Google Forks WebKit And Launches Blink, A New Rendering Engine | Hacker News Reader

Google Forks WebKit And Launches Blink, A New Rendering Engine

techcrunch.com

72 pointsjordn39 comments

This is just a personal opinion, but for a browser I'd always support and use a not-for-profit one. No matter how fast, or perceptibly fast, an offering from a business entity is.

Here is why: 1. Tomorrow you, the billion dollar enterprise, will force real identity even more vehemently. 2. I certainly don't want to see a constant hum of ads. 3. I don't want to turn my computer into a wide-mouth bucket for chrome apps, for example, which have higher than normal access and rights on my disk.

Your browser could potentially take me back into an era of 'download-yet-another-snoopy-app' into your machine yeah! Put it all behind a curated garden and keep me happy within. Where web on tablets and smartphones is today. Nope, not for me.

Current popular browsers are:

  * Firefox
  * Chrome / Chromium
  * Internet Explorer
  * Safari
  * Opera

All of them are produced with the aim of benefiting their parent corporations in some way -- for example, Mozilla Corp rents the default search engine setting to Google for hundreds of millions per year.

I currently use Firefox and Chromium as my primary browsers, because they are the only popular browsers that are open-source and therefore the only browsers I fully trust. Despite coming from "business entities", neither browser shows me ads, requires me to enter a government-approved name, or requires me to install third-party applications.

Mozilla Corp was set up by Mozilla Foundation for tax reasons. Firefox is produced with the aim of meeting the foundation's mission.

"All of them are produced with the aim of benefiting their parent corporations in some way -- for example, Mozilla Corp rents the default search engine setting to Google for hundreds of millions per year."

You've crafted a sentence that will mislead people.

Mozilla did not, and does not, make Firefox in order to generate search revenue. Mozilla makes Firefox to directly advance Mozilla's non-profit, public benefit mission to improve the Web.

Firefox is not produced with the aim of generating revenue. It never has been and it never will be.

Let's all take a deep breath and contemplate the times when we have been as self-assuredly wrong as the author of the above comment. Here's to civil discussion that shores up the spots in life where we're ignorant.

" the decision to fork WebKit was entirely driven by the engineering teams and solely based on the fact that the engineers felt constrained by the technical complexity of working within the WebKit ecosystem."

Is this code for "They wouldn't take our changes so we said, 'Fork it!' and made our own." ?

“Currently, the majority of WebKit reviewers are from Google (95), with Apple coming in second (59)... Google is also currently responsible for the vast majority of commits to the WebKit repository...”

Doubtful.

Do you have any proof that the statement is false?

No, I was using the statement to cast doubt on the parent comment's suggestion.

And then I got a good night's sleep, waking up to find that I'd communicated the opposite of what I meant and that it's too late to edit my comment.

Numbers are doubtful?

I mean, sure, one could fabricate them, but why, especially if he can easily be caught doing it? Those are things anybody can verify by looking at the repository stats.

Here's what I found with a cursory look: Google has overtook Apple in commits 2-3 years already:

http://blog.bitergia.com/2013/02/06/report-on-the-activity-o...

Older stats (already Google on top): http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2010/02/webkit-...

And a TechCrunch article on the issue: http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/06/google-apple-webkit/

Sorry, I meant that the suggestion in the comment I was replying to (that Google was forking because they couldn't get their changes in) was doubtful, not that the figures I quoted from the article were doubtful (I was using them as justification for my comment).

Reviewers and number of commits aren't really relevant stats. I'm the top committer and code reviewer at my company but it doesn't mean I write the most code :)

Reading through some of the analysis I agree, the story about the amount of glue necessary getting worse rather than better was pretty compelling. As a systems guy I find it amazing how intertwined the various parts are, between the process model to the rendering model, simplification there can only be good.

> Is this code for "They wouldn't take our changes so we said, 'Fork it!' and made our own." ?

I think its probably more exactly what it says -- a way of eliminating the overhead of dealing with the complexity of the WebKit ecosystem. As noted in the article, "Google says, for example, that it will be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files comprising more than 4.5 million lines right off the bat."

That's a whole lot of complexity that isn't relevant to what Google is doing with Chrome that is worth not having to deal with.

This[1] other article infers that those lines/files are related to webkit2 features of multiprocessing and sandbox code.

So it seems to me that ChuckMcM may not be far off.

[1]: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/google...

Pretty sure it has more to do with their architecture changes RE: multithreading and embedding/porting.

Nope. If Google wanted to push things through it would certainly be possible as the single largest contributor, but that's not a productive way for anyone to participate. Instead, it's just a matter of simple project divergence. Apple landed the WebKit2 layer a few years ago, which was largely incompatible with the Chrome architecture that predated it by several years. Some minor efforts were made to unify parts, but WebKit2 continued to move in a direction that was increasingly incompatible with the existing Chrome architecture. Rather than burden everyone by continuing to maintain a codebase between these increasingly divergent approaches, it made sense to split.

_IT BEGINS_

We're switching out the cluster that was IE6 for Google Chrome. Mozilla, save us; you're our only hope.

Opera is going to contribute to Blink as well, so I guess there's that.

On the contrary, this saves us from WebKit being the new Trident from IE6.

This could also be code for we are implementing features that we don't want to contribute to WebKit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5489025

Please, when you make a new project, please, please don't use a pre-existing English word. Perl? Great name. Searchable. You won't be contaminated and neither will you contaminate others. Tumblr? Same thing.

Python? Well, has a lot of groundswell so now tech 'owns' the name, but you contaminate other people's search.

Rust? (or a million other projects without python's heft) The reverse issue.

Blink also has the problem of already being a word used occasionally in web design (bad or otherwise).

At least until a quick and convenient context setting syntax enters the mainstream search syntax.

Id love the ability to search "Json parsers [python]" or "music packages [django[python[programming]]]"

'Chrome' used to refer to the GUI elements that surround a webpage - scrollbars, back button etc. Google changed that.

Google will effectively Google-bomb the web development word 'blink' too. It is no big loss.

"A Short Translation from Bullshit to English of Selected Portions of the Google Chrome Blink Developer FAQ"

http://prng.net/blink-faq.html

Well, talk about taking your ball and going home. News like this is something I would have assumed from Apple rather than Google (based on the amount of code they've contributed).

Maybe it's political, maybe it's technical but this is a bit of news I expected yet didn't see coming.

"Don't Blink. Blink and you're dead. Don't turn your back. Don't look away. And don't Blink. Good Luck."

By forking WebKit Google is fucking Apple

Duh! Chrome, Youtube, Maps, Android and virtually everything serve Google's $$$$ making efforts. Same applies to Microsoft and other large corps, no matter how much they spin.

So I use Firefox and will use for as long as they are independent.

You do realize that Google pays Firefox $300M a year, making them at least somewhat aligned to the business of Google?

Yes, and I suspect that Firefox is, at least, not going to work against the way it makes its money (ads) but the alternative browsers have bigger conflicts of interest.

It's interesting to see open-source foundations get corporate patrons. Like Ubuntu's relation with Amazon.

That's always been the case. (Linux < IBM, Oracle, Redhat. FreeBSD has corporate sponsors and so on).

For any project to succeed, it's going to need some kind of funding. And often that means turning to big businesses, who have deeper pockets than all of us little people combined.

Opera?

Plus with their switch to Blink on the horizon, even the old complaints about rendering compatibility are soon to be moot.

> Duh! Chrome, Youtube, Maps, Android and virtually everything serve Google's $$$$ making efforts.

Following the above logic wouldn't Opera not fit the bill either, considering it serves only to make money for Opera?

If Opera was non-free or pushed Opera owned services, then I would agree. But they don't.

In fact, how does Opera generate income?

Probably by Google alone http://www.zdnet.com/opera-google-extend-search-deal-for-two...

Google has bought placement on all non-MS major browsers and portals.

I had to look that up just to verify it was that much. 300M is a boatload of money per year.

http://allthingsd.com/20111222/google-will-pay-mozilla-almos...

That is like saying Brendan Eich is beholden to Mozilla because they currently pay him. Don't forget the fact that he could get a job in less than a minute's worth of effort at pretty much any tech company in the world. Mozilla's traffic has a value that is independent of Google.

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