The Unforking of KDE's KHTML and Webkit Begins

Jiilik Oiolosse writes to tell us Ars Technica is reporting that after years of existing seperately, KHTML and Webkit are finally coming back together. "In open source terms, this may be as big of a deal as the gcc and egcs merger of yonder days. KHTML and Webkit are definitely coming of age. The KDE developers, responsible for the original creation of KHTML, are dedicated to seeing this unforking happen and are taking a leading role in that effort."

Comments

Impact on Apple

[jshriverWVU]

How will this impact Apple given that Safari uses it. Also after the unfork they decide to go the GPL3 route.

Re:Impact on Apple

[Otter]

One of the problems is Apple has no interest in keeping a GPL'd webkit fully functioning with tidy entry/exits for whatever proprietary things Apple wants to add.

Huh? How do you get that from a story about Apple providing such an attractive fork that everyone, including the original authors, is switching to it?

The piece you quoted refers to a squabble about changes to Webkit being difficult to port to KHTML. Which, as the article notes, has been long resolved to everyone's satisfaction.

Re:Webkit wins

[stilborne]

i think a more accurate term is "everybody wins". the code bases have evolved and it has come time to bring the best of all worlds together. the path chosen to get there is interesting, but not a matter of winners and losers.

Re:How is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

The real beauty of EGCS history is when RedHat 6.0 shipped with a snapshot version of EGCS instead of tried and true GCC 2.98, and called it GCC 3.0. Of course, since it was just a daily snapshot and not even a release candidate, it was buggy as all hell. Couldn't even compile a kernel because some of the inline assembly and undocumented behavior changed. What a huge piece of shit, thanks RedHat.

It got so bad, FSF had to disavow all knowledge of any GCC 3.0 compiler and jump to 3.1 immediately, since invariably GCC was blamed for this debacle, instead of the true idiots: RedHat.

The more you know.

I hope you are right

[mpapet]

My bias is pretty obvious. I sincerely hope that you are right.

Re:Four standard browsers.

[wal9001]

Maybe the "Make sure everything works in IE" era will die off and grow in to the "Make sure everything works on iPhone." Then we could all let IE die or switch to Webkit/Gecko rendering. Since both of them aren't written by a bunch of faceless cubicle monkeys deep in a megacorporation we'd probably end up with a happy world of (correctly rendered) rainbows designed within the standards set forth by WC3!

An explanation

[Midnight Thunder]

Apple is pretty much driving this one now. I think this quote from TFA is telling, "its improvements had become difficult to move back into KHTML"

You are missing some of the context. WebKit is being heavily developed and is receiving contributions from many source, though what is most notable is the fact that WebKit has an abstraction layer, whereas KHTML does not. This abstraction layer allows WebKit to be adapted to many underlying architectures and this is why Webkit is getting the attention. Because of the original license nothing is stopping the KHTML developers from taking the WebKit source and making a fork (KHTML -> Webkit -> KHTML NG), but while everyone is benefiting there is little need to do this.

What is also interesting are some of the players that are contributing to WebKit, since there are big corporations in there too, including Adobe and Nokia. There are of course many unaffiliated developers that should not be forgotten, of course.

Can you get Windows Binaries?

[billstewart]

I'm not really interested in building Windows versions of the browser from source - other people have presumably done that, since they're shipping the source (:-), and the little development I do these days (and lots that I used to do) tends to be on various flavors of Unix systems where there's a decent development environment and working OS. But I spend *lots* of time using Windows, and using Windows browsers, and having a browser that was lighter-weight than Mozilla would be a Good Thing.

The nightlies look like they're just source, and the various home pages and first layer or two of wikiness didn't seem to have any indication that they want to support users as opposed to developers.

thats the end of the world as we know it

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you actually aware of what this means?

Three very big development 'companies' are working together on *one* web engine with *one* code base.
Apple. Trolltech. KDE/The Open Source community. Maybe Nokia too, sometimes in the future.

Never thought that that would happen.

Re:Boy lost in the Software.

[Dhalka226]

Frankly if I had mod points I would have modded both of your posts down, and I couldn't care less about the GPLv2/GPLv3 debate or its outcome. Your first post didn't say anything worth being modded up, and I don't know what that "have you stopped beating your wife?" comment was about but it smells like flamebait to me.

And this one? Aside from worthless insulting of some anonymous moderator, you bust out some fantastic "ZOMG! ANTI-GPLV3 CONSPIRACY!!!" nonsense that simply deserves to get buried. And you used your karma bonus to do it.

Perhaps instead of some vast anti-GPLv3 conspiracy to keep you down, you're just being modded down for being an ass?