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The Unforking of KDE's KHTML and Webkit Begins

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the sounds-dirty dept.

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."

31 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. Impact on Apple by jshriverWVU · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Impact on Apple by Jiilik+Oiolosse · · Score: 3, Informative

      KHTML/Webkit and derivatives are under the LGPLv2, and the rights were not assigned to a central organization. They would have to contact every author that ever touched that code before they'd be permitted to offer it solely under the LGPLv3...

    2. Re:Impact on Apple by ip_fired · · Score: 5, Informative

      When I worked on WebKit, the source that was publicly available was the source that went into Safari after it's had been adequately tested. They don't have a super-secret version that they are adding their improvements to. The version they improve is the LGPL version.

      In fact, you can go and download the nightly build of WebKit and use it with Safari (Safari is just a wrapper that provides the gui).

      http://nightly.webkit.org/

      --
      Don't count your messages before they ACK.
    3. Re:Impact on Apple by Otter · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

      --
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  2. With our powers combined by SpiffyMarc · · Score: 3, Funny

    Finally, open-source has an answer to Voltron (or the Megazord, depending on which generation you are in.)

    1. Re:With our powers combined by wiredlogic · · Score: 2, Funny

      Super Sentai (AKA Power Rangers) predates Captain Planet.

      --
      I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
  3. Unforking? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I believe you mean KHTML and WebKit will be *spooning* soon!

    1. Re:Unforking? by jd · · Score: 4, Funny

      Spork.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  4. Re:How is it? by jshriverWVU · · Score: 2, Informative

    egcs was a fork of the gcc tree, and had some nice pentium optimization back in the day. See link.

  5. Webkit wins by dj_tla · · Score: 5, Informative

    The summary is a bit vague as to what 'coming together' means. Basically, Webkit is going to be adopted in KDE as a Kpart, features in KHTML that aren't in Webkit are being added to Webkit, then KHTML will die out. Seems at least some KHTML developers will be working on Webkit in the future. The article also goes into the history behind the forking, and is actually a decent read.

    1. Re:Webkit wins by stilborne · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Webkit wins by stilborne · · Score: 5, Informative

      > what 'coming together' means

      i suppose i could be a bit more helpful and comment on this as well..

      > Webkit is going to be adopted in KDE as a Kpart,

      what's happened is that the Qt rendering layer has been added to the main webkit repository and several people at Trolltech and from the KDE community are working on webkit and the Qt based rendering in that repository.

      this opens the way for webkit to show up in kde, including the kpart.

      hopefully more of the khtml forks will follow suit and join mainline dev, but this certainly does start to bring together two of the bigger and more knowledgeable teams when it comes to khtml/webkit.

      > features in KHTML that
      > aren't in Webkit are being added to Webkit

      as many as possible, yes.

    3. Re:Webkit wins by IceFox · · Score: 2, Interesting

      For example check out some neat stuff that Zack has been doing in his spare time with webkit in Qt. http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2007/07/web-on-canvas-a nd-dashboard-widgets.html

      --
      Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
    4. Re:Webkit wins by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I wonder if this actually means that WebKit will become a standard Qt (and not just KDE) component. Qt has its own HTML rendering engine currently, but it's rather simplistic. I wonder if Trolltech has decided it's time for something more powerful...

  6. Re:How is it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:How is it? by ZachPruckowski · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well, it's a famous forking/unforking story regarding GCC, and today we've had a GCC forking story, and a forking->unforking story. Since stories about successful unforks and stories about GCC aren't all that common on Slashdot, it makes sense you haven't seen it here before.

    Fortunately, in this case the reference is actually relevant to the process and the discussion. In the GCC story, it was completely unrelated to a license-based fork of GCC.

  8. Re:How is it? by iluvcapra · · Score: 2, Funny

    The phrase "GCC fork" is a well-known fnord.

    --
    Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
  9. Four standard browsers. by LWATCDR · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So we have the Webkit family.
    The Gekko family.
    Opera.
    and the IE family of browsers.
    All this would be great if they would all follow the standards!
    Okay it would be great if IE followed the standards instead of making them up as they go. IE7 is better but far from perfect.
    I wounder if there is any chance that Firefox will move to Webkit in the future? I know it is unlikely but one does wonder.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
    1. Re:Four standard browsers. by wal9001 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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!

    2. Re:Four standard browsers. by omfgnosis · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Personally, I think a new open source project to bring a Webkit-based browser to Windows that attempts to actually fit into Windows could easily kill Firefox. No bloat, superior standards support, what isn't there to love?
      There used to be such an effort, called Swift. When Safari for Windows was announced, the Swift developer(s?) announced that they'd continue development, switch to win32 WebKit builds and provide a native Windows user experience with a WebKit renderer. Now swift.ws is gone. I seem to recall it'd disappeared before, so I don't know if the dev(s?) changed their plans or just have shitty hosting.
  10. Debate in a Glasgow pub? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Aparently the debate was in a Glasgow pub. So was the final decision was made over a broken bottle and a cry of "Stich this Jimmy!"?

  11. I hope you are right by mpapet · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

    --
    http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
  12. As big as GCC? by H4x0r+Jim+Duggan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As big as GCC? I'll need Wikipedia's help just to know what Webkit is.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webkit

    --
    Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
  13. Developers abandon KHTML for the WebKit fork by homesnatch · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is a more accurate subject line. If you read the article, it is clear that the original developers are moving to WebKit instead of KHTML.

    From TFA:

    While there are still a few reservations, the consensus is to develop a Webkit KPart for embedding into Konqueror at the earliest opportunity and to take a more active role in the development of Webkit itself. This was hinted at earlier in an Ars interview with Lars Knoll, but now it is more or less the official word.

    Now, KHTML won't be deleted right away since there are features in it that need to be ported into Webkit. For example, KHTML (in KDE 4) implements portions of the definition of the CSS3 standard, which will need to be adopted into Webkit and so forth. But the big deal is that the coders that invented the underlying layers that power Konqueror, some Nokia browsers, Abrowse, Safari, Adobe's Air, and now Epiphany and a few other projects that are in the works, are now back in the fold.

  14. An explanation by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Jumpstart the tartan drive.
  15. Can you get Windows Binaries? by billstewart · · Score: 2, Insightful
    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.

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
    1. Re:Can you get Windows Binaries? by ip_fired · · Score: 3, Informative

      I believe the nightlies are actually compiled DLL's (or shared libraries, depending on which OS you are on). You can point the safari executable to use the nightly builds instead of the shipped build.

      With that said, the nightlies can be buggy, leak, crash, etc. After all, it's just what the devs checked in the previous day and it hasn't really been fully tested.

      I was just trying to make the point that the guts of Safari is open source, and that is where Apple puts it, it doesn't have a separate branch that it works on.

      --
      Don't count your messages before they ACK.
    2. Re:Can you get Windows Binaries? by Phil+Urich · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The Safari 3 beta for Windows is faster than Firefox. See http://www.apple.com/safari/


      I had my doubts, but now that I've looked at Apple's entirely unbiased official site I'm convinced! :P

      Seriously, do your research first. Safari kindof cheats (and by kindof, I mean majorly) with onload, see this article for example. Quote, "Well, its results are almost certainly wrong, and it will appear a lot faster than it really is, if JavaScript is used to time it. The results are completely unreliable." The author suspects it wasn't intentional cheating, though. Regardless it's not as straightforward of an issue as Apple's PR department would like you to think.

      (by the way, Konqueror launches far faster than Safari 3 claims to on that publicity site; is that Konqueror being quick, Windows being slow, 64-bit computing actually being an improvement, or the fact that they tested that on an iMac? I bet they used XP SP2 Home :P )
      --
      I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
  16. Re:How is it? by 1729 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.


    Your facts are a bit off:

    http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/gcc-2.96.html

    In particular, note that the gcc-2.96 debacle had nothing to do with egcs. GCC 2.95 was released after the gcc/egcs merger and before Red Hat released gcc-2.96.
  17. thats the end of the world as we know it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  18. Re:Boy lost in the Software. by Dhalka226 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?