blink blink Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

[THolman Veteran]

Having completely differen rendering engines is completely different from forking an existing engine instead of properly contributing it. basically google is(again) saying, we don't care about Open source, we just use it until we get it to where we want, then we'll go our own way and not care about anyone else.

Which, ironically, is exactly what Amazon, and soon Samsung, are doing with Android...

[Growled Member]

I did a lot of reading on this and apparently this is a good thing for both rendering engines. From what I've read, Apple and Google was having a hard time agreeing on how to develop webkit because their respected browsers operated differently. Now, both sides can focus on making their rendering engines better for their users.

[ichi]

Because they are not open source

Who is "they"?

[francescob]

Fork everything about this!

[Torolol]

well, its GPL to begin with, forkiness just must happens.

very likely google already planned to do this since they start using the webkit, but only now they do it after their browser got significant marketshares.

Opera that adopting webkit recently, might also do the same in near future.

[HawkMan]

So far Opera has said they will use and contribute to blink.

[ichi]

Opera that adopting webkit recently, might also do the same in near future.

Opera adopted Chromium, which happened to be based on Webkit but as soon as it goes with Blink so will do Opera.

[LaP]

Not good imo

Doesn't look so bad after reading more about it.

As long as they follow standard perfectly it's no biggie.

[s30]

While the fanboys will (and already have) jumped on this as "OMGZ GOOGLE TEH SUXXORS", it's worth noting that Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera already have their own rendering engines. This simply adds another to the mix. The importance of this fork isn't the fact that Google are doing their own thing (it's pretty proven that corporate entities can't push their own technolologies if they're not readily available to the rest of the web users). The importance here is twofold (IMO):

1. Removing the legacy WebKit code could be benefitial, but will the loss of compatibility affect existing sites adversely?
   
2. How will this effect the "IE6-ism" that is afflicting WebKit? Will this help or make it worse?
   

Oh, and BLINK? <blink>? Really?

Most of the code clean up would be removing crap that apple created for safari and chrome never used it. I appreciate that vendor prefixes will be removed from chrome.

But this makes me thinking what's the future of webkit if google going to ditch it. safari will be the only browser to use it and safari doesn't have much market share.

[LaP]

The non-standard extensions could be used for their own sites, services and that would then just mess with things. It could turn into another IE only website type deal. I thought everyone was diehard about standards and open standards at that, so how is adding any non-standards to this not a big deal?

One of the main problem with IE (until 9) though is it did not follow standard and had many many many rendering bugs. Having its own non standard extension and tech is not something i like but it's not as bad as not following standard and having many rendering bugs. webkit-this doesn't break a fully compliant web site as long as the rendering engine follow almost all the standard and has only a few rendering bugs. And a good dev using the webkit-this properties will be sure to implement fallbacks.

The problem with IE (until 9) is you had those weird things like IE 7 supporting inline-block for inline elements but not supporting it for block level elements. And things like the infamous hasLayoung ****. I once lost like 2 days of dev because of hasLayout many years ago ...

http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/onhavinglayout.html

[BajiRav]

Most of the code clean up would be removing crap that apple created for safari and chrome never used it. I appreciate that vendor prefixes will be removed from chrome.

But this makes me thinking what's the future of webkit if google going to ditch it. safari will be the only browser to use it and safari doesn't have much market share.

Isn't mobile safari the undisputed king?

[Growled Member]

I think when it came down to it, Google was tired of doing all the work just to see Apple reap half the benefits.