Slashdot Mirror


How Competing Companies Are Jointly Building WebKit

New submitter jgb writes "WebKit is, now that Opera decided to join the project, in the core of three of the five major web browsers: Apple's Safari, Google's Chromium and Opera. Therefore, WebKit is also a melting pot for many corporate interests, since several competing companies (not only Google and Apple, but also Samsung, RIM, Nokia, Intel and many others) are finding ways of collaborating in the project. All of this makes fascinating the study of how they are contributing to the project. Some weeks ago, a study showed how they were submitting contributions to the code base. Now another one uncovers how they are reviewing those submitted contributions. As expected, most of the reviews during the whole life of the project were done by Apple, with Google as a close second. But things have changed dramatically during the last few years. In 2012, Google is a clear first, reviewing about twice as much (50%) as Apple (25%). RIM (7%) and Nokia (5%) are also relevant reviewers. Code review is very important in WebKit's development process, with reviewers acting as a sort of gatekeepers, deciding which changes make sense, and when they are conforming to the project practices and quality standards. In some sense, review activity reflects the responsibility each company is taking on how WebKit evolves. In some sense, the evolution over time for this activity by the different companies tells the history of how they have been shaping the project."

125 comments

  1. Companies can work together just fine... by mwvdlee · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...just as long as you keep managers, marketeers, sales people and HR out of it.

    --
    Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
    1. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So who decided they weren't confident in opera's own engine and let's swap years of work out for webkit? Developers?

    2. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Grond · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You don't think management was involved Apple's decision to use KHTML as the basis for Safari rather than Gecko (the Mozilla engine)? Or the decision to use an open source engine in the first place rather than creating their own proprietary engine? You don't think sales and marketing were involved in the decision to feature the open source nature of the engine when Safari was first announced ("Safari’s features include ... the industry’s best rendering engine based on KHTML, from KDE’s Konqueror open source project, to which Apple has made significant enhancements that will be contributed back to the open source community."). You don't think HR was involved in recruiting software engineers with experience working with open source projects?

      The same is true of every other company that has used WebKit. Companies that base products on open source projects are not self-governing programmer utopias.

    3. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      What was avoided here is the usual horde of slavering, shambling, mindless middle managers who usually bring every worthwhile software development effort to a pathetic halt.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    4. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, it was probably a cost cutting measure, nothing even remotely related to marketing.

      Think about it for a second. There are so many companies all working on that engine, it's a win-win-win situation for them. They reduce research and development costs by A LOT, look at MS how much it spent on IE to bring it to it's current status, then they get a finished product that is high quality, or at least as good as their competitors and they get karma/marketing points by having their names plastered all over the open source community.

      Google did this first, they helped Firefox to really take off, and won so big, they now have their own browser with a healthy market share.

    5. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by blacklint · · Score: 4, Informative

      From the guy who chose to base Safari of KHTML: "But I chose the engine we used — with my team’s and my management chain’s support, of course —"

      Sounds like an engineering-led decision to me.

    6. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Grond · · Score: 4, Informative

      Google did this first, they helped Firefox to really take off

      No, Apple announced Safari in January of 2003, years before Google began seriously funding Mozilla through search referral kickbacks and hiring a few engineers to work part-time on Mozilla projects. Work on WebKit started within Apple even further back, in mid-2001.

    7. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Grond · · Score: 1

      Sounds like an engineering-led decision to me.

      Engineering-led, sure, but that wasn't the claim I was responding to. The claim was "Companies can work together just fine... ...just as long as you keep managers, marketeers, sales people and HR out of it." Management was clearly involved.

    8. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by oever · · Score: 1

      Management was involved but did not decide. Don Melton decided to use KHTML:

      But I chose the engine we used -- with my teamâ(TM)s and my management chainâ(TM)s support, of course -- ...

      --
      DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
    9. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So who decided they weren't confident in opera's own engine and let's swap years of work out for webkit? Developers?

      I doubt it's so much a matter of confidence as it is a matter of outbreaking common sense. Why spend resources on your own engine when there is an open, fast, very popular, well-supported, and well-regarded engine available for free? I'm surprised they waited so long, though I am not surprised that Microsoft is outlasting them.

      A small fraction of users care about what engine their browser is using. They care that the websites they visit work, and WebKit certainly has the edge over Opera's old engine on that point.

    10. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by BitZtream · · Score: 2

      Having embedded both Gecko (mozilla's rendering engine) and WebKit into various applications, it doesn't take any sort of silly thinking to understand why they picked WebKit.

      Gecko is a fucking mess that no self respecting programmer will get with in half a billion miles of. It is a shining example of how to write shitty code. It is in fact the most bloated, buggy, confusing pile of shit I've ever had the dis-pleasure of working with.

      WebKit is far from a trivial beast to work with, but its a HTML layout engine, which is a non-trivial task. WebKit makes sense and was 'designed', not thrown together by idiots who should have been fired in 2000 from netscape.

      Management was certainly involved, but I'd bet a weeks pay that none of the developers involved even gave Mozilla a second thought. The first glance at the code base makes it clear that the Mozilla project is not something you really want to be involved with unless you want to learn how 'to do it wrong' by example.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
    11. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As a long time Opera user, I welcome the change. As long as they keep the features that make Opera so powerful, this will be the best of both worlds.

    12. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Except Safari never got popular.

    13. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Anubis+IV · · Score: 1

      ...just as long as you keep people out of it.

      FTFY

      If what you said was true and there weren't any problems so long as it was just engineers, programmers, and the like on a project, then a number of forks of open source projects would simply not exist at all. The fact is, everyone fails to get along at some point, though I'll readily admit that some of the types you left off that list are more capable of getting along than some of the ones you put on that list..

    14. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      Everyone acts like this is a good thing but it is NOT and here is why: First of all...doesn't anybody remember what happened with IE 6? How you had every damned site coded to IE 6 ONLY and any time a bug came out for IE 6 it spread like wildfire? Having everybody on the same thing just ain't a smart move.

      Second nobody seems to be talking about the ugly truth of why Opera had to go Webkit, because the only way they could get within a million miles of iPad is as a pathetic skin for Apple's browser. I'm sorry but that level of douchebaggery and control was NOT cool when MSFT did it and it sure as hell ain't cool just because its coming from Cupertino. We are talking about a company that was able to change the entire direction of HTML V5 from an open codec to a patent trolling H.264,until they got stopped were controlling the prices of eBooks and are able to kill technologies like Flash and the Presto rendering engine by simply saying its verbotten on the iPad.

      The future is NOT looking bright where I am sitting folks, everybody is cheering the death of MSFT but I wanted them replaced by something better not WORSE, didn't you? Between Google locking down bog standard X86 hardware so you can't install another OS without jumping through a bunch of CLI hoops to Apple controlling which way the web goes frankly this is looking to end up worse than when MSFT was ruled by Darth Gates and that's pretty damned bad.

      We need the web to stay open as much as possible and be as patent free as possible but just handing control from Redmond to Cupertino is just switching one master for another when what we need is no masters at all. Hell maybe I'm wrong, the public sure does seem to love paying crazy prices for glorified game consoles so maybe I'm old fashioned in wanting a non corporate controlled web, but all these changes we've had lately? NOT for the better IMHO.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    15. Re: Companies can work together just fine... by cyber-vandal · · Score: 1

      Yeah a proprietary Web browser controlled by a convicted monopolist is just the same as an open source rendering engine that has multiple contributing companies, two of whom are bitter rivals.

    16. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      One's closed blob that never got updated by sole developer to fix bugs and support standards, other's continuously improved by bunch of competing developers and if you don't like the direction it goes you can fork it and add your own patches. Totally same situation.

      And the stab at iPad is completely misguided, as it doesn't matter what engine the desktop Opera uses - every alt browser on iOS has no rendering engine at all and just hands HTML to the viewer component. IOW, Opera there is basically a picture viewer for Opera Turbo, same as Opera Mini from long ago.

      So yeah, many developers from many companies working towards a single goal of standard compliance and uniform support for features across browsers is a Bad Thing.

    17. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Safari is responsible for two thirds of all mobile web browsing. That's objectively pretty popular.

    18. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Your.Master · · Score: 1

      It didn't get popular until long after Firefox got popular.

    19. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Depending on which stats you believe, mobile web browsing is 13-15% and iOS is 25-55% of that. That is, about as popular as desktop Opera.

      People tend to forget that despite media focusing exclusively on OMGnewshinies, old and boring PCs don't just disappear.

    20. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by ShoulderOfOrion · · Score: 1

      As long as Mozilla and IE continue to be viable, I don't think your concern is valid with regard to the browser.

      As for your other points, particularly the abominable choice of H.264 instead of a free codec for HTML5, you're spot on.

    21. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      Nice to see somebody who isn't a fanboy and can see the risk here. And I'm so damned sick of everyone screaming "M$ Shill" if I don't drink the iKoolaid or kiss Google's ring. Who was calling for MSFT to be broken up when the evidence came to light in the antitrust trial? Oh yeah that was ME, same as i thought Intel deserves a hell of a lot more than a couple billion bribe to AMD to make a decade of backdoor bribery go away.

      Why is it that nobody can see that being the biggest corp on the planet brings with it serious dangers to the web and openess? It was wrong and I screamed bloody murder when MSFT tried to control the web through IE 6, and I'm gonna scream just as fucking loudly now that Apple is controlling the web by saying "Do what we say or it don't run on the iPad" as they did with HTML V5 video. for what its worth, know who I was rooting for? NOT MSFT who simply aped Apple, I thought and still do that a minimum of Drac or Theora should have been mandatory. But apparently its totally okay to stick a "pay your $699 license fee" troll as the "standard" for video across the web as long as it was blessed by St. Jobs of Cupertino. A good rule of thumb...if MSFT would have pulled the exact same shit, would you be cool with it? I sure as hell wouldn't and just because Apple builds for hipsters doesn't magically give them a "be a douchebag free" card.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    22. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Seeteufel · · Score: 1

      Webkit is a fork of khtml open source software, in other words KDE.

    23. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Plumpaquatsch · · Score: 3, Interesting

      http://donmelton.com/2013/01/10/safari-is-released-to-the-world/

      But back to Steve’s presentation.

      Everyone was clapping that Apple embraced open source. Happy, happy, happy. And they were just certain what was coming next. Then Steve moved a new slide onto the screen. With only one word, “KHTML” — six-foot-high white letters on a blue background.

      If you listen to that video I posted, notice that no one applauds here. Why? I’m guessing confusion and complete lack of recognition.

      What you also can’t hear on the video is someone about 15 to 20 rows behind where we were sitting — obviously expecting the word “Gecko” up there — shout at what seemed like the top of his lungs:

      “WHAT THE FUCK!?”

      KHTML may have been a bigger surprise than Apple doing a browser at all. And that moment was glorious. We had punk’d the entire crowd.

      --
      Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
    24. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The funny part is that Mozilla were criticising KDE because they claimed they were more concerned about the quality of there code than getting a finished product out the door. I guess both paths paid off in the end.

    25. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Shirley+Marquez · · Score: 1

      The Windows version of Safari never caught on, and Apple has now given up on it. The OS X version is the dominant browser on that platform, but it's a minority platform so desktop Safari is a small percentage of web use. As you point out, mobile Safari for iOS is another matter entirely, but that didn't happen until after Google was funding Mozilla.

    26. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It really bugs me that every time webkit comes up, no one mentions Konqueror. You'd think Apple invented this or something.

  2. Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite? by bogaboga · · Score: 2

    Why won't this arrangement work on an Office Suite?

    That's the question.

  3. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by erroneus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Critical mass.

    *.DOC(X) is not just he most universally accepted format for word processing documents, it's the most universally EXPECTED format for word processing documents.

    And then there's the ridiculously high amount of integration which is the expected norm for all of this. It's more than just office. It's everything it touches. And as we saw when Microsoft took an active role in attempting to stop ODF from becoming an ISO standard and we saw it in how Microsoft inexplicably got an incomplete and impossible to implement standard fast-tracked through the same process.

    They have no shame or sense of morality when it comes to defending their territory and will never allow anything to get in their way.

    Now, if there were such a collaboration I'd be all over it. Right now? I just can't see it happening.

  4. Re:Is there any reason by erroneus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The moment "everyone" goes to the same platform is the moment everything slows to a crawl or even a stop.

  5. How about fixing memory management? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I'm not knowledgeable enough to understand the deep innards, but the first browser that doesn't slowly (or sometimes quickly) consume all my Mac's RAM will win my undying allegiance.

    There's an extensive thread about this problem with Safari here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3255375?tstart=0

    Some people have reported that disabling JavaScript fixes the problem, but that obviously isn't a realistic solution. But it leads me to suspect that in the race for bragging rights about having the "fastest JavaScript", developers have prioritized execution speed over memory efficiency. Personally I'd be happy with a slower JavaScript that paid attention to memory use. Just like I'd like fewer megapixels but better low-light performance in my digital camera.

    1. Re:How about fixing memory management? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're essentially talking about a *platform* not a piece of software. Your comment is on par with "show me the first computer that doesn't run out of memory and I'll buy it". Our web browsers now have a compiler, hardware drivers, etc. It's what is running *on* them that is probably responsible for about 50% of aberrant memory usage. The other 50% is probably feature creap/design related.

    2. Re:How about fixing memory management? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Javascript performance in Safari is Apple's responsibility. Google's Chrome Javascript engine is totally different, named V8.

      I don't think either javascript engines are included in Webkit governance.

    3. Re:How about fixing memory management? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      if disabling JavaScript fixes your problem, it's probably not caused by webkit. The JavaScript engine is a separate piece of software, webkit is "just" the rendering engine.

    4. Re:How about fixing memory management? by Carewolf · · Score: 2

      That is just the Safari Mac defaults. It is using up to 1Gbyte on JIT code, and even more on various caches, but it should throw it out when hit with a memory pressure event. The iOS defaults are much much smaller of course.

    5. Re:How about fixing memory management? by Jeremi · · Score: 1

      But it leads me to suspect that in the race for bragging rights about having the "fastest JavaScript", developers have prioritized execution speed over memory efficiency. Personally I'd be happy with a slower JavaScript that paid attention to memory use.

      You can get 16GB of RAM these days for less than $100. In a couple of years you'll probably be able to get 32GB for that amount. CPU speeds, OTOH, aren't going to get a whole lot faster (more cores notwithstanding). So I think there is a good case to be made that trading memory for CPU cycles is a good strategy in 2013 (along with parallelizing whenever possible).

      --


      I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
    6. Re:How about fixing memory management? by Keybounce · · Score: 1

      You can get 16GB of RAM these days for less than $100.

      But can I put 16 GB of ram into my mother board?

      The limit is not how much memory I can afford.
      The limit is the physical hardware. Or rather, The FIRST part of the limit is my physical hardware

      The second part of the limit is even simpler: I don't run a single app as my whole machine.

      I don't run a single app as my whole machine. My machine is multitasking.

      Right now, what do I have running?

      Gui:
      Finder, Process monitor, Temperature monitor, Terminal (With 10 different windows on 7 different desktops), TextEdit (with something like 70 open files that I need to go through, review, and take action on), Mail, Quicktime (mostly just sitting there, with 4 parts of a video I'm making open, waiting for me to start recording the next segment), MultiMC (just the launcher for minecraft), Skype (so I can can get contacted by the people I play with), Midi Audio Setup (so I can monitor the sound, and switch between hardware speakers and soundflower, as well as adjust volume levels -- which I can't do if I use a multi-output device, and the volume keys adjust the wrong thing if I'm using soundflower), NBT Explorer (just sitting there; has something up that I'll be using in my next video segment), and a Flac to m4a audio converter (again, just sitting there.)

      That's just the BACKGROUND gui stuff.

      There's also a mumble server, two minecraft servers (both currently ctrl-Z'd; testing memory usage/reclaimation shows that Mac OS does a crappy job of paging out unused memory, reducing the effective memory available to me).

      And ... FireFox. Firefox that wants to use ridiculously high amounts of memory. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=814173 -- and remember, Firefox is currently the only browser I know of that has something like NoScript.

      What else am am I likely (but not at the moment) running? iMovie doing quicktime exports to compress video. Yea, it stinks that I have to load a giant GUI program to compress video, but attempting to compress it from Finder gives me a "one-size fits all, we won't even tell you what settings we're using, and we don't care if you don't like the looks, we know what works on YouTube no matter how old our settings are or how much YouTube has changed" output that is of no use to me. (Seriously, if I'm recording 480p screencasts, for a system that wants 480p uploads, that streams to users at 480p, why would I want a 540p encoding?) Or Mumble -- a great audio/voice processor and recorder, that sadly wants to consume very large amounts of CPU activity even when there's no voice activity -- so while I have murmurd (the mumble server) running all the time, I only use mumble during play (And leave skype up so my cohorts can reach me).

      Do I need to shut down the browser when playing? Given that I may need to refer to documentation, or report issues to various forums/bug trackers? Should I shut down email for a trivial gain of space?

      You can get 16GB of RAM these days for less than $100.

      But due to stupidity from Apple, that 16 GB of ram requires 16 GB of hibernation space to be on my root partition. It has to be in /var/vm/swapfile, and /var/vm must be a directory -- neither /var, nor /var/vm can be symbolic links to a second partition on the primary drive. So I would have to be able to repartition my system drive -- which doesn't even work.

      So ... I have to have temporary files (/var/tmp, /var/folders), swap files (/var/vm), hibernation, etc, all in a partition that was sized big enough for the operating system, and expected growth -- back in 10.6 when XCode was on a different partition, etc. -- and then Apple decided that developers must have the entire development environment on that partition a

  6. Embrace.. extend... by fustakrakich · · Score: 1

    extinguish

    --
    “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
  7. Re:Is there any reason by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Here's a pretty good discussion of the issue.

    Selfishly, I hope Mozilla never adopts WebKit because both the Gecko and WebKit teams tend to stagnate when nobody is out-classing them, but they both have strong competitive instincts and everybody benefits from that.

    And, frankly, I think the aesthetics of Gecko are much nicer on Linux than Webkit. I use Chromium for Google Apps because I pretty much have to, but the text layout and rendering really has room for improvement. I do too much work in a browser all day to use that as a primary tool until the necessary work is completed on my platform.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  8. Re:Is there any reason by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Then we get IE6 again, great idea.

  9. Why is webkit on Kindle so poor? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If webkit is so good, why is the browsing experience on a Kindle 3g so awful?

    1. Re:Why is webkit on Kindle so poor? by excursive · · Score: 1

      The Kindle 3G doesn't have a powerful processor or gobs of memory. The display refreshes slowly. The internet connection is not very fast. Maybe all the transactions go through Amazon's servers (as they do on the Fire unless you turn that off). Amazon probably had to make many additions to the code to adapt to the Kindle's physical interface. In other words, there are several potential reasons. What in particular do you not like about it?

    2. Re:Why is webkit on Kindle so poor? by tyrione · · Score: 1

      Hey genius, every platform is responsible for porting WebKit to their API needs and platform. It requires work.

  10. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by bogaboga · · Score: 3, Interesting

    *.DOC(X) is not just he most universally accepted format for word processing documents, it's the most universally EXPECTED format for word processing documents.

    But I remember IE was in this exact position not many years ago. Heck, you could hardly "get anywhere" around the web without hitting so called "IE only" sites. What happened in this case?

  11. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by Xemu · · Score: 4, Funny

    Why won't this arrangement work on an Office Suite?

    That's the question.

    The transformation of the office Paradigm will be disruptive and imperative in a cloud computing initiative and to leverage Web 3.0 and deliver a truly seamless Prosumer solution .

    --
    Tell your friends about xenu.net
  12. Re:Is there any reason by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

    Mozilla should fork Webkit, GPL it, then compete on that basis. More efficient all round. We will still have great competition and rapid evolution, what we won't have is the nasty hairball that is Gecko sandbagging Mozilla progress.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  13. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Proprietary IE features were never as widely used as some people claim. In most cases those "IE-only" websites were 98% semi-standard HTML/CSS/JS, and the developers just didn't want to support the non-standard shitbox that was Netscape 4. Very few public websites had an ActiveX plugin or anything of that nature.

    Web front-ends tend to be redesigned every few years so there was plenty of opportunity to fix this.

  14. Re:Is there any reason by Elbereth · · Score: 2

    We could call it... KHTML and make it a part of KDE!

    However, to be fair, KHTML is actually LGPL.

  15. Antitrust by Grond · · Score: 0

    When Microsoft dominated the browser market by abusing its market power in the operating system market, that was an antitrust problem. Should we not be concerned when a group of competitors collude to dominate the HTML rendering engine market? It's a different kind of market than the browser market, but it is still a market, and a dominant player will cause problems for both competitors and consumers. For example, even though the WebKit browsers are generally free, WebKit's dominance is steadily leading to a lack of choice and a security monoculture. Witness the recent FillDisk exploit, which only affects WebKit browsers.

    This is an example of how open source can allow competitors to collaborate in ways that might ordinarily raise more antitrust scrutiny. Here, several companies for whom an HTML engine is an input have collaborated to reduce the cost of that input. In doing so they have effectively pushed a competitor (Opera) out of the HTML engine market. Firefox and IE's usage share have also steadily been falling for years in favor of WebKit browsers. Will we wait until WebKit has a stranglehold on the market before taking corrective action, like we did with IE?

    1. Re:Antitrust by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      No. Being a monopoly is perfectly legal, abusing the power is not. They are not abusing their power, and they are not even close to being a monopoly.

      Opera were not forced except by the fact that writing an HTML renderer these days is hard, and they are a small company. By trying to keep up, they would have wasted effort that could better be used otherwise (everything around the renderer).

      Basically, you have no idea what you are talking about and just throw around words that make you sound clever.

    2. Re:Antitrust by Grond · · Score: 1

      No. Being a monopoly is perfectly legal, abusing the power is not. They are not abusing their power, and they are not even close to being a monopoly.

      There is much more to antitrust law than monopolies. For example, there are "contracts, combinations..., or conspiracies in restraint of trade or commerce" in violation of the Sherman Act. I did not suggest that WebKit was a monopoly. I suggested that competitors (such as Google and Apple) were colluding to dominate the HTML rendering engine market. That kind of concerted anticompetitive action is precisely what the Sherman Act is aimed at preventing.

      I am not the first person to suggest that collaboration between competitors via open source projects can raise antitrust concerns. See, e.g., Stephen M. Maurer, The Penguin and the Cartel: Rethinking Antitrust and Innovation Policy for the Age of Commercial Open Source .

      Basically, you have no idea what you are talking about and just throw around words that make you sound clever.

      I am an attorney. You may want to rethink that accusation.

    3. Re:Antitrust by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I see this as more of an mirror of the optical disc market.

      The DVD forum was a collaboration between so many companies.
      They all worked and built on the same spec.
      They were allowed to research and create new derivative specs as long as everyone else could use it.
      There was even huge disagreements (DVD+/-R)
      But for the most part, it worked out well.
      Think of the disc market if there was even 10+ competing disc formats. That would be horrible.

      These 3 are working on ONE implementation of the spec, of which there are 3 main competing engines and various smaller secondary competitors.
      All 3 are still capable of working on their own research with the engine, they can then discuss with the others ideas to be added in to the spec at WHATWG and W3C mailing lists with their experimental specs, possible future implementations and then the others get to working on other ideas. They can still even fork it if they wanted to, right?

      There is still going to be competition, even if they are using the same base engine.
      And more to the point, the real competition with browsers has NEVER been the renderer, it has been the features built on top of said renderer.
      At a time IE6 was still better than Firefox, up to 1.5 in fact, FF previous to these versions was just plain bad.
      IE6 had a tabbing extension for it as well, but of course people weren't as clued in to IE extensions as they weren't really that big of a thing.
      And it actually worked really well. I just cannot remember the name of it for the life of me.
      The differences between IE6 and FF1.5 at the time weren't that huge and could, for the most part, be solved very easily with some CSS and JS.
      But MS were still behind in a lot of the more advanced features, regardless.
      These days Microsoft are actually competing though, and all of the current engines are actually pretty damn well up to date on many of the main features.
      So there is basically no real advantage sharing an engine right now. Features and ease of use are the things that will get you users.
      It was the reason Chrome exploded in use because it was such a simple and quick browser compared to FF and IE. Features of the renderer weren't even that different then, besides a few of the more experimental things.

      So people worrying that things will just become the webkit web are being silly.
      Even they don't want that to happen. Things stagnate in monopolies, that would be the worst thing to happen.
      And in all honesty, if things were to somehow get to a state of there being The One Renderer To Render Them All, someone can easily come in, steal the source, re-arrange it entirely and just release it closed source.
      Sure people can come in and easily decompile it, but as long as they re-arranged the code and featureset well enough, nobody would ever find out.
      A really good copy of an open source base would look completely unique, even if it had the same features. And given that someone was in code, they'd likely be smart enough to know how to go about hiding that fact.
      Nobody would stand for an open source monopoly like that if it did happen. So don't worry. The only bad thing that will happen is we will get Great Websites out of it. The horror.

    4. Re:Antitrust by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Basically, you have no idea what you are talking about and just throw around words that make you sound clever.

      I am an attorney. You may want to rethink that accusation.

      Must...not...make...obvious...lawyer...joke....

    5. Re:Antitrust by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Being an attorney doesn't automatically prevent you from speaking out of your ass.

      For a start, you didn't even mention what harmful actionsexactly comprises that Google-Apple "collusion" except for "putting out good product". I wasn't aware that Apple and Google sell HTML rendering engines. That's kinda hard for them to do with Webkit being permissively licensed and all.
      So, what exactly of Apple and Google's actions is illegal and how they profit from Presto's demise?

    6. Re:Antitrust by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For an attorney, your attention to detail is seriously lacking.

      Exhibit A: Your own link on the FillDisk exploit. In that link (and every other link on the exploit, since its factual), it states that Opera and Internet Explorer were both vulnerable. Both browsers do not use WebKit.

      Hardly "only affects WebKit browsers." Perhaps you should limit your comments to legal issues and leave the technical side to people who actually understand what their talking about. See security monoculture may sound witty, and it conjures up images of a biological monoculture that's vulnerable to being wiped out by a single virus or disease.

      But software is different. Yes, a standardized platform creates a single, more attractive target for attackers. But it also increases the attention that the code gets...just check out the summary for just how much code review is happening within WebKit. This makes WebKit more akin to an encryption algorithm where security researchers around the world are invited to participate in the process.

      The only way for software to be considered secure is for it to be reviewed as widely as possible. WebKit's popularity, open development process and open source make it more secure than any other rendering engine.

  16. This is a very good GPL myth debunking by hotfireball · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    So can we now just close that utter bullshit statement about GPL as being world-best license to keep project alive?

    1. Re:This is a very good GPL myth debunking by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What statement would that be? I'm sure you'll be perfectly willing to provide a quote or citation.

    2. Re:This is a very good GPL myth debunking by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In fact, what does this have to do with the GPL at all? Is there some other GPL browser engine that's technically comparable to WebKit but falling behind due to the licence? Did you mean to post that on a different story?

  17. Soon. by hotfireball · · Score: 1

    Soon. Microsoft.

  18. Re:Is there any reason by Ambvai · · Score: 2

    We have never sought to become a monopoly. Our products are simply so good that no one feels the need to compete with us. -CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Alpha Centauri (Fictional quote, by the by.)

  19. ... so long as it meets their interests by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I interned on the Chrome team 3 years ago. Google was still building up towards being a major player on Webkit. This lead to issues when Google's interests didn't match Apple's.

    For example, there was a bug on a KURL object (held a url in it or something). According to specs, it was supposed to wipe out certain data whenever such and such an event occurred. I do not remember the specifics. But, Webkit had this bug where it did not do that, going against its own documentation and specs. This was causing Chrome some issues, so they wanted to patch the problem.

    Apple refused to accept the patch- there were many places where Safari RELIED on the bug to work. If you wanted to fix the bug in Webkit, Apple would have to fix Safari. Since Apple had the majority of commiters/contributors, they could outvote any decision, open source be damned.

    In the end, Google made a GURL object for their own purposes, which was essentially the same object, without the bug.

    *Note: I may be mistaken on many of the details here, or the specific object names (it was a while ago), but the overall scope of the issue, I'm telling it to you like I remember it happening.

    1. Re:... so long as it meets their interests by Skapare · · Score: 1

      This is exactly why projects should be run by the community instead of a for-profit corporation. Such corporations simply have not learned to really work together for a common goal. In theory, it is impossible for them to do so, anyway, since, by definition, the only goal a for-profit corporation can have it to make a profitable return on the investment of its owners.

      --
      now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
    2. Re:... so long as it meets their interests by BitZtream · · Score: 2

      Right, because they exact same thing wouldn't happen with 'the community' in charge.

      THERE ARE ALWAYS CONFLICTS, even in your fantasy hippie commune. Not everyone gets what they want in the real world.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
    3. Re:... so long as it meets their interests by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you read this correctly you would know that Apple was wrong. They refused a bug fix to the rendering engine. A fix that that would make the engine work the way the documentation and specs said it should work. This was because Safari was using the undocumented bug. Not because WebKit was using it. Reading and comprehension fail causing you to come to exactly the wrong conclusion. Doh!

    4. Re:... so long as it meets their interests by Tumbleweed · · Score: 1

      And Apple were right. Merging in a patch that breaks Webkit is utterly wrong. If Google had been serious about the fix they would have patched the bug and also all the places in Webkit that they had then broken. Instead Google followed their usual route - a half-assed change that only works for them. Google is the new Microsoft: embrace, extend .... and soon extinguish.

      You seem to have misread the parenter's description of the problem, and are possibly also confusing WebKit with Safari. He said there was a bug in WebKit which *Safari* relied on. Apple refused to fix the bug in Safari, and refused to accept Google's WebKit bug fixes. This, if true, is COMPLETELY a problem with Apple, not Google.

    5. Re:... so long as it meets their interests by Carewolf · · Score: 1

      I am pretty sure Google URL has many more intentional bugs. One of the interesting things about Google URL is that it is been designed based on Googles vast knowledge of URLs used on the internet, and has been designed with enough insane quirks to parse almost all of them.

  20. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by Kjella · · Score: 1

    Critical mass and a lack of companies that indirectly make money off it. The kernel is free but Red Hat makes money selling service and support, Webkit and the web browsers are free but Google makes money selling web services - or giving them away and making ad revenue, same thing. Who makes money off Open/LibreOffice? The StarOffice business model never really worked for Sun and Oracle simply killed it outright. The Linux distros a little bit maybe, but desktop Linux has never been a moneymaker. On Apple's products you've got other choices, Google wants to push Google Docs, there's other apps for Android and there's no Android port anyway.

    You have of course all the companies producing MS Office documents who'd be interested in offering a cheaper solution but their customers probably have other solutions forcing them to go MS anyway. And really at the bottom of the ladder there are those who'd like a cheaper alternative to MS Office, but then they're usually on a tight budget and not interested in hiring people to fix software way outside their core business. Now if you could unseat Microsoft then yes I suppose they'd all together would be enough, but none of these are really rocking the chair as it is. To put it a little cynically, there's plenty money in being Microsoft but there's not so much money in replacing it with a free and open standard, then nobody really makes much money off basic office documents.

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  21. What Hapened to KHTML? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Does anyone know what happened to KHTML?

    1. Re:What Hapened to KHTML? by ninetyninebottles · · Score: 1

      Does anyone know what happened to KHTML?

      It is still the default in Konqueror although many users swap it out for Webkit. Kubuntu, probably the largest KDE distro, dropped Konqueror for a Webkit based alternative, so the KHTML fork of the code seems pretty close to dead from my perspective.

    2. Re:What Hapened to KHTML? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Stritcly speaking, WebKit is the fork. Credit where its due.

    3. Re:What Hapened to KHTML? by ninetyninebottles · · Score: 1

      Stritcly[sic] speaking, WebKit is the fork. Credit where its due.

      Strictly speaking, they're both forks of the same code. While some people use the term "fork" to try to indicate a spin off of a code base, that sort of connotation becomes really murky really fast. Is LibreOffice or OpenOffice the fork? It all depends upon your perspective. In truth, like forks in the road, when code diverges both divergent code bases are forks.

  22. Monoculture by Alain+Williams · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Much as I like the idea of competitors working together I do have a slight concern that a security flaw found will be exploitable on many platforms. OK: more developers working to kill bugs, but this code is large and complicated.

    1. Re:Monoculture by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I agree. I would much much rather have competing implementation of an open standard than a de-facto standard resulting from ubiquitous use of a single platform, a-la MS Office. I fear the open web is going to be history soon.

  23. a parallel view by burdickjp · · Score: 1

    This is a great example of how a market can work together to achieve a goal. I think this kind of collaboration should be encouraged by the state. Here's a similar example of how and how not to: In cameras there is a consortium which promotes a lens mount standard called four-thirds. A few companies have made cameras and lenses to fit it. More recently they made a standard called micro four-thirds. This is for mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras. Only Panasonic and Olympus have adopted it. Even so, a BUNCH of companies have now made similar cameras, all with different standards. Some companies have more than one standard for their MILCs! I understand each party has different goals, but some form of collaboration would be much better for the consumer, which is I guess my mistake. They don't care about consumers. They want you to buy their lenses and cameras and things.

  24. Errror in blurb by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    > Apple's Safari, Google's Chromium and Opera.

    Isn't Chromium the operating system?

    Should be "Chrome."

    1. Re:Errror in blurb by BitZtream · · Score: 2

      No, Chrome is the Google branded closed source version of Chromium, which is the open source browser tied to Chrome. ChromeOS is the OS.

      As is traditional of tech companies, the names they chose are confusing and retarded to anyone who doesn't follow tech religiously.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
    2. Re:Errror in blurb by pthisis · · Score: 2

      As noted, Chromium is the open-source browser project, Chrome is Google's branded version of that code (much as Netscape v6 and later and Mozilla were related).

      The bigger error in the article is calling Opera one of the 5 major browsers. The summary then links to a page that isn't overall browser share, but is only non-mobile browser share. When you stop cherry-picking data, it becomes clear that:

      a) There are only 4 major browsers; Firefox, Chrome, IE, and Safari all have about 10-30% of the market share, and nothing else has more than 5% share; and
      b) The 5th largest browser is the Android stock browser. Opera is at best the 6th biggest browser, with 3.2% of the market.

      --
      rage, rage against the dying of the light
    3. Re:Errror in blurb by jgb · · Score: 1

      You're right. Sorry for the error.

  25. Re:how a market can work together to achieve by TaoPhoenix · · Score: 1

    Since the Slashdot tradition is to apply caution to news-spin, here's my reply to your fair post.

    I certainly agree that if multiple companies can agree to work together on something like a rendering engine, they all share the cost savings. That's the easy part.

    Right now the blend of players is interesting - with Opera folding its efforts on Presto, the player mix is becoming "Them", who all that ever entails, Microsoft, and Mozilla. I wish Opera well but I never saw them as a "shaker" in the scuttle of the modern internet white water rapids. If either of the *other two* follow suit, then I think we'll see a real turbulent shift with an "odd man out" scenario.

    We can agree that companies can achieve neat cost savings with a single render engine. The usual curse of Ant-Trust is when they *then* decide to jam something into it that users can no longer escape from.

    --
    My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
  26. Re:Is there any reason by ninetyninebottles · · Score: 1

    The moment "everyone" goes to the same platform is the moment everything slows to a crawl or even a stop.

    I disagree. Monopoly, slows innovation to a halt, because there is no motivation to improve to gain share. Apple, Google, Opera, etc. still want to gain share from one another and they still need to advance Webkit to support those advancements in applications and services. The nature of copyleft prevents the normal monopoly issues (although patents can still introduce that problem).

  27. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 4, Funny

    Aww, you were only missing "synergy" to win Bullshit Bingo.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  28. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by BitZtream · · Score: 1

    Microsoft upgraded IE and caused all those IE6 sites to not work properly in newer versions of the browser so the issue had to be addressed regardless of outside influence.

    Microsoft killed IE6, not anyone else. It wasn't until Microsoft killed it that anything else changed.

    --
    Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
  29. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by Bearhouse · · Score: 1

    Mod up. This is really what we need - it would truly knock a big nail into MS Office's coffin.
    Not that I'm against either MS Office or indeed MS per se. Apple is just as bad.
    Goggle has progress to do; you can open a "pages" document in Google docs, but not then save it in another format.
    For the love of Christ, how hard can it be?

    I'm just so sick of trying to manage, and use, documents with needlessly opaque and complex formats.

    It's a losing strategy, but still a powerful one, "I own your data, because I own the format you create and store it in".

    People here froth at the mouth about personal data, but this is equally important. I have shitloads of files, in various formats, many proprietary, going back years. Please give me one ring to own them all, FOSS.

  30. Couple things to say on this... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    1 point others have noted, in "monoculture" (bad in ways, since it has parallels in 'the real world', ala diseases being like a grenade (in the disease here), that can take out a "single group" genetically for instance, whereas that isn't as possible in genetically varied groups as easily because of their having adaptations from diff. environments steering them to be 'different' & in some ways, better (or worse, conversely)).

    The other is my disappointment in a way, with Opera doing it... they have done SUCH A GREAT JOB on their own engine, & it shows in 12.14 (especially the 64-bit model which I use) - I just do NOT understand WHY they'd "drop the ball" on something they've worked on for many, Many, MANY years now, & have running excellently!

    (Then again - from what I understand, Mr. Hakom Lie (main dev of Opera iirc) is also on the standards board for the web, & perhaps HE even *thinks* it's "for the best" to even take a beating personally that way, giving up HIS motor/engine, so the "herd"/whole can gain from a SINGLE webplatform & engine that interprets it...)

    * Pure speculation, I have no "inside info." on this, but it's the ONLY way it makes sense (especially on my point on Opera's "latest/greatest" 12.14 build - probably the LAST we'll see on the actual original "opera motor/engine"!).

    APK

    P.S.=> On the "flip side" - I can see the "web boys" giving THIS move to a consolidated SINGLE display motor/engine for the web being great for them personally: Less "hassles" having to build sites for diff. browser engines & doing the "pre-flight check" on browsers hitting their sites in order to do so, etc./et al...

    ... apk

  31. Re:Is there any reason by allo · · Score: 1

    and the lgpl-part is, why companies like apple can use it without opensourcing their browser.

  32. Thank Apple. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Funny how it took Apple's work on creating webkit (as well as darwin, llvm, etc) to prove that an open source project can really make some amazing stuff. And yet you read slashdot any time and there is nothing but hatred for Apple, apparently hated for proving that open source can just work by being the first to build amazing and amazingly successful software on top of it. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, freetards.

    1. Re:Thank Apple. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Apple did not create Webkit. They just gave KHTML a new name, and started contributing some code. KHTML was as grassroots as an open source program can get. At the time, KDE critics were complaining about how we don't need another web rendering engine, since we have Netscape and stuff. Now everyone is glad that those critics were ignored.

  33. Re:Is there any reason by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The sheer fact that you call Gecko a "nasty hairball" shows how objective and impartial you are, and just how seriously you ought to be taken.

    Perhaps you could also contact Microsoft and tell them to working on the filthy dishrag that is Windows? Or contact Apple and tell them to stop wasting everyone's time on the.. uh, fetid dishwater that is OSX when they could just as easily contribute back to BSD?

    Translation: hey, I don't like Gecko, and I think that it would be better for Mozilla to dump something that has numerous advantages over the competition simply because I think my uneducated opinions mean something.

  34. That's not really involved though by SuperKendall · · Score: 0

    Just letting someone do what they want is not "involvement". Involvement is stopping someone from doing what they want, or making a choice for them.

    Mere support is not involvement.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  35. Now more browsers will fail the MathML Acid test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Now that Google has decided to remove MathML from Chrome 25, the MathML Acid Test will show which browser is doing the most for academic e-books.

  36. So the only way to remain an Opera fanboi is to by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    become a webkit apologist.

  37. Exactly how does this improve MathML? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Google just decided to remove MathML from Chrome 25, so much for "great competition and rapid evolution" for academic e-books.

    1. Re:Exactly how does this improve MathML? by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      Proved my point. Mozilla foundation should GPL KHTML (call it MozML?) and restore MathML.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    2. Re:Exactly how does this improve MathML? by RaceProUK · · Score: 1

      Google just decided to remove MathML from Chrome 25, so much for "great competition and rapid evolution" for academic e-books.

      Looks like it's going to be restored as part of WebKit though.

      --
      No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
    3. Re:Exactly how does this improve MathML? by RaceProUK · · Score: 1
      --
      No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
    4. Re:Exactly how does this improve MathML? by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      I feel better now

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  38. Re:Is there any reason by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

    The sheer fact that you call Gecko a "nasty hairball" shows how objective and impartial you are, and just how seriously you ought to be taken.

    The sheer fact that you do not understand that Gecko is a nasty hairball shows that you do not have the slightest clue about anything to do with software design, and nobody should take you seriously.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  39. Does it matter by Chuck+Chunder · · Score: 1

    Ie is there a practical difference between 30%, 50% and 90% of people's browsers being exploitable with a particular exploit? In any case it a phenomenally large number of people.

    --
    Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
  40. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

    There is nothing stopping you sending ODF files to MS Office users, they can open them just fine with any version of Office from the past five years.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  41. Re:Is there any reason by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

    Webkit is just a layout engine. Network operations, rendering and script execution is all handled by the browser, which should also be sandboxing the layout engine anyway. A flaw in Webkit shouldn't cause a major problem in a well designed browser.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  42. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by erroneus · · Score: 1

    Prolblem is a lot of businesses and individuals are still on 2007.

  43. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

    Do you HONESTLY think if only ODF would have been approved it would have made a damned bit of difference? Like them or hate them MSFT did get a few things right, one of them is MS Office. With LO it feels like what it is, a mish mash of separate programs bolted together that don't really belong together and for the longest time Writer was the only program that got any love, the rest didn't get squat comapred to Writer. with MS Office its an actual suite, with everything working together and honestly Excel and Access are pretty impressive in the amount of work you can do with them and the entire ecosystem that has built up around them.

    There are some places where FOSS got it right, browsers being a damned good example. Office Suites? Not so much. The other field where MSFT really doesn't have any competition of note is groupware which they also do REALLY well but frankly I don't know why MSFT wasted that money getting OpenDoc or whatever the hell its called pushed through because everybody has stuck with Doc(X) so neither ODF or OpenDoc really made a dent and when you compare the latest MS Office, hell MS Office 2K3 or 2K7 even to the latest LO you can see why, MS Office is the better product. I wish it weren't so because lord knows the market works better with real competition but LO is AMD to MSFT's Intel, they ain't even in the same ballpark.

    --
    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  44. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by erroneus · · Score: 2

    it is supposed to make a difference when government entities require that ISO standards are followed when possible and one exists for documents, that it should be used. So if/when government follows its own laws and policies, they would have to select software which utilizes an accepted ISO format. If Microsoft wasn't able to manipulate its way through, there would have been some really tough questions to answer.

    And let's be clear on how important an issue this is. We're talking about government record keeping. We are talking about file formats wihich should be able to stand the test of time... 10 years, 50 years, 100 years from now if documents are to be accessed, which format do you think would be most accessible? A clean and clearly defined spec (ODF) or an XML formatted memory dump (OOXML)?

    As for MS Office getting it right? Do you actually use MS Office? I more than use it, I support it so I get to identify and manage problems associated with its use. I encounter problems all the time... well not "all" the time, but often enough to keep me employed.

  45. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    He used a revolutionary, far-thinking communication style to avoid the pitfalls of hyper-implementing the term. Nice forward thinking, GP. Blast fax kudos all around!! (I would include an optimistic pie-chart ---it would even have rounded corners--- but there's no slashcode options for that.)

    -Sincerely, Marketing

  46. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by saleenS281 · · Score: 1

    IE had horrible issues with picking up viruses, and Microsoft let the application fester in it's own filth. Eventually it got to the point you couldn't browse the web with IE and not get a virus - "power user" or not. So Mozilla started picking up steam - then they added extensions which brought all this cool new functionality, and suddenly it caught on.

  47. Re:Is there any reason by kangsterizer · · Score: 1

    I don't know. I don't find webkit much better than gecko as a user. I mean, seriously, if you remove all the "webkit-only" websites, I don't see anything faster in chrome than in firefox. Sometimes I bench webgl out of curiosity (mainly because the other pages are all instant on both browsers), and some webgl demos are 2fps faster on one or the other.
    When I'm on Android, Firefox is actually noticeably faster than Chrome, for some reason (memory footprint maybe?).

    Thus, I'm not sure what the gain would be with webkit (minus being able to load webkit-only sites). Easier multiprocessing, yes, but it doesn't seem to be that much of a big deal. Firefox has as much or as little security issues as Chrome, and it crashes as rarely (if not more rarely in fact.. i'm pretty sure my chrome crashes/freezes/what not more often, since Firefox virtually never does).

  48. Re:Is there any reason by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The nature of copyleft prevents the normal monopoly issues (although patents can still introduce that problem).

    Except WebKit isn't copyleft. Actually, most software that runs the web isn't. Front-end stuff? Almost always MIT-licensed. Back-end? Apache, nginx, PostgreSQL, *BSD, memcached, nodejs, lighttpd, redis, Varnish, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby... yeah, none of it is copyleft.

    Stallman has done well in convincing the gullible that we need a long, complicated license to ensure companies "give back," but it's obviously not the case.

  49. Re:Is there any reason by ninetyninebottles · · Score: 1

    Except WebKit isn't copyleft.

    The core components are LGPL, which means if it is distributed contributions have to be submitted back. That's pretty copyleft in my book, in fact it is about the most copyleft license I know of that is practical for a library that the developers want to be widely used.

  50. Re:how a market can work together to achieve by burdickjp · · Score: 1

    I believe an XKCD is appropriate here: http://www.xkcd.com/1118/

  51. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

    But your OWN ARGUMENT makes no damned sense! If its for "record keeping" why in the fuck would you use an ALTERABLE format at all, unless you want to selectively "change" anything you don't like down the road? We DO have this thing called PDFs you know, we have the specs to several revs of PDF and frankly a bazillion companies make basic PDF readers that will run on just about any damned thing with a screen and a CPU, so why in the hell use ANY alterable format?

    And YES I use MS Office, I have MS Office 2K installed on my 64bit netbook (I like how light it is and it supports the latest formats with the converter pack) and 2K7 on the desktop and they run great. More importantly I have probably 200 business customers using MS office RIGHT NOW and frankly its one of the most hassle free pieces of software there is. i get a dozen times more calls for support because their browser broke than I do over any MS Office problems, its frankly a damned good piece of software....which is both a blessing and a curse for MSFT because I don't know a single customer who has moved beyond 2K7 yet, they are happy and it does what they want so why buy the latest and greatest?

    --
    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  52. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

    2007 supports ODF. I should have said 6 years.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  53. It's not all wine and roses by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Webkit is riven with architectural compromises, technical debt, lousy infrastructure, competing corporate agendas, mistrust and factionalism that will probably destroy it sooner or later. This recent post on the Webkit dev mailing list is illuminating. Eric Seidel is an almost-decade-long contributor to Webkit, both as an Apple and Google employee, and he has a laundry list of problems with the Webkit project. Perhaps most telling is that there is almost no trust between Google and Apple, with each having developed an "us" and "them" attitude, and also that there is essentially no management of the project's overall direction. Contributors just work on what they want, when they want, without telling anyone else, and the first and only way their supposed collaborators hear about it is by seeing changesets show up in the Webkit trunk.

    Here's another Webkit dev post by Google employee Adam Barth, regarding Apple's attempts to upstream its iOS Webkit port, which for the duration of iOS's existence has been Apple-internal. It's pretty illustrative of the level of discourse between Google and Apple on Webkit:

    I don't really know how to respond to this thread. I feel like I'm being offered the following choice: 1) Give up the ability to have technical input to how WebCore works and simply accept all the design choices made in the iOS fork, whether they be good choices or bad. 2) Keep the iOS port in an Apple-internal fork for a number of years. I feel like I'm being asked to make this choice in the context of a growing trend of unilateral action by Apple in this project. Given that trend, I don't see how I can choose option (1). As much as I would like the iOS port merged into trunk, I'm not willing to give up having a technical say in the project. Therefore, reluctantly, I'm forced to choose option (2).

    "A growing trend of unilateral action" does not seem like a healthy place for a collaborative project of this sort to be in. I get the impression that these kind of conflicts are become more common not less, as Google and Apple compete more strongly and openly, and their patience with each other runs out.

    In fact, in some respects, Google and Apple already maintain their own forks of Webkit, albeit stored under the same source tree. How does that work? Well every feature that is implemented in Webkit nowadays is done behind what is called a feature flag. This means it can be turned on or off in a particular Webkit port at compile time. The set of features enabled by Google's Webkit ports (in Chrome and Android), differs wildly from those enabled in Apple's ports (in iOS and Safari), but basically can be summed up as, Google uses features developed by Google, and Apple uses features developed by Apple, with just occasional crossover. This means anything you read about "Webkit browsers" is meaningless, because one Webkit browser can be totally different from another in capability, even if it was compiled from the same source.

    This situation, coupled with the apparent nightmare they have encountered trying to construct infrastructure to support building and testing Webkit, makes you suspect each will eventually conclude the diminishing benefits of shared labor are not worth the myriad headaches and loss of control, and go their separate ways. They'll maintain separate trees, with occasional cherry picking of features from each other, but also growing incompatibility as each pursues their own independent vision.

  54. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by Seeteufel · · Score: 1

    That was true 5 years ago but the situation is completely different now and Libreoffice got a massive coding productivity boost.

  55. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by Seeteufel · · Score: 1

    The treath is as follow, throw 300 Million on LO development and Microsoft's cash cow is dead. A marketing campaign costs probably the same money. That shows the potential.

  56. I *think* I'll "stick by" Opera "PRESTO" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    For as long as I can actually - I've been using this browser for ages is why, & like it a LOT along with many others worldwide!

    (After all - It consistently "led the pack" in terms of speed for years (most of last decade) in both straight HTML processing & even Javascript processing (until Mozilla/FireFox built up their engines for it better, & Chrome too - this is just heading into exploits FASTER though, imo @ least, but it's based on fact since javascript's one of the "main delivery mechanisms" for malicious code online)).

    * Will I try the new "WebKit" based builds? Sure... why not!

    (Question is - will I remain by them is all... The "Presto" engine's been very good to me & others for ages now, in both speed + security, & until it shows a security flaw that isn't patched? I will most likely continue using it, until patches stop for it, in regards to security online especially...)

    APK

    P.S.=> Anyhow/Anyways - "there ya go"!

    ... apk

    1. Re:I *think* I'll "stick by" Opera "PRESTO" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Was that P.S. really necessary?

    2. Re:I *think* I'll "stick by" Opera "PRESTO" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Was that off topic comment from you really necessary?

  57. Why are you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    so dumb?

  58. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by RaceProUK · · Score: 1

    You can go back farther than that - http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/download.html

    --
    No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
  59. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by RaceProUK · · Score: 1

    Actually, scratch that - not sure that's exactly right.

    --
    No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
  60. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by erroneus · · Score: 1

    Every format is alterable. Every format.

    I think you lack experience in this area. I personally work for a company which requires government interfacing and all of the strict standards and polocies associated. Yes, some archiving does require PDF/A. However there are other forms of data which are best stored in a more accessible format. Often times, the government requires both PDF and the original format simultaneously.

    But what would be a likely reason for needing the original source document? Lots. Verification/validation, for starters but also, data extraction for other purposes as well.

    As much as you would like to believe otherwise, Microsoft, the currently "too big to fail" entity, is still a company whose command over the market is subject to change just as Word Perfect once owned that market leaving [especially] the legal business which was heavily entrenched in work perfect from way back to manage a difficult situation as everyone ELSE was using MS Word while the courts and other legal offices used WP for the longest time... some still do! And the reason? Backwards compatibility and the ability to read those documents properly. Word has the option to read the WP formats but...it isn't always correct enough for the legal trade.

  61. Re:Is there any reason by VisceralLogic · · Score: 1

    and the lgpl-part is, why companies like apple can use it without opensourcing their browser.

    And also, perhaps, the reason they use and improve the open source part.

    --
    Stop! Dremel time!
  62. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

    Use RTF then, hell use .TXT if all you need is the raw data, the point is making an office format "open" isn't a magic bullet and makes no God damned sense. And frankly the current state of affairs proves it...how many offices you see using ODF? I don't see any, I see yet another failed format that nobody cares about.

    I think the problem is what people SAY they want and what they ACTUALLY want are often two different things, as many a company has found out the hard way. Anybody who dreamed of juicy government contracts for converting to ODF has gotten a rude awakening by now and I bet if one were to take a survey that ODF wouldn't even crack 5% and neither would opendoc. Just because MSFT rammed through their little format so they could have a bullet point on the box didn't make ODF disappear ya know, its still free to use, its just nobody is using it because we already HAD formats that could do the job they said ODF was required for and the infrastructure was already built so why switch?

    --
    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.