

Announcing WebKit2 - tlrobinson
https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2010-April/012235.html

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mbrubeck
Ooh, and with multi-process coming to Firefox and other Mozilla apps
(<https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis>), soon we'll have multiprocess/async
web browsing everywhere.

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LoupSolitaire
Once webkit 2 released, they may add a feature that split lines at 80
characters in their MUA :)

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briansmith
Or, the mailing list archive software could just render it reasonably like
good MUAs do.

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sjs
s/Or/And/

emit strictly, accept liberally. then we'd have 2 lines of defence.

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bbatsell
Honestly, I'm not all that enthused about this. Once Safari segregated plug-
ins to separate processes, I've literally not had a single crash from a stable
version (there was a buggy nightly build about a week or so ago that crashed
twice in a day — oh, the humanity!). I use my browser pretty much 16 hours a
day, and can easily have 50+ tabs at any given point in time. Even though
Chrome has extensions that I would appreciate, since each one of Chrome's tabs
has to set up its own address space, it uses a significantly higher amount of
RAM than Safari altogether — which makes Safari the browser I use 95% of the
time.

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zefhous
If Apple waited until they needed something like this, it would already be too
late. That's why they are doing it now. It's not that WebKit isn't good enough
as is, they just want to make it that much better.

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MikeCapone
This can only be a good thing for the web.

In a twisted way, I'm kind of disappointed, though; it'll make the choice
between Chrome and Safari a lot harder. Right now I'm using Chrome 95% of the
time, but if Safari becomes much better, I might end up sitting between two
chairs.

Anyone knows what the implications of this are for Chrome? They use Webkit.
Will they stay on Webkit1 while Apple splits with V2?

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pavs
Safari has bigger issues than rendering engine. (at least for me)

I don't even have to open a website, just open a new tab and its starts
beachballing just to load the new tab. Also extensions are a big part of my
browsing experience. Safari doesn't have large extension community like
firefox and Chrome.

Simply put, for me, chrome is more than its rendering engine. Overall its just
a well rounded piece of software with very frequent updates, which is very
unique among browsers.

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acdha
Do you have top sites enabled? That's a comically inept botch (loading a 300MB
image pack?) but with it disabled the difference versus Chrome is pretty
minimal - it's mostly down to Chrome's ability to segregate CPU-hungry apps at
that point.

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guns
In addition, there is a defaults command to disable web snapshots in Safari
(for Top Sites, history, etc). This can save considerable amounts of disk and
bandwith if you don't use the graphical previews.

    
    
        defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy -int 2

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ash
How do you read it without horizontal scrolling? I've tried Readability, but
it doesn't help...

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cool-RR
I did "View Source"...

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PostOnce
Valid suggestion, though copy + paste into a word processor might be
easier/yield better results. Whoever downvoted you has too much spare time.

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malkia
I understand the need for each process to be in a separate process, but
would've all this special code (to separate processes) would've been needed if
Windows had implemented fork()?

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xpaulbettsx
Trivia time, the Windows kernel actually _does_ implement fork, it just
doesn't expose it to the Win32 subsystem. I keep trying to convince the kernel
devs to expose it, because it'd be extremely handy for UAC if you had a
ForkAndElevate() function that would create a forked child with elevated Admin
privileges.

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mlinsey
Someone once told me that the NT kernel is designed so that with a couple
config changes you can make it behave like Unix or OS/2, with Windows being
just one "personality" on top the device, supposedly because MS was contracted
to build several different OS in the early 90s. Is this what you are referring
to by "the Win32 subsystem"? Does that still work? Or have there been so many
changes over the years that something crazy would happen if you tried to run
NT OS/2?

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thristian
I don't know about OS/2, but the POSIX subsystem for the NT kernel is alive
and well:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix>

(note that this is not POSIX implemented _on top of_ Win32, like Cygwin, this
is POSIX implemented _next to_ Win32)

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nailer
Doesn't the POSIX subsystem have no network access (I was an NT guy a decade
ago and I seem to remember this being true back in the day)?

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toisanji
What are the pros and cons for allowing other clients to use it as opposed to
what Google Chrome offers?

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olliej
WebKit is used by many different applications and browsers (eg. Epiphany,
Arora, Omniweb, Shiira, etc) -- by incorporating multiprocess support directly
in webkit all of those applications can make use of it.

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othermaciej
WebKit is also used in lots of other applications that are not browsers, but
may be getting untrusted content from the network, or that may be rendering
complex content but need total responsiveness. For example, Mail, iChat,
Adium, Colloquy, lots of other chat clients on Mac too.

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abdulhaq
I guess Apple are now working on a switch that will prevent the running of
Cappuccino, GWT and pyjamas web apps - they don't use 'raw' javascript.

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elblanco
I'm personally very excited about this. We use Webkit a bit and really really
like it.

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xpaulbettsx
Dropped Linux support in the process :-/

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andymoe
"Currently WebKit2 is available for Mac and Windows, and we would gladly
accept patches to add more ports." does not sound like they are dropping
anything.

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xpaulbettsx
I only worry that if Linux isn't an official platform, it won't get the same
updates that the real ones will and will fall into bitrot.

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olliej
WebKit isn't an end user product -- it's a library, ports are maintained by
the people who want the port, there are active gtk, qt, wx, and efl ports.
WebKit doesn't have a set of "supported" platforms, each port is responsible
for maintaining their own backend support, and their front facing API.

There's also the element of "linux" not meaning much in this context -- as I
said above there are multiple port, eg. webkit/gtk, qtwebkit, webkit/wx, etc

