8 ms·

Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

231 points by kolistivra 14y ago

Lightning 14y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5489025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5489025
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- stdbrouw 14y ago
  Too bad it's not relevant to the situation.
msoad 14y ago
My understanding is that Dart VM will be in Chrome soon.
- mikewest 14y ago
  http://www.chromium.org/blink#new-features http://www.chromium.org/blink#new-features has some detail about how we plan to add features to the platform. We're certainly hoping to be pretty transparent about how things get into Chromium.
  - itafroma 14y ago
    That section states that you will make exceptions against compatibility with competing implementations under the following conditions: 1. That you propose a draft specification 2. That you're willing to discuss it with other implementors 3. That you've exhausted all other options So let's take the example of Dart, and let's say every other browser engine says "no" to Dart. This policy seems to allow you to act unilaterally, against current interoperability, in this case as long as you put some indeterminate amount of effort to convince other implementors. Is that a correct reading of it? If so, what good is the rest of the policy about striving for compatibility with other engines when you've given yourself an out when consensus doesn't fall your way?
sukuriant 14y ago
A number of people were complaining about how not enough common implementations on the web was a bad thing; and how everyone using webkit would lead to complacency. Google forking webkit to make it its own might be just enough to keep them all different enough to keep standards going :)
doe88 14y ago
> Google also argues that the decision will introduce greater diversity into the browser ecosystem and might mitigate concerns that the mobile Web in particular was becoming a WebKit monoculture. Ahah so much hypocrisy condensed in this sentence. Yeah it's constraining to share code and have compile time #defines but if every vendor did the same there wouldn't be any common project.
- mikewest 14y ago
  The web is the common project, right? We're all working together to put together powerful and performant windows into the web, and we work together at places like the W3C and WhatWG to construct a common vision of what that means. Diversity in implementation is a great way of hammering out the exact contours of the standards that govern the common project...
  - doe88 14y ago
    This is a fallacious argument in this context, this is a pretext, that's why I used the word 'hypocrisy'. And also I really think that a so called 'diversity' of implementations of open source projects may only really be sustainable for large companies with big resources to do things on their own and know they don't need to rely on anybody. But ask yourself, now, what if Apple decided that for being competitive with Google they must do the same thing and ditch everything that don't suit to their plans? And what if Samsung does the same and Blackberry and so on... would it be great for diversity? Would it be great for small vendors? I don't think so. Excuse me but in this case I don't praise this kind of diversity. Edit: I didn't know I replied to a Google employee, just s/Google/your company/ in my post.
    - jmillikin 14y ago
      > But ask yourself, now, what if Apple decided that for > being competitive with Google they must do the same > thing and ditch everything that don't suit to their > plans? They did, remember? WebKit was an open-source rendering engine that Apple secretly forked, worked on in private, and then released as a new project. At the time, people were quite upset that Apple hadn't simply adopted an extant dominant open-source engine (Gecko). Looking back, Apple's choice to go their own way was obviously beneficial both for themselves and for the web in general.
cnlwsu 14y ago
nugget at the end: "there won't be any -blink or -chrome CSS prefixes; like Mozilla, all new experimental features will require developers to enable them in the browser's options page"
hp50g 14y ago
This reads like: "We're not sharing our stuff anymore as it's costing too much". A the risk of sounding like a paranoid nutbag, with stuff like NaCl, SPDY, Dart etc, it sounds like Google have their own agenda.
- jsnk 14y ago
  Aren't all those projects you mentioned open source and licensed to be useable by anyone?
  - hp50g 14y ago
    Does that actually matter? All these are as well: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd208104.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd208104.aspx Would you consider building on top of them? No because they are not 100% vendor neutral. They serve the vendor, not the consumers of the technology.
    - jmillikin 14y ago
      Microsoft has a history of being hostile to the open-source and free-software communities. They release "shared source" code under licenses with onerous terms or encumbered with patents. In the event that an open-source project built on their technology becomes popular, Microsoft attempts to smother it (for example, see their treatment of Mono). I trust Google about as much as I trust Red Hat, Canonical, or any other company with a history of friendly interaction with the community. While I'm certainly not going to give them my SSH keys, it seems reasonable to take advantage of open-source software that they release.
      - AceJohnny2 14y ago
        I agree that Microsoft hasn't been trustworthy historically, but how have they smothered Mono? And a counter-example is Samba.
        jmillikin 14y ago
darkchasma 14y ago
WebKit has prevented google from pulling an IE6, so this effectively frees them to eff it all up.
JamesPDX 14y ago
Google just realizes it cannot pretend to be a nice guy when the world no longer spins around it. So much for "do no evil"...
- ok_craig 14y ago
  Funny how when Opera deprecates its engine in favor of WebKit we all make a big deal about how it's bad for everyone. But when Google spins off their own version, we vilify them too... For real?
  - zobzu 14y ago
    I don't think it has much to do with anything. Opera used Webkit because they had no choice. It was that or dying. Google forks webkit because even thus they have a massive control over it, they don't have _enough_ control. There are still things other contributors refuse loud enough. Well, like Dart. Or the implementation of Webkit2. Or what not. Since Google has the major browser marketshare, they're like "wait a moment, we're the masters of the game here, why the fuck can't we just dictate the rules? it's our browser that's mainly running this." Well, now, there will be zero barrier to this. Not even disagreements. So.. it is a quite different thing indeed. The other intents Google have are good, but unfortunately, I'm near certain the REAL interest is the one I and others listed: CONTROL. FULL CONTROL. Things will inevitably go that way. Even if some devs working on Chromium are fooled right now. There is no way you don't get this without making Chromium an entity fully separated from Google, and that ain't happening.
    - pekk 14y ago
      How exactly did you determine that the (sole) purpose of the fork is "full control"? And how specifically is that going to happen?
      - zobzu 14y ago
        forking is by nature for taking control. not sure why I'm even replying. that like saying the fire burns. the difference is the leverage over people, programmers, website, and other companies google has by having this control - due to the marketshare of chrome.
tgandrews 14y ago
To me it sounds like a good thing. We end up with 3 major rendering engines on the desktop; Gecko (Firefox), Trident (IE) and Blink (Opera and Chrome) and 2 major on mobile Blink (Opera and Chrome) and Webkit (Safari). This I think will help shake up some of monoculture. Chrome definitely doesn't have any level of domination over the enterprise market like IE6 on Windows did. That was the problem with IE6 not the browser per se - it was revolutionary when it was released, MS just killed the team. The chance that enterprises will stick with Chrome is very unlikely. As it stands at the moment, the only downside is the duplicated development between the Safari and Chrome teams. Webkit will suffer, but the web won't. Apple don't care enough, the web isn't the top of their priority list. If anything, the iOS monopoly of mobile web traffic (in the first world) is a problem which certainly isn't changed by this fork. That's my two pennies worth.
- gurkendoktor 14y ago
  Isn't this contradictory? If a significant/relevant chunk of people use WebKit, and WebKit development lags behind Blink (and the others), then how will this not affect the web?
  - sukuriant 14y ago
    The idea is that, Webkit will have to keep up with the innovations in Blink, and maybe even try to innovate themselves, to maintain marketshare.
    - gcr 14y ago
      Webkit's done plenty of innovating, haven't they?
      - Achshar 14y ago
        That was with help of google. Google had incentiv to work on webkit, not anymore. Now webkit folk are on their own.
eluos 14y ago
They are removing the <blink></blink> tag?!? PITCHFORKS OUT
jevinskie 14y ago
Will this help unshackle WebKit2 development (an alternative to Chrome's multiprocess architecture)? It seems to have stagnated for quite some time.
slacka 14y ago
> "For example, we anticipate that we’ll be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines" On my 2GB netbook, chrome has gone from my preferred browser to unusable due to the high memory footprint of recent builds. I wonder if this cleanup will help get the memory down to something reasonable like the level it was before Chrome 10.
smallegan 14y ago
I like competition but I hate having to test for yet another engine. Really hoping that developing for webkit will still result in well rendered sites/apps on blink.
linuxhansl 14y ago
Not sure what to make of this statement: "the costs of sharing code now outweighed the advantages" Does that mean Google will only be a good open source citizen as long as it is advantageous to them and on a project-by-project basis? Edit: Well it is part of Chromium, which is open source, so maybe I was too rash.
- Drakim 14y ago
  They forked it because they want to take the code in another direction. They aren't being any worse open source citizen than anybody else that forks open source.
EGreg 14y ago
Noo! Why can't we have one, nice open source target? At least I hope they all support the standards.
fuck_google 14y ago
A Short Translation from Bullshit to English of Selected Portions of the Google Chrome Blink Developer FAQ: http://prng.net/blink-faq.html http://prng.net/blink-faq.html
- ksec 14y ago
  Some are true, but most are over the top.
kapranoff 14y ago
Some people here are confused about the business side of making a browser for Google. I even saw mentions that Google Chrome is just a good will project to make the Web a better palce. While that is partially true, Google Chrome also has a very strong business strategy behind it. Right now it is the main distribution channel for Google Search. Every download of the browser is converted (with a probability, of course) to more searches or to a switch-over from another search engine. For quite a long time (several years) search engine quality has not been selling itself. Many people do not notice any real difference between Bing/Baidu/Yandex/Seznam and Google. Google invented search distribution with Google Toolbar (which was a tremendous success from business side) and right now Google Chrome is the new Google Toolbar. One of the main KPIs for Google Chrome product is Google Search market share. Specifically they directly optimize for Google Search share from inside Google Chrome which when multiplied by the share of the browser converts into money. Just wanted to clarify things, sorry if not mentioning Blink made this comment an off-topic one.

231 points by kolistivra 14y ago

Lightning 14y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5489025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5489025

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
stdbrouw 14y ago
Too bad it's not relevant to the situation.

msoad 14y ago

My understanding is that Dart VM will be in Chrome soon.

mikewest 14y ago
http://www.chromium.org/blink#new-features http://www.chromium.org/blink#new-features has some detail about how we plan to add features to the platform. We're certainly hoping to be pretty transparent about how things get into Chromium.
- itafroma 14y ago
  That section states that you will make exceptions against compatibility with competing implementations under the following conditions: 1. That you propose a draft specification 2. That you're willing to discuss it with other implementors 3. That you've exhausted all other options So let's take the example of Dart, and let's say every other browser engine says "no" to Dart. This policy seems to allow you to act unilaterally, against current interoperability, in this case as long as you put some indeterminate amount of effort to convince other implementors. Is that a correct reading of it? If so, what good is the rest of the policy about striving for compatibility with other engines when you've given yourself an out when consensus doesn't fall your way?

sukuriant 14y ago

A number of people were complaining about how not enough common implementations on the web was a bad thing; and how everyone using webkit would lead to complacency. Google forking webkit to make it its own might be just enough to keep them all different enough to keep standards going :)

doe88 14y ago

> Google also argues that the decision will introduce greater diversity into the browser ecosystem and might mitigate concerns that the mobile Web in particular was becoming a WebKit monoculture. Ahah so much hypocrisy condensed in this sentence. Yeah it's constraining to share code and have compile time #defines but if every vendor did the same there wouldn't be any common project.

mikewest 14y ago
The web is the common project, right? We're all working together to put together powerful and performant windows into the web, and we work together at places like the W3C and WhatWG to construct a common vision of what that means. Diversity in implementation is a great way of hammering out the exact contours of the standards that govern the common project...
- doe88 14y ago
  This is a fallacious argument in this context, this is a pretext, that's why I used the word 'hypocrisy'. And also I really think that a so called 'diversity' of implementations of open source projects may only really be sustainable for large companies with big resources to do things on their own and know they don't need to rely on anybody. But ask yourself, now, what if Apple decided that for being competitive with Google they must do the same thing and ditch everything that don't suit to their plans? And what if Samsung does the same and Blackberry and so on... would it be great for diversity? Would it be great for small vendors? I don't think so. Excuse me but in this case I don't praise this kind of diversity. Edit: I didn't know I replied to a Google employee, just s/Google/your company/ in my post.
  - jmillikin 14y ago
    > But ask yourself, now, what if Apple decided that for > being competitive with Google they must do the same > thing and ditch everything that don't suit to their > plans? They did, remember? WebKit was an open-source rendering engine that Apple secretly forked, worked on in private, and then released as a new project. At the time, people were quite upset that Apple hadn't simply adopted an extant dominant open-source engine (Gecko). Looking back, Apple's choice to go their own way was obviously beneficial both for themselves and for the web in general.

cnlwsu 14y ago

nugget at the end: "there won't be any -blink or -chrome CSS prefixes; like Mozilla, all new experimental features will require developers to enable them in the browser's options page"

hp50g 14y ago

This reads like: "We're not sharing our stuff anymore as it's costing too much". A the risk of sounding like a paranoid nutbag, with stuff like NaCl, SPDY, Dart etc, it sounds like Google have their own agenda.

jsnk 14y ago
Aren't all those projects you mentioned open source and licensed to be useable by anyone?
- hp50g 14y ago
  Does that actually matter? All these are as well: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd208104.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd208104.aspx Would you consider building on top of them? No because they are not 100% vendor neutral. They serve the vendor, not the consumers of the technology.
  - jmillikin 14y ago
    Microsoft has a history of being hostile to the open-source and free-software communities. They release "shared source" code under licenses with onerous terms or encumbered with patents. In the event that an open-source project built on their technology becomes popular, Microsoft attempts to smother it (for example, see their treatment of Mono). I trust Google about as much as I trust Red Hat, Canonical, or any other company with a history of friendly interaction with the community. While I'm certainly not going to give them my SSH keys, it seems reasonable to take advantage of open-source software that they release.
    - AceJohnny2 14y ago
      I agree that Microsoft hasn't been trustworthy historically, but how have they smothered Mono? And a counter-example is Samba.
      - jmillikin 14y ago

darkchasma 14y ago

WebKit has prevented google from pulling an IE6, so this effectively frees them to eff it all up.

JamesPDX 14y ago

Google just realizes it cannot pretend to be a nice guy when the world no longer spins around it. So much for "do no evil"...

ok_craig 14y ago
Funny how when Opera deprecates its engine in favor of WebKit we all make a big deal about how it's bad for everyone. But when Google spins off their own version, we vilify them too... For real?
- zobzu 14y ago
  I don't think it has much to do with anything. Opera used Webkit because they had no choice. It was that or dying. Google forks webkit because even thus they have a massive control over it, they don't have _enough_ control. There are still things other contributors refuse loud enough. Well, like Dart. Or the implementation of Webkit2. Or what not. Since Google has the major browser marketshare, they're like "wait a moment, we're the masters of the game here, why the fuck can't we just dictate the rules? it's our browser that's mainly running this." Well, now, there will be zero barrier to this. Not even disagreements. So.. it is a quite different thing indeed. The other intents Google have are good, but unfortunately, I'm near certain the REAL interest is the one I and others listed: CONTROL. FULL CONTROL. Things will inevitably go that way. Even if some devs working on Chromium are fooled right now. There is no way you don't get this without making Chromium an entity fully separated from Google, and that ain't happening.
  - pekk 14y ago
    How exactly did you determine that the (sole) purpose of the fork is "full control"? And how specifically is that going to happen?
    - zobzu 14y ago
      forking is by nature for taking control. not sure why I'm even replying. that like saying the fire burns. the difference is the leverage over people, programmers, website, and other companies google has by having this control - due to the marketshare of chrome.

tgandrews 14y ago

To me it sounds like a good thing. We end up with 3 major rendering engines on the desktop; Gecko (Firefox), Trident (IE) and Blink (Opera and Chrome) and 2 major on mobile Blink (Opera and Chrome) and Webkit (Safari). This I think will help shake up some of monoculture. Chrome definitely doesn't have any level of domination over the enterprise market like IE6 on Windows did. That was the problem with IE6 not the browser per se - it was revolutionary when it was released, MS just killed the team. The chance that enterprises will stick with Chrome is very unlikely. As it stands at the moment, the only downside is the duplicated development between the Safari and Chrome teams. Webkit will suffer, but the web won't. Apple don't care enough, the web isn't the top of their priority list. If anything, the iOS monopoly of mobile web traffic (in the first world) is a problem which certainly isn't changed by this fork. That's my two pennies worth.

gurkendoktor 14y ago
Isn't this contradictory? If a significant/relevant chunk of people use WebKit, and WebKit development lags behind Blink (and the others), then how will this not affect the web?
- sukuriant 14y ago
  The idea is that, Webkit will have to keep up with the innovations in Blink, and maybe even try to innovate themselves, to maintain marketshare.
  - gcr 14y ago
    Webkit's done plenty of innovating, haven't they?
    - Achshar 14y ago
      That was with help of google. Google had incentiv to work on webkit, not anymore. Now webkit folk are on their own.

eluos 14y ago

They are removing the <blink></blink> tag?!? PITCHFORKS OUT

jevinskie 14y ago

Will this help unshackle WebKit2 development (an alternative to Chrome's multiprocess architecture)? It seems to have stagnated for quite some time.

slacka 14y ago

> "For example, we anticipate that we’ll be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines" On my 2GB netbook, chrome has gone from my preferred browser to unusable due to the high memory footprint of recent builds. I wonder if this cleanup will help get the memory down to something reasonable like the level it was before Chrome 10.

smallegan 14y ago

I like competition but I hate having to test for yet another engine. Really hoping that developing for webkit will still result in well rendered sites/apps on blink.

linuxhansl 14y ago

Not sure what to make of this statement: "the costs of sharing code now outweighed the advantages" Does that mean Google will only be a good open source citizen as long as it is advantageous to them and on a project-by-project basis? Edit: Well it is part of Chromium, which is open source, so maybe I was too rash.

Drakim 14y ago
They forked it because they want to take the code in another direction. They aren't being any worse open source citizen than anybody else that forks open source.

EGreg 14y ago

Noo! Why can't we have one, nice open source target? At least I hope they all support the standards.

fuck_google 14y ago

A Short Translation from Bullshit to English of Selected Portions of the Google Chrome Blink Developer FAQ: http://prng.net/blink-faq.html http://prng.net/blink-faq.html

ksec 14y ago
Some are true, but most are over the top.

kapranoff 14y ago

Some people here are confused about the business side of making a browser for Google. I even saw mentions that Google Chrome is just a good will project to make the Web a better palce. While that is partially true, Google Chrome also has a very strong business strategy behind it. Right now it is the main distribution channel for Google Search. Every download of the browser is converted (with a probability, of course) to more searches or to a switch-over from another search engine. For quite a long time (several years) search engine quality has not been selling itself. Many people do not notice any real difference between Bing/Baidu/Yandex/Seznam and Google. Google invented search distribution with Google Toolbar (which was a tremendous success from business side) and right now Google Chrome is the new Google Toolbar. One of the main KPIs for Google Chrome product is Google Search market share. Specifically they directly optimize for Google Search share from inside Google Chrome which when multiplied by the share of the browser converts into money. Just wanted to clarify things, sorry if not mentioning Blink made this comment an off-topic one.