Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

The idea is that, Webkit will have to keep up with the innovations in Blink, and maybe even try to innovate themselves, to maintain marketshare.

He didn't say the Web wouldn't be affected; he said it wouldn't suffer. And it won't, because it forces the WebKit (and Gecko) folks to keep up with Blink, and the Blink folks to keep up with their keeping up. Everybody wins.

Chromium as packaged by most Linux distributions is not a "nightly build" sort of a thing. It's only a hassle if you run a non-FOSS operating system without a package manager, and in that case having to run Chrome instead of Chromium is the least of your issues re: FOSS.

Mobile web developers should already be used to testing their work on multiple different devices anyway. The deployed versions of WebKit differ quite significantly across the myriad of mobile devices on the market, and WebKit is just the layout engine anyway. It doesn't run JS or talk directly to the network stacks, and it isn't responsible for any GPU acceleration that may or may not be available.

If you're doing anything more complicated than serving static HTML and images to mobile devices you will already need to test on as many different devices as is feasible for you. It's basically unheard of for something to work across all WebKit based browsers just because your CI is telling you it works OK in desktop Chrome.

and firefox is the IE6 of firefox os ... what you are saying doesnt make sense. A mobile doesnt have to accept multiple browsers. Can you run chrome on WP8 ? no.

Actually, the issue is not "no choice in rendering engine", the issue (with IE6) was "a shitty rendering engine" - I for one don't care if Safari / Webkit remains the only rendering engine on iOS for eternity, as long as webpages work and look well. Because that's all that matters to me, as a consumer.

Extensively modified WebKit, I believe (at least compared to the system WebKit on Android). That being said, given that their customized engine targets Android, I suspect it is more likely than not that they'll switch to Blink.

This is a fallacious argument in this context, this is a pretext, that's why I used the word 'hypocrisy'. And also I really think that a so called 'diversity' of implementations of open source projects may only really be sustainable for large companies with big resources to do things on their own and know they don't need to rely on anybody. But ask yourself, now, what if Apple decided that for being competitive with Google they must do the same thing and ditch everything that don't suit to their plans? And what if Samsung does the same and Blackberry and so on... would it be great for diversity? Would it be great for small vendors? I don't think so. Excuse me but in this case I don't praise this kind of diversity.

Edit: I didn't know I replied to a Google employee, just s/Google/your company/ in my post.

Pfft. The Web is run by businesses, not some star trek style council where everyone speaks in turn and there is a common good.

WhatWG was formed because the W3C design by committee approach was too slow for some businesses to gain an advantage.

W3C is a paid up list of various exchange top 500 companies who can afford to pay up for standards.

It's a giant pissing match.

>The web is the common project, right? We're all working together to put together powerful and performant windows into the web, and we work together at places like the W3C and WhatWG to construct a common vision of what that means.

No, we (the companies) don't.

We work to get web features that we can leverage.

If we can get away with them being adopted by everybody but solely controlled by us, it's all the merrier. If we can get away with keeping some features to ourselves as a competitive advantage ditto.

If we can push our agenda and standards instead of collaborating and iterating faster on common ones, that's great too.

We (the companies) could care less about the web, in any way in which it doesn't affect our bottom line.

In fact, if we have to stall the Web's progress to protect some of our own investments and offerings, we're all for it.

Also, if we have to stall the Web's progress just to avoid some competitor getting his stuff adopted and standardized first, we're all for it.

>W3C and WhatWG to construct a common vision of what that means.

all you have to look at is the history of html5 and even the issues surrounding things like video to see what its like to decide by committee.

WHATWG published the First Public Working Draft of the specification on 22 January 2008

In May 2011, the working group advanced HTML5 to "Last Call

As of May 2012, the specification is back to Working Draft state at the W3C

In September 2012, the W3C proposed a plan[28] to release a stable HTML5 Recommendation by the end of 2014

Does that actually matter?

All these are as well:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd208104.aspx

Would you consider building on top of them? No because they are not 100% vendor neutral. They serve the vendor, not the consumers of the technology.

Indeed, and that is my point.

Why would you build the tool to organize the world's information on top of a platform designed to serve a single vendor rather than the user and consumer of the technology?

Google are playing a little game here similar to the antics Microsoft got up to in the early '00s.

All it takes is some level of adoption and then a diversion away from this and all the other vendors spend forever playing catch up, forcing market dominance.

Since they didn't exactly shout it from the mountaintops, here's the git repo: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/blink

I was concerned that Blink would only be open-source retro-actively, like Android, but this is a good sign.

Open source doesn't mean much when it comes to standards.

It's all about who has control of the codebase. If you need to fork or kiss Google's ass to implement changes to it, then it's not really open.

To put it better, it might still be "open source" but it's not a community or a multi-company project.

You have no idea what you are talking about.

That section states that you will make exceptions against compatibility with competing implementations under the following conditions:

1. That you propose a draft specification

2. That you're willing to discuss it with other implementors

3. That you've exhausted all other options

So let's take the example of Dart, and let's say every other browser engine says "no" to Dart. This policy seems to allow you to act unilaterally, against current interoperability, in this case as long as you put some indeterminate amount of effort to convince other implementors.

Is that a correct reading of it? If so, what good is the rest of the policy about striving for compatibility with other engines when you've given yourself an out when consensus doesn't fall your way?

I don't think it has much to do with anything.

Opera used Webkit because they had no choice. It was that or dying.

Google forks webkit because even thus they have a massive control over it, they don't have _enough_ control.

There are still things other contributors refuse loud enough. Well, like Dart. Or the implementation of Webkit2. Or what not.

Since Google has the major browser marketshare, they're like "wait a moment, we're the masters of the game here, why the fuck can't we just dictate the rules? it's our browser that's mainly running this."

Well, now, there will be zero barrier to this. Not even disagreements.

So.. it is a quite different thing indeed.

The other intents Google have are good, but unfortunately, I'm near certain the REAL interest is the one I and others listed: CONTROL. FULL CONTROL. Things will inevitably go that way. Even if some devs working on Chromium are fooled right now. There is no way you don't get this without making Chromium an entity fully separated from Google, and that ain't happening.