Comment by othermaciej | Hacker News Reader

Comment by othermaciej | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>> We talked privately with particular Chrome folks before we started (as described upthread), in the middle, and shortly before landing to mention that we were landing soon. > Yes, I'm aware of that, but the work had been underway for a long time and was about to be dropped by the time there was a real heads up. So the core of the architecture was already being frozen from a larger perspective.

Are you aware of the earlier conversation that occurred before we wrote any lines of code or even had a name? Where we talked about the possibility of just using Chromium's model if Google was willing to contribute it back? I have mentioned it twice - maybe you overlooked those parts of my remarks.

> Chromium's architecture was public and available, but we assumed it wasn't used because it didn't fit the needs of WebKit2. There's no malice in that. We designed Chromium from the beginning for SFI (as Adam tried to convey), and that incurs quite a bit of complexity.

It had nothing to do with SFI (which wasn't brought up at the time) or complexity. It was for the reasons I stated upthread.

>Are you aware of the earlier conversation that occurred before we wrote any lines of code or even had a name? Where we talked about the possibility of just using Chromium's model if Google was willing to contribute it back? I have mentioned it twice - maybe you overlooked those parts of my remarks.

The Chromium code is all in a public repository and was already integrated into WebKit via Chrome's platform layer. Members of the Chrome team were also interested in helping better incorporate Chrome's model into WebKit. So, I must be misunderstanding you, because it seems like you're suggesting that you expected Chrome engineers to simply do all the work.

>It had nothing to do with SFI (which wasn't brought up at the time) or complexity. It was for the reasons I stated upthread.

I still don't get what that reason is supposed to be. Regardless, the resulting WebKit2 design was clearly incompatible with the existing Chrome architecture. And the fact that they were continuing to diverge and place a burden on both projects was a clear problem. This was raised repeatedly, but never seemed to receive any serious consideration.

My interest in this thread was only to report on some history that I knew about personally, to correct what I thought was an incomplete version of events. I think a bunch of people found that information useful and interesting.

I regret that this thread has turned into such a back-and-forth. It's not my goal to detract from the Blink announcement. I feel like it would be rude to leave you hanging on mid-thread. However, I feel like: (a) You are trying to argue with my version of specific events where I was present in person and you (as far as I recall) were not. (b) You are trying to argue with my stated motivations for decisions that I was part of and you were not. (c) You seem to want to assign blame.

Maybe my impressions are wrong. But given this, I find it hard to reply in a way that would be constructive and would not further escalate. I hope you will forgive me for not debating about it further.

Yeah, I didn't intend this to turn into a back and forth. I think we both had similar intentions, but from different perspectives and with different first-hand information that may not be well communicated. I agree that it's best to leave it be from here. I think both of us and our respective projects bear no ill will and desire the best for the Web as a whole, despite differences in how exactly to get there.

A request for clarification on why they refused was posed to a Chrome engineer in todays Blink Q&A (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlJob8K_OwE#t=13m34s), and according to him the request for integration came shortly after Chrome was released, and the reason for their refusal was the sheer scale/complexity of the task.

In light of this, your initial "if Google had only upstreamed their multiprocess support...we almost surely" and reiterations on this point within the thread do seem a bit like PR sleight of hand, since out of context it implies willingness to do so was the only issue on their part.

1) The answer wasn't "we'd like to do this but we're super busy right now, how about later" or "that's super complicated, will you guys put in a lot of the effort". It was a pretty direct no. We would have been willing to do much of the work.

2) My recollection is that we talked about it around a year after Chrome was released. Chrome Beta release date: September 2, 2008 Date of WebKit2 announcement: Thu Apr 8, 2010 (after <1 year of development) I don't have records of the meetings where we walked though.

3) Does the reason for saying no affect whether our choice to make our own thing was reasonable?

With regards to 3), yes it does affect it since a "flexible/malleable no" is an altogether different constraint from a "solid no", so the solution would be measured against a different yardstick in the former case. Pressing on with your own thing in the interests of time to market (and thereby further cementing the more mature implementation not being integrated) in that scenario does strike me as less than ideal/short-sighted.

This is somewhat moot with 1) and 2) being the case (or at the very least strongly perceived to be the case on your side). At any rate neither side being able to settle on a single version of events signals a communication problem, which makes the whole value of this hypothetical joint undertaking fuzzy anyway.

I think it's reasonable to say this is one of those situations where different sides simply interpreted the situation very differently.

If this is actually true, then the schism is truly a tragedy.

The way I read it, they didn't want to integrate until they got an official 'yes' (quote: 'our choices were to do a hostile fork of Chromium into the WebKit tree').

> So, I must be misunderstanding you, because it seems like you're suggesting that > you expected Chrome engineers to simply do all the work.

Nah, you're not misunderstanding, Apple/WebKit has a track record of doing this.

I expect that's not the case, and I'm just missing the point othermaciej is trying to make.

Well it doesn't really matter if you expect it or not, the fact still stands that they do.

Do you actually know what you pretend to know, or are you holding a grudge against Apple for an old transgression with KHTML that they've since done did a great deal of work to put right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com