the issue with Google's control of web standards stem from their surveillance capitalism business model.
    - pdpi 4y ago
      Microsoft's stranglehold over the browser market was a pretty huge problem, irrespective of their business model. The web is way too important to be so tightly controlled by one single company, no matter who they may be.
      - GeekyBear 4y ago
        It isn't Microsoft that has entered the extinguish phase for ad blocking browser add-ons. I also don't remember Microsoft doing anything as anti-user as trying to keep pop-up blockers from working back in the bad old days.
        olliej 4y ago
        Pop-ups were universally reviled, but also explorer aggressively pushed lots of random half features to support their products - the only difference is that they didn't publish a "spec" as google uses to create a veneer of not being anti-user. MS's anti-user was in the form of ensuring that necessary sites would not work in other browsers (including the Mac IE engine, whose name I have forgotten, and therefore IE mobile). They didn't block ad blockers, etc because they didn't support any kind of extensions :D
filmgirlcw 4y ago
I mean, Blink is a fork of WebKit, so yes? But it’s also even less-responsive to upstream contributions so, outside of embedded systems that had previously adopted WebKit, I seriously doubt it'll recapture the traction it had before the fork.
- Longhanks 4y ago
  "recapture the traction"? It is used by literally billions of devices of varying form factors every day. It has probably 100x the number of users as Gecko/Mozilla Firefox and one of the wealthiest companies on the planet sponsoring development, and I don't see Apple betting on Gecko or another fork of Chrome anytime soon.
  - filmgirlcw 4y ago
    Who said anything about Apple? I would never suggest Apple use another fork or the fork they incubated/created/developed. I was replying to a comment asking if WebKit, which != Safari could be a replacement for the Chrome-driven world we are in and when used by people who aren’t Apple. And yes, it is absolutely bigger than Gecko. No question. But are you going to tell me with a straight face that WebKit has the same amount of traction with third-parties as Blink? Because sorry, that’s not the case. That was the case for about 5 years, when post iPhone, everyone and their brother decided to use WebKit to power their mobile browser for whatever mobile OS they were building for (Android, BlackBerry, Symbian/Maemo/Meego, webOS, Tizen) or for whatever embedded systems they were designing for in-car systems or whatever, but after the Google fork became demonstrably different, the surviving players in that arena switched to Blink because Google was faster at iterating and easier to work with for upstream commits (easier does not mean easy).
pipeline_peak 4y ago
Apple has iOS browser control on complete lockdown, so even if it performed as bad as Gecko, they’re pretty well off. > bite the dust If I were ceo of Mozilla I would have cut off Firefox development like 5 years ago. It doesn’t look pretty, but AOL and Yahoo changed assets, they don’t look as ugly. But I also hate a lot of what they currently stand for, and they don’t really have assets. They’re like some NPR for web standards documentation, and while it is the best, it’s not very valuable. Google seems to have a lot of leading control while Mozilla is angry outside, with a megaphone, and red-orange dyed hair. They’ve always been open source, they’ll die of natural causes.
- sgjohnson 4y ago
  > But I also hate a lot of what they currently stand for. What exactly out of this this you hate so much? https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/advocacy/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/advocacy/
  - pipeline_peak 4y ago
    lol so much noise, if this is a browser dev company, they're no better than I am on HN right now during work hours.
    - sgjohnson 4y ago
      But it’s far more than a browser dev company, and the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit entity.
      - pipeline_peak 4y ago
        I guess, I hate to be more pessimistic than I already am, but when I see pointless petitions to “Facebook: Stop Group Recommendations” I don’t see anyone over there truly “fighting the good fight”. I think GNU is a far better example of this type of action. I think an open source foundation has to stand on the shoulder of a valuable product to get noticed. GNU has all of its things, Mozilla is an acoustic guitar busker playing “bulls on parade by Ratm” outside of a Barnes and Nobles.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
Ideally, we need both Gecko and WebKit to be healthy, with additional promising alternatives on the horizon.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
cwp 4y ago
Sigh... apparently I'm old.
Cyberdog 4y ago
What does Mozilla biting the dust have to do with WebKit being viable? And even if they did, I think Gecko has enough of a fan base that it would live on for a very long time. NetSurf and Dillo are still around after all.
- fomine3 4y ago
  If Mozilla bite the dust, unfortunately Firefox/Gecko developers will lost the job, then possibly some of them start developing WebKit or based browser on Apple or different corp. I don't want it.
sph 4y ago
Not any more viable than it is now. Brendan Eich IIRC said they looked into building Brave on top of Webkit but it was so hard to compile and embed across all three platforms that they went with Chromium. Same story with Gecko. So that's another reason why we now have a Blink monoculture: because the alternative engines didn't spend any effort in making them usable by third party applications.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pabs3 4y ago
  Hmm, WebKit is used by lots of apps on Linux these days; at least GNOME Web, GNOME evolution and Liferea.
  - sph 4y ago
    WebKit is used by the WebkitGtk library which all of these include. But it's been stagnating for years and it's still not a viable replacement for Gecko and Chromium (broken scrolling on scaled screens, WebAuthn is unsupported so I can't login to my email account, etc.) In any case, if I recall correctly Eich's comment, the biggest difficulty was building webkit for Windows. The documentation was very out of dated, and it's understandable given Apple's focus on its OS. Even this GitHub says it's a web engine for "macOS, iOS and Linux".
jacooper 4y ago
Its the worst.
politelemon 4y ago
It wouldn't unfortunately. It's merely one stranglehold in a duopoly; Blink and Webkit are controlled by their corporate overlords in their respective spheres of influence. Ios won't allow non-Safarized browsers (think back to the IE days, but worse), and Google decides what goes in Blink. So in short, no. If Mozilla dies, then there will be trouble and would need someone to carry on their work as the last remaining 'freedom' blessed engine.

Could WebKit be a viable alternative to Blink, should Mozilla bite the dust?

by brnt 4y ago

Could WebKit be a viable alternative to Blink, should Mozilla bite the dust?

JohnTHaller 4y ago

Blink is a fork of WebKit. Apple manages WebKit development. Google manages Blink development.

no_way 4y ago
It is a fork, but that was really long time ago, most parts of both engines were completely rewritten so for all intents and purposes these are completely different engines.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Maybe not really long time ago, maybe around ten if I'm remembering correctly. But, maybe in web time, that's pretty long time ago.
- filmgirlcw 4y ago
  They’ve splintered a ton over the years for sure, but there are still similarities. But yes, this isn’t like the first few years when Blink was just WebKit with V8. But on the whole, Blink is still more similar to WebKit than it is to Gecko.

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

1. Yes 2. No

olliej 4y ago
right? We already have an IE-esque level of monopoly and associated behavior from chrome/blink. Making it just blink+webkit seems like it would be even worse - even though they have diverged significantly it's also wrong to think they're "different" in the sense of gecko and blink/webkit or even presto. I think the real problem is the gecko and spidermonkey seem to be falling significantly behind on real user experience. This is ignoring the Firefox application itself which I find super irksome. But as their gross built in tracking+advertising shows they are at least somewhat hurting for cash which does not help, and encourages gross stuff like said spam+tracking. It doesn't help that the google folk keep shoving out half-assed specs for whatever some google team has decided they want/need with specs but little thought of generally of how to make more universal solutions. That just means you've got constant pressure to implement ever increasing numbers of standards just to stay in place - if apple (and technically MS in the past) has difficulty keeping up with the constant "spec" spam it's hard to see Mozilla managing in the longer term.

vbezhenar 4y ago

If that’s the same WebKit powering Safari, why not. It’s the second most popular browser after all.

brnt 4y ago
AFAIK, Apples control over WebKit is not any less than Googles over Blink, which many say is the source of many of the webs problems. I remember the days Apple posted tarballs infrequently. I'm wondering if this move may open development up, and thus may become a codebase more widely 'owned' than Blink's.
- GeekyBear 4y ago
  > Apples control over WebKit is not any less than Googles over Blink, which many say is the source of many of the webs problems I'd say that the issue with Google's control of web standards stem from their surveillance capitalism business model.
  - pdpi 4y ago
    Microsoft's stranglehold over the browser market was a pretty huge problem, irrespective of their business model. The web is way too important to be so tightly controlled by one single company, no matter who they may be.
    - GeekyBear 4y ago
      It isn't Microsoft that has entered the extinguish phase for ad blocking browser add-ons. I also don't remember Microsoft doing anything as anti-user as trying to keep pop-up blockers from working back in the bad old days.
      - olliej 4y ago
        Pop-ups were universally reviled, but also explorer aggressively pushed lots of random half features to support their products - the only difference is that they didn't publish a "spec" as google uses to create a veneer of not being anti-user. MS's anti-user was in the form of ensuring that necessary sites would not work in other browsers (including the Mac IE engine, whose name I have forgotten, and therefore IE mobile). They didn't block ad blockers, etc because they didn't support any kind of extensions :D

filmgirlcw 4y ago

I mean, Blink is a fork of WebKit, so yes? But it’s also even less-responsive to upstream contributions so, outside of embedded systems that had previously adopted WebKit, I seriously doubt it'll recapture the traction it had before the fork.

Longhanks 4y ago
"recapture the traction"? It is used by literally billions of devices of varying form factors every day. It has probably 100x the number of users as Gecko/Mozilla Firefox and one of the wealthiest companies on the planet sponsoring development, and I don't see Apple betting on Gecko or another fork of Chrome anytime soon.
- filmgirlcw 4y ago
  Who said anything about Apple? I would never suggest Apple use another fork or the fork they incubated/created/developed. I was replying to a comment asking if WebKit, which != Safari could be a replacement for the Chrome-driven world we are in and when used by people who aren’t Apple. And yes, it is absolutely bigger than Gecko. No question. But are you going to tell me with a straight face that WebKit has the same amount of traction with third-parties as Blink? Because sorry, that’s not the case. That was the case for about 5 years, when post iPhone, everyone and their brother decided to use WebKit to power their mobile browser for whatever mobile OS they were building for (Android, BlackBerry, Symbian/Maemo/Meego, webOS, Tizen) or for whatever embedded systems they were designing for in-car systems or whatever, but after the Google fork became demonstrably different, the surviving players in that arena switched to Blink because Google was faster at iterating and easier to work with for upstream commits (easier does not mean easy).

pipeline_peak 4y ago

Apple has iOS browser control on complete lockdown, so even if it performed as bad as Gecko, they’re pretty well off. > bite the dust If I were ceo of Mozilla I would have cut off Firefox development like 5 years ago. It doesn’t look pretty, but AOL and Yahoo changed assets, they don’t look as ugly. But I also hate a lot of what they currently stand for, and they don’t really have assets. They’re like some NPR for web standards documentation, and while it is the best, it’s not very valuable. Google seems to have a lot of leading control while Mozilla is angry outside, with a megaphone, and red-orange dyed hair. They’ve always been open source, they’ll die of natural causes.

sgjohnson 4y ago
> But I also hate a lot of what they currently stand for. What exactly out of this this you hate so much? https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/advocacy/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/advocacy/
- pipeline_peak 4y ago
  lol so much noise, if this is a browser dev company, they're no better than I am on HN right now during work hours.
  - sgjohnson 4y ago
    But it’s far more than a browser dev company, and the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit entity.
    - pipeline_peak 4y ago
      I guess, I hate to be more pessimistic than I already am, but when I see pointless petitions to “Facebook: Stop Group Recommendations” I don’t see anyone over there truly “fighting the good fight”. I think GNU is a far better example of this type of action. I think an open source foundation has to stand on the shoulder of a valuable product to get noticed. GNU has all of its things, Mozilla is an acoustic guitar busker playing “bulls on parade by Ratm” outside of a Barnes and Nobles.

kitsunesoba 4y ago

Ideally, we need both Gecko and WebKit to be healthy, with additional promising alternatives on the horizon.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

cwp 4y ago

Sigh... apparently I'm old.

Cyberdog 4y ago

What does Mozilla biting the dust have to do with WebKit being viable? And even if they did, I think Gecko has enough of a fan base that it would live on for a very long time. NetSurf and Dillo are still around after all.

fomine3 4y ago
If Mozilla bite the dust, unfortunately Firefox/Gecko developers will lost the job, then possibly some of them start developing WebKit or based browser on Apple or different corp. I don't want it.

sph 4y ago

Not any more viable than it is now. Brendan Eich IIRC said they looked into building Brave on top of Webkit but it was so hard to compile and embed across all three platforms that they went with Chromium. Same story with Gecko. So that's another reason why we now have a Blink monoculture: because the alternative engines didn't spend any effort in making them usable by third party applications.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pabs3 4y ago
Hmm, WebKit is used by lots of apps on Linux these days; at least GNOME Web, GNOME evolution and Liferea.
- sph 4y ago
  WebKit is used by the WebkitGtk library which all of these include. But it's been stagnating for years and it's still not a viable replacement for Gecko and Chromium (broken scrolling on scaled screens, WebAuthn is unsupported so I can't login to my email account, etc.) In any case, if I recall correctly Eich's comment, the biggest difficulty was building webkit for Windows. The documentation was very out of dated, and it's understandable given Apple's focus on its OS. Even this GitHub says it's a web engine for "macOS, iOS and Linux".

jacooper 4y ago

Its the worst.

politelemon 4y ago

It wouldn't unfortunately. It's merely one stranglehold in a duopoly; Blink and Webkit are controlled by their corporate overlords in their respective spheres of influence. Ios won't allow non-Safarized browsers (think back to the IE days, but worse), and Google decides what goes in Blink. So in short, no. If Mozilla dies, then there will be trouble and would need someone to carry on their work as the last remaining 'freedom' blessed engine.