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Comment by drinchev | Hacker News Reader

That's the most scary thing of all. Although open-sourced webkit is mostly developed by big companies ( Apple, Google, Adobe .. ). Webkit is not perfect. There are a lot of bugs that nobody cares and will care less. Imagine what will happen if there are no competitor and webkit core engineers do whatever they want and still people use their engine. Prefixes like '-webkit-animation' will remain forever and w3c specs will not be a significant for them.

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If there's bugs you care about, then you patch them. WebKit is open source, so anyone can fork it and build their own version with any fixes or changes they like. I don't see anything but positive news from this.

That doesn't mean those patches will be accepted upstream.

  > WebKit is open source, so anyone can fork it and build 
  > their own version with any fixes or changes they like.

You're committing an error here. Say you find a bug in Webkit. You patch it, but Apple declines to accept it upstream. You fork the project. Now how do you get your fork into the hands of your users? Unless you're secretly Google in disguise, you're SOL.

If there's bugs you care about, then you patch them.

So now you have a fixed WebKit that nobody else uses.

But it's not that easy. It's one thing to add a missing feature to a Ruby gem or event to jQuery, but WebKit is a much bigger beast. Most geeks can't realistically patch things in a big heap of C++ code like that...

The codebase is pretty big... and I think you're right that someone can pop in and contribute to smaller projects much more easily. But I've poked around in it and it's not that bad. If you put a week into understanding it, it's not nearly as daunting.

It's about the same as when you start at a company with a large existing codebase. You're not going to get much done until you've read and understand the chunks of the code that relate to what you need to do. This spinup time is definitely bigger than the hour it can take to fix a bug in a small project that you previously had no experience with, but it's definitely within the realm of the possible.

Please explain how I can patch webkit bugs on my iPhone.

  > Imagine what will happen if there are no competitor and
  > webkit core engineers do whatever they want and still
  > people use their engine.

Well, I've tried and it is still better than few buggy engines. I am sure Gecko and Presto also have bugs that nobody cares about.

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