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Comment by allenbrunson | Hacker News Reader

wow. wouldn't have guessed this would happen in a million years.

we are all well aware of apple's successes in the last few years, but they all seemed to be happening in their own little walled-off corner of the world. it's typically apple's tech versus the rest of the industry. now here's a sign that apple's influence is being felt at even deeper levels.

i guess webkit was another sign of this, but that doesn't seem as stark as some other company adopting objective-c.

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Except webkit was a fork of KHTML.

Except Chrome uses WebKit, not KHTML.

I don't see how this is relevant. Obviously KHTML is now surpassed by Webkit because most of the development for KHTML was diverted into Webkit + a huge influx of new dev from Apple and now Google. It doesn't remove from the fact that Apple benefited from the work the KTHML guys did. They could have used Gecko, but they didn't, obviously there was something good about KTHML.

it is relevant because apple's involvement was what caused that particular project to become the de facto go-to web rendering engine.

Still, neither GNUStep/NS, KHTML/Webkit, or even the Mach/XNU kernel were native Apple tech. To portray them as that in a "Apple VS. The World" scenario is a bit misleading and presumptuous. Webkit and KHTML are still both mutually beneficial projects.

I think the leading example of "apple's tech versus the rest of the industry" is the use of usb - which only goes to show how weak the basis of the meme is.

I don't see where an Apple vs the world argument is made. More like Apple did it's own thing before and no one else cared. Now they are influencing other companies more than before.

Along with WebKit, I'd say that app stores and touch UI are other areas where Apple has been influencing tech in recent years.

Allenbrunson's point is that WebKit is an example of Apple's influence beyond Apple. You could argue that the choice of WebKit wasn't important to Chrome- that they would have been just as successful had they chose another rendering engine. But they did choose it. And that is either true irrespective of the fact that WebKit is based on KHTML.

I'd argue v8 is a much more vital part of chrome than webkit is.

Why? The performance differences between V8 and JSC/SFX are marginal at this point.

To be fair, V8 kicked of an arms race that has benefited the whole industry.

How so? Squirrelfish was released (at least in source form) in June 2008, V8 wasn't announced until September of that same year. Apple, Mozilla, and Opera were duking it out in public for months before V8 was on the scene.

WebKit (and KHTML) is written in C++.

I don't think it had any influence on this decision.

WebKit most probably did not have any influence here, but was mentioned because WebKit in the past, like "Cocoa/Objective-C" in this instance, is being used elsewhere. Hence, Apple's technologies are influencing adoption in the industry (yes, gnustep is not from Apple but for the most part, Cocoa is a distinctively Apple technology).

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