

Dear Microsoft, please use WebKit - MrAlmostWrong
http://www.drawar.com/articles/dear-microsoft-please-use-webkit/210/

======
mrkurt
There will come a time when WebKit isn't innovating the fastest, just like the
previous darling browser engines (IE included). A dominant WebKit engine isn't
really any more desirable than a dominant IE.

I would much prefer that MS wise up about the special requirements of a
browser engine and do as well as they can with their own. Opera is more than
welcome to switch to Webkit though. :)

~~~
ryandvm
Agreed. Monoculture is always a poor situation to find yourself in. It's bad
in agriculture, it's bad in politics, and it's bad in computing.

Not only does monoculture kill innovation and induce complacency on account of
a lack of competition; it creates the perfect security conditions for
malevolent exploitation. Imagine a security bug that is exploitable in 99% of
the industry's web browsers. Yikes.

We are actually in the perfect position right now. Webkit (props to the
original KHTML team) is receiving accolades by the heap and has put intense
pressure on both Mozilla's Gecko and Microsoft's Trident teams. The result
will be 3 very fast rendering engines (and if it suits them, they'll be
standards compliant too).

~~~
wtallis
I don't think a monoculture has to be a bad thing when it's not backed by an
associated monopoly. WebKit is used by Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, and
almost everybody's mobile browsers, but they all have different goals and
requirements. They share code where it makes sense, but add to it their own
GUIs and other innovations. Competition on the basis of performance is as
healthy as ever, and the WebKit world has a lot going on in the way of new
features and security.

I think that the benefits of standardization and code sharing have far
outweighed the "monoculture" dangers for UNIX, and I see no reason why a
similar balance between diversity and compatibility can't be achieved for web
browsers.

------
xpaulbettsx
One of the things that IE is working on for IE9 along with Mozilla and Webkit
is more rendering and layout-based tests, so when you specify things like
"dotted line border", it will look identical in all browsers.

Things like this will serve the web better than "Hey everyone, let's all use
Webkit".

~~~
jasonlotito
The thing people don't realize is that there is no standard WebKit browser,
either.

<http://www.quirksmode.org/webkit.html>

So, even if MS did convert to webkit, which webkit?

~~~
darrenkopp
microsoft should switch to webkit-ish.

------
WorkerBee
This post is relevant to why this advice will not and should not be heeded:
[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/10/programming-is-
hard...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/10/programming-is-hard-lets-go-
shopping.html)

In summary: "If it's a core business function -- do it yourself, no matter
what."

Building runtimes (and a web browser is a runtime for web apps) is a core
business function to Microsoft.

~~~
moron4hire
This is an excellent point that I think is not mentioned enough in the open
source world. This should especially ring true after the recent top link on
Why The Lucky Stiff and his "digital suicide". If something is _that_
important to your business, you'd be a fool not to hold on to it, and how are
you going to do that if you don't own it yourself?

------
bep
Yes, it is a pain to test pages in different browsers. But I would prefer to
have competition in the browser front.

------
awolf
"When you don’t have to worry about the development of a rendering engine then
you can focus on the actual browser. Google understood this with Chrome and it
is fast climbing up the charts. I know that WebKit development is essentially
controlled by Apple, but since it is open source who really cares?"

Actually, Google surpassed Apple in commits to the WebKit repository a few
months ago. Google adopted WebKit with Chrome but by no means are they not
worried about the rendering engine's development.

~~~
X-Istence
Apple tends to have a flurry of commits right before a new Safari is about to
be released, or a new OS release is made. That is when Apple commits the
latest and greatest they have to offer.

It will be interesting to see when this happens again.

~~~
Splines
Curious - have there been any conflicts between Apple/Google on the direction
WebKit is going? (e.g., Google implements a bunch of stuff in WebKit which
ends up invalidating some work Apple was doing. Apple backs out the offending
changes and checks in their stuff. etc. etc.)

------
zppx
> "In a perfect world Mozilla would adopt it as well, but I don't see that
> happening because they have too much invested in Gecko along with too many
> different projects using that particular engine. Maybe one day though."

Hasn't occurred to him that maybe MS also has invested too much in its
rendering engine?

------
moron4hire
"I’m tired because it’s 2010 and we are still dealing with the same issues
that we thought we were solving with CSS back in 2002."

I don't know, maybe you weren't doing real work in this industry back then,
but things are light years beyond what they were like in 2002. We've got
JavaScript implementations that actually perform well. DOM works largely the
same across browsers (remember that Layers debacle from Netscape? WTF). PNGs
work properly. We have _largely_ similar rendering across all browsers. I'm
talking about things at least being in roughly the same place on the screen,
having mostly the same styling, whereas you couldn't even count on things
being in the same general location between browsers before.

"We are all working from the same W3C specs so why can’t we at least make
everything render the same way."

Have you read the W3C spec? It defines a plethora of optional features and
many key required features are ambiguously stated. In other words, it's a
poorly written spec. What do you think is more likely, Microsoft intentionally
breaking spec or the spec being poorly worded? Considering the differences
between Gecko and WebKit that you yourself have also mentioned, I'm going with
the common denominator here, the spec.

~~~
jerf
"What do you think is more likely, Microsoft intentionally breaking spec or
the spec being poorly worded?"

Well, I'm waving my Bayesometer at both those propositions and both are coming
up pretty close to 100%, within each other's needle wiggles. I don't think I
can answer that.

(Oh, _so_ close to a word coining:
<http://www.google.com/search?q=bayesometer> )

------
dutchflyboy
Maybe I completely missed the point, but, why WebKit? Why is WebKit better? I
mean, I could use the exact same arguments for Gecko, and even for the IE
rendering engine. I mean, if everyone uses the IE rendering engine, it'll
always look the same, but that wouldn't resolve all problems.

------
RyanMcGreal
There is a theory which states that if we did adopt one rendering engine to
rule them all, the healthy competition that keeps (most of) the various
rendering engines innovating would collapse and progress would stall.

Eventually, some upstart would seize the opportunity by launching a new
browser with a better rendering engine.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

------
ck2
IE already CAN use webkit:

<http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/>

Just gotta convince the users to install it.

But that's going to be way easier than convincing Microsoft to dump millions
in invested development.

------
chime
If you can't convince Mozilla to adopt WebKit, how can you expect MS to do the
same? I really wish Mozilla and Opera adopted WebKit and devs from all the
non-MS browsers worked together on WebKit. Then we'd have an IE and non-IE
web. Right now, we have a IE vs FF vs Safari vs Chrome vs Opera web and it
really really sucks as a developer.

The whole "develop for standards" doesn't work when each browser renders
things slightly differently. While coding up <http://bulletxt.zetabee.com> I
realized that each browser handles line-height, padding, margins, and font-
alignment differently, especially when applied to textarea. Sure, most of the
non-IE browsers handle things in a similar way but similar is not good enough
in many instances. If I do margin-top: -4px, it works fine in Chrome and
Safari but I need to make it -6px in Opera and -2px in Firefox. IE doesn't
even work that way so I end up doing something completely different.

I would be completely fine with there being 1 rendering engine and 1 JS engine
no matter the browser. And all browsers could improve on the speed/performance
of these engines without changing the output or requiring different input. If
I do padding-right:10px for a float:left element with position:fixed, I want
it to look the exact same in ALL browsers.

I know standards try to do that but it just doesn't work. Standards work in
theory but in practice, it is the code that works. WebKit works like WebKit.
If I created the spec/standard based on WebKit and implemented it based on
this new standard, it would NOT be WebKit. Standards work well for protocols
and communication methods but for actually rendering arbitrarily complex
window elements, they don't work and last decade of failed attempts at
standardization have shown us that. Think of how many
websites/tutorials/articles exist solely to help deal with browser
inconsistencies. Now imagine if that effort could have been made towards
something productive.

~~~
zokier
Maybe you should design your sites so that it doesn't need to render pixel-to-
pixel the same as on the designers workstation.

~~~
chime
I do that for most of my sites but there are many things that require pixel-
level adjustments. If all I'm making is a blog with headers and p, span tags,
nobody cares if things don't line up exactly the same on my browser vs. their
browser. However, take a look at: <http://bulletxt.zetabee.com/demo> \- not
everything that is created using HTML/JS is a basic page. If you're trying to
make even slightly complex web-apps, one extra pixel width will move things
into the next line.

It's very easy to say "design for standards" or "design for fluid layouts" but
when it comes to actually coding it up, it just doesn't work like that. My
point wasn't that I don't know how to make things work. In the end, all my
finished products work well. My point was that it's a pain to make everything
work nicely across all the browsers and that inconsistency causes headaches.

------
jpablo
I miss the days the web was about content and people didn't expect accuracy
down to the pixel in their HTML.

------
SamAtt
I wish it were this simple but it's not.

Most small and medium sized businesses still run at least one web applications
that was written when IE had 90% of the market and which relies on Microsoft's
backwards implementations.

I suspect Microsoft couldn't make Webkit backwards compatible to those apps if
it wanted to. The trident code base probably has quirks Microsoft itself has
completely forgotten about. But many small web based programs rely on those
quirks to run.

~~~
danieldon
I can't believe it's nearly as common as it was 5 years ago. It's anecdotal,
but all of the big IE-only industry-specific web apps I've had contact with
have been rebuilt.

There certainly are some in the wild, but Microsoft doesn't need to have
support for these old applications hold back progress. They certainly can (and
do) have separate modes within the same browser, they could even run separate
engines. They could also just distribute a separate "Legacy IE" application to
support these apps.

But that's one of the many problems with Microsoft: they refuse to make hard
decisions.

------
pohl
_The logic behind this is that the browser wars aren’t won by who can render
HTML the best, browser wars are won by speed and features._

I don't think the author understands the nature of the "browser wars". He
seems to think that none of the players have had the specific desire to have
their browser dominate so that it could control, through the power of _de
facto_ standardization, exactly how HTML & kin will behave. There's one
notable player, namely the one he's beseeching, who has historically been
aiming at exactly that. I'll grant that it's possible that they're in the
process of having a change of heart: maybe in the future their desire for
market share will be a mere matter of pointing user's searches to bing instead
of google. But we're still waiting on delivery of a version of IE that proves
this.

For all we know, they could be stalling to switch strategies at the last
moment possible. But I think it's more likely that they will strategically
leave something like Canvas out and continue the same old strategy, but on a
slightly different front.

------
dalore
No, one company controlling the rendering would be a bad thing.

What they need to do (IMHO) is to have W3C create a reference implementation
of the spec (and tests) and release that open source with say a BSD like
license. So the different engines can use that if they want. Also if the
browser doesn't display it exactly like the reference implementation then it
shouldn't be called a web browser.

------
sutro
Does the author like AJAX? Because it grew out of Microsoft's initially IE-
only XMLHttpRequest functionality. A marketplace in which multiple browsers
compete and the best platform-specific features rise up to enjoy broader
cross-platform support is what's best for the web. Dear Microsoft, please
ignore this misguided blogger.

------
jhancock
If MS changed their browser so significantly, many websites would break. A
doctor's office I support uses dozens of web sites for insurance, lab results,
hospital admissions, etc... I would have installed Firefox or Chrome on all
the PCs if the web site worked properly on those browsers. The ugly truth is
that many government and corporate systems _only_ test their sites in IE. Its
a shame, but thats the state of the industry. If MS changed to WebKit, many of
their enterprise customers would feel pain.

------
Timmy_C
I really don't mind developing for the latest and greatest versions of the
popular browsers. I think there is a surprising amount of congruency among
them. Where it gets difficult is developing for older versions of browsers.

This article should have made an argument about retiring old browsers faster
and getting people to use the latest versions sooner.

Other than that, I can empathize with his position. Web development is hard. I
guess that's why we get paid to do it.

------
msie
I don't understand how people who favour browser diversity can be making
websites unless they are masochists. MS can use WebKit and still innovate.
It's not either-or.

If MS would just implement the <canvas> tag (and according to the standard)
then I'd be a little less disgruntled.

I really don't care if they all use WebKit or they all adhered more closely to
some standard. I want less work for me to create a website. I guess I could
always use Flash. ;-)

------
eli
_"I’m insane because it just makes too much sense to me and when something
makes sense it usually means large corporations won’t do it"_

Of course not. If a corporate IT department wanted everyone to use a WebKit
browser, then they'd already have done it.

------
Tichy
Didn't read it all, but I think creating an unambiguous specification is
indeed very hard, if not impossible.

------
dmillar
Never gonna happen. Too many enterprise apps depend on IEs render engine and
ActiveX.

------
rbanffy
Please don't.

If Microsoft starts using WebKit, they'll find a way to fragment it and make
their implementation of WebKit incompatible and unmergeable with the rest of
the crowd.

No. Please, Microsoft, stay away from the projects I depend on.

~~~
slantyyz
That doesn't make much sense, if MS creates their messed up own fork of
Webkit, how does that hurt you?

Your stuff will still break in IE.

~~~
rbanffy
Fragmentation.

It would still be called WebKit, but it would be somewhat compatible with
other implementations of WebKit.

Remember Microsoft's Java.

~~~
sid0
How would it be any worse than it is today?

<http://www.quirksmode.org/webkit.html>

~~~
rbanffy
They would find a way ;-)

WebKit variations happen mostly in mobile platforms. That would be expected as
the system resources are so much scarcer than they are on desktop computers.

------
sid0
The argument for one browser vendor switching from engine A to another engine
B "just like that" is _entirely_ invalid unless engine B is _strictly_ better
than engine A. And by the looks of it there are areas in which IE9 Trident is
going to be better than WebKit (e.g. hardware acceleration), which means that
the argument is invalid. The argument for Mozilla switching to WebKit
similarly falls flat -- Gecko is better than WebKit in several areas -- it is
the only engine capable of rendering Firefox's interface, for instance.

~~~
danieldon
_"IE9 Trident is going to be better than WebKit (e.g. hardware acceleration)"_

You must be joking. It's great that they have _finally_ decided to add SVG
support, but bragging about SVG "hardware acceleration" when they won't even
commit to supporting the _canvas tag_ is unconscionable.

It's also this kind of thing that makes it clear that either the IE team has
its priorities completely out of whack or that Microsoft is trying to throw a
spoke in the wheel of progress on the web.

Edit: I don't know what you hope to gain by downvoting. It doesn't change the
fact that IE is and, from all indications will continue to be, the odd browser
out.

~~~
moron4hire
Right, MS is actively trying to slow down progress. Republicans eat old
people's medicine, democrats want to kill babies. Facebook wants to steal your
soul, Google wants your first born child. Sure.

~~~
danieldon
I said "either." It's completely plausible that their prioritization process
is disfunctional.

What's your explanation for why IE is consistently out of sync with the rest
of the browser landscape?

~~~
moron4hire
You're not getting the point. It doesn't matter that you provided an
alternative, it's that you suggested the idea at all. That sort of sectarian
bile I'd expect to find at Slashdot, not here.

------
terra_t
WebKit sucks, when it comes to performance, compared to Chrome and Opera. I'm
sure you'll always find compatibility 'issues' but Microsoft is also planning
to pull out all the stops when it comes to HTML 5 application performance.

~~~
davecardwell
Chrome uses WebKit as its rendering engine…

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#Development>

