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WebKit Developers Discuss Removal of Google-Specific Code

Posted by Soulskill on from the cleaning-house dept.

hypnosec writes "WebKit developers have already started discussing the removal of Chrome- and Chromium-specific code from the rendering engine in a bid to make the code easier to maintain. Just a couple of days back, Google announced it will go ahead with a WebKit fork to develop a new browser engine — Blink. According to Google, having multiple rendering engines — just like multiple browsers — will allow for innovation as well as contribute toward a healthy open-web ecosystem. The discussion was started by Geoffery Garen, an Apple WebKit developer. He said Google's departure is an 'opportunity to streamline' the code of WebKit, which would eventually make development 'easier and more coherent for everyone.' Garen expects that developers who will be working on WebKit in the future should help to clean up the code. However, Adam Barth and Eric Seidel — two Google WebKit developers — have already offered their help." Google plans on making the switch to Blink in the stable Chrome release in around 10 weeks. They've posted a half-hour video explaining how the transition will work.

3 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. On the Origin of Species by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't see why people get so scared of forking code. Differentiation and species drift happens in nature all the time, and a code-base that tries to fit too many different requirements is awful to maintain (and also unstable).

  2. Know your audience. by RivenAleem · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The "how the transition works" video will be for people interested in how the transition works, not a regular user. Your comment is like saying a 30 minute video on "how the internal combustions engine works" is a pointless exercise, because the regular driver just wants it to work

  3. Re:So... by KugelKurt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Google is evil according to all the whiny bitches on here for Forking Webkit into Blink. So just how horrifically evil is Apple for forking KHTML into Webkit?

    Actually Apple at that time was a pretty bad FOSS citizen. People campaigned to Apple to rethink the way it does development and that resulted in a vendor-neutral development home for WebKit. These days KDE is a happy user of WebKit.

    Google now repeating Apple's past mistakes is not so great. 2 wrongs don't make 1 right, as they say.