It must be frustrating for the WebKit team when their engineering advancements are taken for granted and attributed to Chrome — the perceived bastion of web freedom — while they themselves are simultaneously criticized for assisting in a conspiracy against "the web" whenever they fail to make enough cutting-edge performance improvements.
The chrome team makes more commits than the Apple webkit team. I know number of commits don't mean much but the chrome team is mostly reponsible for adding websocket, the file api, web workers and more. Also don't forget webkit itself is based on KDE's KHTML.
Oh, so these features are comparable in effort and scale to an entire web browser and HTML5-compliant rendering engine then?
By your logic, Chrome is essentially KHTML + HTML5-fanboy-features. I guess that must mean Apple has been shipping a 2002-era build of Konquerer with each copy of Mac OS X then, huh? Because clearly WebKit itself is so minimal in comparison to the rest of Chrome as to be positively technologically inconsequential.
I hope you can see the irony of your remark in light of the original point I was making.
Strawman, I never said the Chrome team deserved all the credit, or that KHTML did for that matter. All I meant was that the WebKit team didn't deserve all the credit as it's clearly a shared effort between the three of them, not to mention Nokia and others. Also my initial comment was answering a post mentioning HTML5 features.
Didn't Apple take the KHTML (Konqueror was a full fledged browser) code and then had to release their code because it was GPL. I remember reading about a complaint from the KHTML that Apple was releasing the code as a big blob and this was hindering KHTML integration.
WebKit has vastly evolved from the original KHTML library, to the point of being almost an entirely different product. The KHTML team has been pulling changes from WebKit (http://trac.webkit.org/browser) for many years now.
Instructive link, Apple praising KHTML and reasoning why they used it http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-devel&m=104197092318639&...
So, saying that Google took Apple's full browser is not really true, Chrome mostly took Webcore, they have their own JS engine and their own UI chrome(!), and WebCore has a lot of roots in KHTML
Your bias is showing. Hard.
Please tell me more, drivebyacct2.
Edit: Your homoeroticism is showing.
The point is, in three different places you shrugged off the Chrome team's contributions to WebKit, yet acted like Apple is the night in shining armor because they happen to "own" WebKit. Can't they both work on it, both receive credit and both be happy without fanboys needlessly going out of their way to argue about a competitor that competes in a nearly completely unrelated field?
Besides the original point has gone completely undiscussed. It might be shocking but I'm betting the WebKit, iOS and Apple's executive steering committee are all vastly decoupled. It is possible for the WebKit team to make advances and for the iOS team to not adopt them for, gasp, political purposes. For example, the accelerated javascript engine, additional HTML5 controls that have been simply and for reasons unknown not enabled in iOS.
That has nothing to do with my ability to be thankful for Apple's stewardship of WebKit. I'm quite thankful to be honest. I love that Google and Apple can both build a better web engine while competing with each other. I just hope that they both embrace that superior engine for the sake of the open web, and some of Apple's actions have called into question their intentions about the mobile web in iOS. That's all I'm saying.
edit: Uh, I generally try to keep my, yes, homo, eroticism off of the Internet. I apologize if you were exposed to any, that's probably not a pretty sight.
Yes, that my point, and it's in much the same way that you're questioning my motives (a form of argumentum ad hominem) instead of... actually participating in the conversation.