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Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

Both Chrome and Safari were based on WebKit (which itself started as a fork of KDE's KHTML and KJS libraries), which a lot of other vendors use too.

Although Chrome eventually diverged years later with the development of Blink, Chrome was the result of a multi-company, industry-wide unification strategy on WebKit, the core of Safari.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit

>WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE, and has since been further developed by KDE contributors, Apple, Google, Nokia, Bitstream, BlackBerry, Sony, Igalia, and others. WebKit supports macOS, Windows, Linux, and various other Unix-like operating systems. On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it had forked WebCore, a component of WebKit, to be used in future versions of Google Chrome and the Opera web browser, under the name Blink.

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What is sort of interesting is this thread (sort of) suggests they might have been looking at the Mozilla renderer at the same time as the Webkit one. I wonder if the licensing (MPL?) would have allowed that fork to happen. That everyone ended up going with Webkit is a bit sad imo.

Mozilla was in no shape to run on mobile or embedded devices (and still isn't afaik), while WebKit ran quite nicely on mobile and embedded devices, thank you.

And as we all know, Android is as important to Google as iOS is to Apple.

So there was really no chance of either of them (or any other of the many companies interested in mobile and embedded devices, like TomTom for example) ever building on top of Mozilla/xulrunner.

> Mozilla was in no shape to run on mobile or embedded devices (and still isn't afaik)

Probably true at the time (anno 2007), but since ~2014, FirefoxOS which is an entire mobile OS based on Gecko (called boot2gecko) I think proves that at least the browser engine (not UI) could be used for more than just simple webpages, and on mobile devices.

The OS itself was relatively fast, but the public perception of the performance of the OS was very low, as most (if not all devices) running FirefoxOS was very low powered compared to the contemporary flagship models for Android and iPhone.

The irony here is that the person was in many parts responsible for creating XPCOM at Mozilla which was a major reason for the bloat, jumped ship to Apple/Safari at the early stages.

I remember a rigorous article where he dissected Mozilla vs Webkit and explained by why the latter was superior (= less abstractions and no XPCOM). I wouldn't be surprised if that article was the basis for the decision to not go with Mozilla at Apple.

Nothing to be held against him for sure, if you have been in this business for this long you are sure to have created stuff that you realize was not optimal. Particularly over-abstractions.

Also I would not be surprised if it is that person they are talking about in the mail conversation.

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