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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."
...just as long as you keep managers, marketeers, sales people and HR out of it.
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Why won't this arrangement work on an Office Suite?
That's the question.
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.
The moment "everyone" goes to the same platform is the moment everything slows to a crawl or even a stop.
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.
extinguish
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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)
*.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?
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
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.
We could call it... KHTML and make it a part of KDE!
However, to be fair, KHTML is actually LGPL.
Soon. Microsoft.
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.)
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
Aww, you were only missing "synergy" to win Bullshit Bingo.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
and the lgpl-part is, why companies like apple can use it without opensourcing their browser.
Hey genius, every platform is responsible for porting WebKit to their API needs and platform. It requires work.
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
You're right. Sorry for the error.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
Prolblem is a lot of businesses and individuals are still on 2007.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I believe an XKCD is appropriate here: http://www.xkcd.com/1118/
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.
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
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:
"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.
That was true 5 years ago but the situation is completely different now and Libreoffice got a massive coding productivity boost.
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.
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
Actually, scratch that - not sure that's exactly right.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
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
Not so fast - MathML's in WebKit already.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
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.
I feel better now
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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!
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.