Dear Google: Please fork WebKit (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Dear Google: Please fork WebKit (2010)

my.opera.com

52 pointsyuhong14 comments

Google listened, and Instead of having one more engine that bolsters open web, we also had to lose one because Opera changed as well.

I think it'd be hilarious to see what happens to the "open web" if Google changes the vendor prefix in chrome to -blink- instead of -webkit-

There are no more vendor prefixes.

Is this your prognosis for the future? Because at the moment this simply isn't true.

Try this among of countless other examples in the very latest Chrome Canary:

    document.createElement('canvas').getContext('2d').webkitBackingStorePixelRatio

Blink is removing vendor prefixes. http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2013/04/30/blink-and-the-end-o...

Vendor prefixes appear to be on the way out. For experimental not-a-standard-yet kind of features, the preference seems to be a browser config switch like "chrome://flags". This is "a good thing" methinks.

That's just putting salt on wounds :(

Hasn't this happened with Blink[0]? And now Opera is going to be using Blink as well.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_web_engine

Yes, it has. I think that's why it was posted - someone at Opera predicted/suggested/wanted this to happen.

True, but there is also a bit of irony to the request in hindsight because the main thrust of the argument was that the more heterogenous the browser market was, the better it would be for web standards.

However, after Google forked WebKit Opera adopted Blink as their rendering engine, making the whole situation basically a wash in the context of the original argument.

Blink is just a fork of WebCore, not WebKit. There's more to WebKit than WebCore.

Blink is a fork of the entire WebKit repository. The lion's share of that is WebCore (especially after removing platform bindings that don't apply to Chromium), but it's entirely fine to call it a fork of WebKit.

Flash player(common denominator for all browsers) still runs in separate system process, so I does not look like overall security of web increased at all.

That's not big suprise tho, if you are required to have Adobe Flash player installed in order to use Youtube.

There is also entire advertisement ecosystem built by Google, which relies on flash player... and I don't mean ads here, but all the data about users which Google is harvesting through it thanks to Google Toolbar which is bundled with Flash player.

Dear Opera: Please fork Blink. ..or better not.

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