

Cleaning House - protomyth
https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-April/024388.html

======
hkmurakami
Back in 2011, I got my first exposure to WebKit and OSS in general as I was
hanging out at my friend's office in downtown MV, 9pm on some random weekday.

I recall him working on submitting a patch (which I think got accepted after a
few necessary revisions) to WebKit, and him explaining to me how WebKit is
behind both Safari and Chrome, and how even though the companies and its
fanboys are grabbing at each others' throats, the developers are happily
working together, conversing casually on the mailing list and on twitter. It
reminded me of the great sports rivalries, where the fans and media rile up
the heat and hatred, but the players themselves remain respectful to their
brethren on the other side of the lines.

In the years since, I've been able to help out some OSS projects as a non-
coder, and I look back and think that learning about the collaboration behind
WebKit certainly nudged me a little bit towards this direction.

It's a bit sad for me to see the Google and Apple teams split in this manner,
since it was such a visible and prominent example of how OSS can bridge
corporate divides, but I am hopeful that down the line we'll all look back at
this moment in history with fondness.

~~~
general_failure
There's nothing to be sad about. Some people seem to think this is some sort
of tragedy and failure of webkit the opensource project. It's not.

The fork happenned to a large extent for a want of control on the code base.
So, it's mostly technical. WebKit has atleast 8 ports in trunk. Every part of
it - networking, os, javascript engine, bindings, plugins, graphics has been
hacked to death. And it has abstractions galore.

Now imagine you worked for WebKit. If you wanted to commit something, you had
to test it against 8 ports. Many of these ports are cross platform. So, you
are really talking about like gazillion combinations (mac, windows, linux,
retina vs non-retina, os versions). It was not a happy place to develop and
everyone in the project recognized this.

The pace of development was getting very slow because of the above. Apple
faced this and said WebKit2 is all theirs and nobody else should really use
it. Google faced this and decided to fork.

In short, most webkit devs are happy about this. It's worked out well for
everyone.

~~~
geoka9
> In short, most webkit devs are happy about this. It's worked out well for
> everyone.

I can't say the same about front-end web devs. They are potentially looking at
yet another browser family that can have its own quirks (sure, safari and
chrome were different enough already, but this fork means that now they can be
different at a lower level).

~~~
chc
I believe this is pretty much the definition of "fear, uncertainty and doubt."
Let's not spread it around.

Google already basically ran their own fork of WebKit — it most definitely was
not the same codebase in Chrome and Safari. Now they've just made it a clean,
official one. Let's not freak out about problems that may never exist and
certainly don't yet.

~~~
tambourine_man
They shared WebCore: pretty much all of HTML, CSS and JS parsing and CSS
positioning. That's most of what a front-end, PSD2HTML kind of developer has
to worry about.

So yeah, they will probably differentiate even more now.

~~~
schrodinger
I don't think it will be that bad. WebKit is already pretty well established,
when they're this far along I doubt they'll diverge much. For the most part,
even Firefox and WebKit render the same, even though they have no common
lineage. This isn't going to be like IE6 vs Firefox.

------
rurounijones
Unless I am mistaking things* it looks like there is a rather big problem
brewing regarding the JS engines in webkit.

Webkit guys want to remove support for V8 (and any JS engine apart from their
own JSC engine) due to maintenance and complexity conerns BUT:

* Qt 5.x uses V8 in Qt's Webkit

* Samsung uses V8 (In a unofficial fork of WebkitGTK+ by the looks of it).

* Oracle want to add support for their own JS Engine to webkit.

Resolving this one amicably should be interesting. If you want to use Webkit
on windows with anything other than JSC it looks like you might want to start
investigating blink in detail.

* I probably am.

~~~
azakai
Out of curiosity, why would you have a strong preference for one of the two
over the other? Both are open source and very fast,

[http://www.arewefastyet.com/#machine=12&view=breakdown&#...</a><p>each beats
the other on some benchmarks. Is there another reason for your preference?

~~~
rurounijones
I personally have no stake in this, I am just observing from an outside
perspective so I cannot really say why some groups whose webkit + V8 over JSC,
you would really have to ask them.

I am _guessing_ there are probably non-technical points (eas of commit access,
architecture, roadmap etc)

------
ceautery
I noticed a striking lack of snark in this link and the prior announcement of
Blink. Either these are pros who are working in good faith toward their
respective ecosystems, or there's bad blood and vitriol all around that goes
deep enough to not get expressed right away.

I'm hoping for the former, but human nature being what it is...

~~~
zethraeus
The lack of responses to the announcement post makes me sad.
[https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-
dev/2013-April/024...](https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-
dev/2013-April/024384.html)

~~~
onli
There is one now. And the author of the mail posted in the thread linked here
and offered help, seemed professional to me. Of course, I don't know whether
there was any arguing going on before that decision, but that thread doesn't
seem to point to that.

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ZeroGravitas
So it seems you'll need to choose Blink+v8 or WebKit+JSC, I had thought
WebKit+v8 was relatively common but perhaps its just Google.

[https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-
dev/2013-April/024...](https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-
dev/2013-April/024408.html)

~~~
signed0
Opera planned to adopt WebKit+v8, but since they are moving to Blink they will
be fine.

~~~
azakai
Opera was planning to move to Chromium all along, not WebKit. So it was a
given they would be using v8.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Also, given how recent Opera decided to switch to Chromium, surely they knew
about Google’s plans?

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cpeterso
Will Android and Windows become "tier 2" platforms in Apple's WebKit tree?
Who, besides Google's Chrome team, cared about WebKit on Windows?

~~~
amackera
Well, Apple does. They use WebKit to render the iTunes store.

~~~
greenyoda
Apple also supports Safari on Windows.

<http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1531>

~~~
mbrubeck
"Supports" maybe (is it up to date with WebKit security fixes?), but
definitely no longer maintains or develops. Safari 6 is not available for
Windows. There have been no updates to Safari for Windows in almost a year,
and no new feature releases in almost two years.

~~~
yuhong
On that matter, I wonder why they didn't continue to provide security updates
for 5.x when they decided to continue support for Snow Leopard, like MS did
with IE.

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sudhirj
So which browsers on the market are currently using webkit proper? I've heard
that Apple uses their port called Webkit2 for Safari, and now with Chrome and
Opera using Blink, who's left?

Or will Webkit2 and Blink still pull changes and improvements in from Webkit?

~~~
glasshead969
Webkit2 is a branch of webkit project supported by parties other than apple.

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fierarul
They seem really eager to make the forks as hard to merge as possible.

~~~
badgar
Undo a fork is at least an order of magnitude more difficult than making the
decision to fork in the first place. Nobody has that on their minds right now.

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hackernewbie
Google pumping and dumping. Seems kind of shitty to me. E: I do realise it's a
very long term pump. But it has that feel.

~~~
sdqali
Could you explain how this is "pumping and dumping"? What I have learned from
the material floating around is that there are fundamental difference in the
architectures of Chrome and Safari and how they talk to WebKit. Google decided
to go their own way because maintaining the common code base was a pain for
both sets of developers.

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suyash
Yay...common Safari beat Chrome!

~~~
pjscott
What? Safari is substantially _less_ common than Chrome. I'm confused.

~~~
badgar
You are responding to a stray Apple fanboy who spelled "come on" as "common."
I recommend disengaging.

~~~
suyash
Refer to #6 <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=common>

~~~
sliverstorm
_Commonly used by uneducated teens and young adults_

So you're _trying_ to sound uneducated?

~~~
suyash
No, because it's another way to talk in social media. Now, let's not get into
the semantics, we all know how much correct grammar is used in social
media/web.

~~~
sliverstorm
HN is not Facebook. Hold yourself to a higher standard.

