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."

Comments

Companies can work together just fine...

[mwvdlee]

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

Re:Companies can work together just fine...

[Grond]

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.

Re:Companies can work together just fine...

[blacklint]

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.

Re:Companies can work together just fine...

[Grond]

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.

Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite

[erroneus]

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.

Re:Is there any reason

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite

[Xemu]

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 .

... so long as it meets their interests

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite

[wonkey_monkey]

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