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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."

5 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. Unforking? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. 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: 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: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/

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  4. 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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