To the extent that "whatever WebKit does" gets defined as "whatever ugly, lowest-common-denominator thing that works in the stock Gingerbread browser" that might help other rendering engines stay in the race. In other words, legacy Android browsers might help by slowing down the spread of new WebKit-specific features (that they also don't support).

Yes, but only on WebKit-derivates. To use your analogy, it's sort of like trying to make better dinosaurs and deciding that we might as give up on apes at this point, because they don't seem as powerful and get eaten by the dinosaurs anyway.

Well, that's how evolution works. Some species DO get extinguished.

This Opera species wasn't adaptive enough.

If we want web engine evolution happening somebody should build a BETTER than Webkit engine (e.g the Mozilla Rust/Servo team).

Keeping not-that-good engines for the sake of "competition" is not evolution, it's life in "life support".

Yeah, and I'm pointing out it's the ones with more hope for the future, rather than the ones that are obviously doomed in the very long run.

If we want web engine evolution happening somebody should build a BETTER than Webkit engine

Yes, and as already explained, this will become near-impossible if there is no standard, but just a bunch of webpages that need the renderer to do "whatever WebKit does".

A big factor in Operas decision was already that for mobile webpages, any renderer that isn't WebKit is already dead. Not that they thought their own engine sucked.

This is stopping evolution, not helping it.

>>Yeah, and I'm pointing out it's the ones with more hope for the future, rather than the ones that are obviously doomed in the very long run.

I don't understand what this means. If you want to use evolution as an analogy, you should accept the fact the those that get extinguished were simply inferior to adapt and LESS "hope for the future".

>Yes, and as already explained, this will become near-impossible if there is no standard, but just a bunch of webpages that need the renderer to do "whatever WebKit does".

We got the Canvas and AJAX DESPITE the standard (one from Apple, the other from MS) not because of it. Those were only standardised after the fact.

Contrary to what you claim, evolution doesn't play well with standards -- then you wouldn't have competition, just some committee deciding what the spec should be and several implementations. Implementing the same predetermined spec is hardly "evolutionary".

>A big factor in Operas decision was already that for mobile webpages, any renderer that isn't WebKit is already dead. Not that they thought their own engine sucked.

Well, it kind of helped that it also kind of did suck. Opera was forever dragging behind the other engines.

Not at all, it's a phenomenon called "getting stuck in a local optimum" (as opposed to the global one).

Contrary to what you claim, evolution doesn't play well with standards -- then you wouldn't have competition, just some committee deciding what the spec should be and several implementations. Implementing the same predetermined spec is hardly "evolutionary".

You seem to have an incorrect understanding of how W3C standards appear. Browsers implement a new feature (through prefixing), often competitively, and if it's considered generally useful the browser vendors get together and try to agree on a common API that is most useful and sane. After a while the prefix goes away and the standardized API is used. There's been some complaints about WebKit refusing to do the latter, which surely is a contributing factor to Opera's decision.

Without this common API, you'd have no chance in implementing the same features independently. Without vendor competition, there's no incentive to standardize the API, which precludes future competition.

The current web and especially WebKit itself thank their existence to such a spec.

In the case of canvas, not really. Apple created canvas for Dashboard widgets. Were it not standardized, canvas would never have been a web technology.

How does one follow from the other? Technical monopolies are good if they're opensourced? I couldn't disagree with this more strongly.

If both of those companies are working on the same product, then it might follow that 2X units of effort would lead to the implementation of feature Y and feature Z. Or that feature Y is implemented in less time.

It depends a lot upon the talent of the people involved, their past experience, their knowledge, and so forth. It also depends on the systems in question.

The amount of effort needed to build some particular functionality can vary immensely between two experienced developers working for the same organization on the same system. It usually varies even more so when multiple organizations are involved, or multiple systems are involved.

As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, a WebKit monoculture will stifle technical innovation in web rendering engines, because they'll be constrained with being (bug-)compatible with WebKit.

webkit routinely gets breaking changes, it was never constrained because of compatibility concerns over non-standard features. Wouldn't having a load of developers in different environments, working on the same codebase actually accelerate innovation? Something could go from W3C/WHATWG draft to implementation in a matter of weeks, then we wouldn't have things like css3 gradients or flexbox syntax changing completely after years prefixed in the wild.

Seriously? You should go read the www-style archives or public-html archives or the relevant W3C bug databases sometimes for all the things the WebKit folks refused to implement (and still do) precisely because of such concerns.

> accelerate innovation?

Innovation and feature addition are not the same thing.

Please explain to me how building a rendering engine that scales well to 64 cores would be accelerated by starting with WebKit as a base, for example.

I don't know enough about the webkit architecture to say anything, but I guess it wouldn't be any faster if it started with Presto.

So my point wasn't that one would build such a UA by starting with Presto. My point was that there are distinct advantages to competition over everyone using the same rendering engine.

Real innovation is far more drastic and disruptive. When it comes along, it often meets heavy resistance from those who are entrenched, especially when these people may not benefit from it. This is true even within open source projects. Unorthodox ideas will often be brutally crushed, even if the benefits they provide are immense.

So the question is is a fork "true" competition or more of a "suggestion" for a feature change?

Or to put it another way, instead of evolution happening (as in the best win and the worst die) we now have a situation where the winners and losers are decided by subjective individuals (i.e. some project manager somewhere decides to import a forked branch back into their main branch).

In the case of web rendering engines, for example, I don't see "evolution" getting us to a rendering engine that can usefully parallelize over, say, 64 cores starting from the engines we have right now. And monoculture would ensure that we never get there.

I think this is right on for Opera, it has always set itself apart by it's usability and features and I think browsers need to get innovating more on that front.

This is fine if we agree here and now in 2013 that WebKit is the only rendering engine we'll ever need.

That just doesn't seem like a smart bet to make. Opera was in some ways better than the WebKit browsers on mobile devices, except for broken Webkit only sites. That ain't going to get better now.

For example today I just browsed my Internet provider's customer area. Their online invoicing page only works on Firefox and IE7, but not IE8, IE9, Opera and Chrome. Urgh.

But a de facto standard (ie one defined by a popular implementation) forces sites to be compatible or be ignored. More monolithic standard => stronger coding conventions => more robust web. Or am I being totally idealistic?

Robustness often comes from the opposite approach. It's the willingness to throw out ideas and code that are observed to be broken. Replacing JavaScript with a more sensible scripting language like Lua or Python would increase the robustness of the web, while standardizing it further only entrenches the problem deeper.

I call on your "no need to rehash it here." Without even one good example, I'd say you're just trying to be elitist.

Let me help set you on the right path. Google for "javascript semicolon insertion". After reading about it, it should be very apparent to you how it's a very large flaw with the language, and how it can be extremely harmful.

Do some research into JavaScript's equality operators. Any good programmer will be sick to his or her stomach after reading about how broken such basic, yet essential, functionality like that is.

And that's just the start, my friend. I encourage you to do further research on your own. You'll find no shortage of serious issues to learn more about.

No, it's totally the opposite. They only have to be "compatible" with this one implementation, and are free to rely on all implementation-specific bugs or implementation defined behavior when doing so.

Think IE box model around the IE5/6 age. Or hell, supporting Office Documents. Even if you'd have the source, being compatible certainly wouldn't have gotten much easier.

Note that WebKit is open source and Opera is having problems being bug-compatible with it.

Although there is a chance here for the -prefix-rabbit-hole to yawn wide, there's also an opportunity for a (nearly-)universally-supported rendering engine to emerge that could, one day, get into bed with the standards committee. Surely this would be a good endgame for the browser wars?

Note that coding to an implementation rather than a standard does stifle innovation, because when you code to target the implementation you inevitably rely on bugs in the implementation, without ever knowing or trying to. From the perspective of an implementor, would you fix a bug even if it meant breaking an unknowably large number of websites? If not, you've adopted that bug for the rest of time, and every subsequent implementation, ever, will be forced to implement the bug as well when they could be busy implementing new features. Now compound this by thousands of bugs, and reflect on all the time spent implementing Quirks Mode in every browser engine that exists today.

I do agree with you that in a perfect world we wouldn't need multiple implementations, because bugs would not exist and the lone implementation would track the standard perfectly, and because the standard would be controlled by neutral third-parties. But I think it's much too soon to declare the current era the browser endgame.

Don't forget that on mobile platforms, not including Windows Phone, WebKit is already the standard engine. Safari, Android's stock browser and Chrome all use WebKit and developing for mobile is a ghetto, especially because each version has their own quirks and bugs (and there are dozens of Android stock browser variations in active use at any given time).

WebKit can be maintained, forked etc as the world pleases.

I agree that if there is to be a rendering engine monoculture, it might as well be open source, but that in itself guarantees nothing.

Even today, mobile users typically account for only about 10% to 15% of a site's traffic, for sites that don't directly target mobile users. Mobile just isn't as important or widespread as a lot of people think it is.

Their February 2013 results are at: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-monthly-2013...

It gives a good sense of the current situation. Mobile browser usage is under 15%. It's nothing compared to the usage of desktop browsers. The growth from 2011 and 2012 isn't even that impressive, given the all of the hype and attention surrounding mobile.

  > WebKit is open source, so anyone can fork it and build 
  > their own version with any fixes or changes they like.

So now you have a fixed WebKit that nobody else uses.

It's about the same as when you start at a company with a large existing codebase. You're not going to get much done until you've read and understand the chunks of the code that relate to what you need to do. This spinup time is definitely bigger than the hour it can take to fix a bug in a small project that you previously had no experience with, but it's definitely within the realm of the possible.

  > Imagine what will happen if there are no competitor and
  > webkit core engineers do whatever they want and still
  > people use their engine.

EDIT -- from http://wtfjs.com:

parseInt('06'); // 6

parseInt('08'); // 0

Your language is bad, and you should feel bad.

  strtol("06", NULL, 8);  //6
  strtol("08", NULL, 8);  //0

Javascript was bad for making that design decision in 1995, when nobody seriously used octal for anything, so the leading zero was vastly more likely to introduce a class of WTF bugs instead.

Sure you can. Read the Fine manual: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript/Referenc...

tldr: parseInt("08", 10);

    $ perl -le 'print 07'
    7
    $ perl -le 'print 08'
    Illegal octal digit '8' at -e line 1, at end of line
    Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
    $ python -c 'print 07'
    7
    $ python -c 'print 08'
      File "", line 1
        print 08
       	^
    SyntaxError: invalid token

> parseInt("08", 8);

returns 0 instead of NaN

    >>> parseInt("123foobar", 10)
    123

https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-December/...

parseInt('08', 10); // 8