WebKit had to be open source, because it was based on KHTML, which was LGPL-licensed. Apple had no choice there.

In in alternate universe Chrome would have adopted KHTML.

I don't know what shape you think KHTML was back in the day when Safari 1.0 shipped, but it was vastly different a few years of development work later by Apple.

It was decent. Being a Konqueror user before Safari came onto the scene, I'd argue it was the best browser around at the time. The work no doubt continued to improve as time moved forward, as software tends to.

Yup. I did some hacking on khtml before Apple's announcement in my attempt to make the early 2000s the year of the Linux desktop. To be fair, every browser engine was kind of a mess at that time because everyone was trying to reverse engineer IE (or gecko's) undocumented quirks.

The DOM implementation in khtml was particularly well done. I remember one of the major things Apple did was rewrite kjs (into JavaScriptCore), but from what I recall, it wasn't like they did a complete overhaul of khtml right away.

One thing to consider is that Apple, unlike the khtml project, had a lot more power to steer web standards and that tended to clean up browser impls.

It's a shame that Apple decided to have a pretty arcane development process for Webkit, it was not what people expected when they announced Webkit.

> It's a shame that Apple decided to have a pretty arcane development process for Webkit, it was not what people expected when they announced Webkit.

This is a fair point. I believe they milked the, "it's Open Source (Come on In!)" and then would periodically release diff blobs and wonder what else the common folk would possibly find wanting.

This is ultimately why WebKit was forked again into Blink. Because Apple is such a poor steward of open source and WebKit is absolutely riddled with bugs and incomplete implementations of web tech that are pretty much table stakes at this point (WebRTC, among other things). At this point I think most people agree that Safari is the worst mainstream browser in existence.

This is why Apple is met with groans instead of praise when their open source contributions come up.

Apple stole WebKit from KDE

It is not stealing when the license allows for it.

wasn't that just a fork of khtml. what exactly did apple do

Rewrote the entirety of it, added most of the new features for the web over more than a decade?

Or do you believe chromium is also “just a fork of khtml”?

yes they're all derived from the fork of khtml. is that what you're asking?

No, I was asking about "just a fork of khtml". That implies that there wasn't meaningful work. WebKit is at this point (and probably a decade ago) a functionally complete rewrite.

When webkit forked KHTML, KHTML couldn't render the vast majority of the top 100 websites properly, just by the time the first safari was released webkit was already able to render those correctly, or in many cases even usably.

When I say WK rendered correctly, I mean matching Firefox/Explorer, not just a bare "is useable".

Not saying you are wrong, but I remember that KHTML was the first renderer that was able to pass the ACID2 test. So this doesn't sound right to me