Just out of curiosity, why do you think WebKit2 is the "standard"? Just because they named it "WebKit2"? Had Google named their multi-process version "WebKitB" would it be equally standard? It certainly came FIRST (I think it took WebKit2 years before it had an answer).
I think this is a success of open source. Was the creation of WebKit a failure of Mozilla open source? Of course not. Sometimes you need to just actually test two ideas instead of discussing them.
EDIT: Upon further inspection, I think current Safari isn't even using WebKit2. The wiki still says it should be considered a "technology demo", and exists largely in parallel to WebKit. So whatever multi-process thing its doing now I guess is separate? It's not clear to me.
EDIT 2: I guess it is using WebKit2, so my criticisms stand.
I don't know all the history here, but my understanding is that Chrome's engine was never offered in that same sort of way. It was just part of the chromium project, apparently a part that increased the difficulty of integrating with WebKit, not an api intended to be taken by others and integrated into their browser.
It also means that the work they do on the rendering engine for Blink won't be constrained by the constraints imposed by support the various WebKit implementations.
Why is it sad for Chrome development not to be held back by WebKit when each project prefers a different approach?
Personally, I think its win-win: Chrome and WebKit, which have conflicting approaches to a variety of different issues, are free to take their own approaches and prove them. This is a good thing for progress.
> It's certainly not the argument that was made in this blog post, but it certainly is a believable one.
Its actually exactly what the post says when it says "However, Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation - so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit."
Forking happens all the time and is natural: good since you can go your own way, bad since you no longer contribute to the mainline. Its like speciation in that way, where some group of animals splits off and stops mating with (and hence evolving with) another group of animals.
Blink is open source, it's simply a fork of WebKit. That's why Opera is intending to use it instead of WebKit2. It's like Google wanted to take their ball to another court and still let everyone play.
That's in theory. In practice nobody bothered besides Apple.
That being said, I do like the way Safari "feels" a lot more than Chrome. I think Chrome is actually quite ugly, and bad from a UI perspective. For example, Safari's overflow tab menu is a much nicer solution than Chrome's insistence on shrinking tabs ever smaller until you can't tell them apart at all.
Additionally Chrome is missing a killer feature I use all the time: zoom, and more specifically, double tap to zoom. I find it hard to read a lot of text on websites, and double tap, centered, zoom, is amazing. Its too bad everything else feels like its gotten way worse in the last 5 or so years.
I also think Safari has a much better solution for handling bookmarking when you have multiple tabs. Solve these two issues and I'd switch to Chrome in a second.
I digress… :)
From Chrome://Flags-
Stacked Tabs Windows Tabs never shrink, instead they stack on top of each other when there is not enough space. Sorry, this experiment is not available on your platform.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autozoom/ocdkpkoao...
Double click to zoom seems like something that shouldn't be too hard to do in an extension.
Another example, I'm watching an embedded YouTube video which thus annoyingly doesn't allow fullscreen, so I double tap it, and it fills the browser window, and it seems to be smart enough to render at correct resolution at that scale (since it still allows you to choose a higher resolution even though it won't full screen).
To do similar feats with Chrome I have to manually jigger things around.
Chrome doesn't have the same incentives to get that particular machine working well, especially since the next revision of the Retina Macbook probably won't even need special handling since it will surely have a more powerful GPU. They can just wait it out, similar to what happened with the iPad 3 vs iPad 4, where people had to optimize for the iPad 3 and then those optimizations were unneeded on the iPad 4.
Actually, they "merely" leverage their platform by using CoreAnimation, making it GPU accelerated (and enabling pinch-to-zoom), while Chrome scrolling hits the CPU really hard.
Chrome is even starting to drop native dialog boxes
Also note that the timing is fairly important: Chromium was quite far along with our implementation when WebKit2 was announced, and rather than iterating on the solution we'd proposed and run with, Apple created its own framework. That had advantages and disadvantages.
More generally, I'd point to the Content layer as a better integration point: Opera, for instance, is building on top of our multi-process architecture successfully. Chromium Embedded Framework (https://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/) is another example of how other projects can leverage the work we've done.
Before we wrote a single line of what would become WebKit2 we directly asked Google folks if they would be willing to contribute their multiprocess support back to WebKit, so that we could build on it. They said no.
At that point, our choices were to do a hostile fork of Chromium into the WebKit tree, write our own process model, or live with being single-process forever. (At the time, there wasn't really an API-stable layer of the Chromium stack that packaged the process support.)
Writing our own seemed like the least bad approach.
If Google had upstreamed their multiprocess support, we almost surely would have built on it. And history might have turned out differently.
I'd also add that I disagree with Mike about the architectures being really different. In fact, they are quite similar in broad strokes, but with many differences in details (and with the significant difference that the Chromium model isn't in WebKit per se).
I don't know if the contents of these conversations were ever shared with the whole Chrome team as som Chrome people seemed super surprised at our announcement.
It is true that when we announced our effort, it came with a rough working prototype and not just an empty directory. Basically because we did not know if we could do it until we tried.
BTW I am not trying to pick a fight here. I think mikewest's comment gave the impression that Apple built a multiprocess architecture out of cussedness or NIH. But that's not how it was.
Google had the right to make their choices and we had the right to make ours.
Yes, I'm aware of that, but the work had been underway for a long time and was about to be dropped by the time there was a real heads up. So the core of the architecture was already being frozen from a larger perspective.
>BTW I am not trying to pick a fight here. I think mikewest's comment gave the impression that Apple built a multiprocess architecture out of cussedness or NIH. But that's not how it was.
I don't interpret Mike's comments that way. Chromium's architecture was public and available, but we assumed it wasn't used because it didn't fit the needs of WebKit2. There's no malice in that. We designed Chromium from the beginning for SFI (as Adam tried to convey), and that incurs quite a bit of complexity. I'm comfortable that the divergence was simply a result of different needs. I just don't see how it could be presented as something malicious or anti-collaborative.
Are you aware of the earlier conversation that occurred before we wrote any lines of code or even had a name? Where we talked about the possibility of just using Chromium's model if Google was willing to contribute it back? I have mentioned it twice - maybe you overlooked those parts of my remarks.
> Chromium's architecture was public and available, but we assumed it wasn't used because it didn't fit the needs of WebKit2. There's no malice in that. We designed Chromium from the beginning for SFI (as Adam tried to convey), and that incurs quite a bit of complexity.
It had nothing to do with SFI (which wasn't brought up at the time) or complexity. It was for the reasons I stated upthread.
The Chromium code is all in a public repository and was already integrated into WebKit via Chrome's platform layer. Members of the Chrome team were also interested in helping better incorporate Chrome's model into WebKit. So, I must be misunderstanding you, because it seems like you're suggesting that you expected Chrome engineers to simply do all the work.
>It had nothing to do with SFI (which wasn't brought up at the time) or complexity. It was for the reasons I stated upthread.
I still don't get what that reason is supposed to be. Regardless, the resulting WebKit2 design was clearly incompatible with the existing Chrome architecture. And the fact that they were continuing to diverge and place a burden on both projects was a clear problem. This was raised repeatedly, but never seemed to receive any serious consideration.
I regret that this thread has turned into such a back-and-forth. It's not my goal to detract from the Blink announcement. I feel like it would be rude to leave you hanging on mid-thread. However, I feel like: (a) You are trying to argue with my version of specific events where I was present in person and you (as far as I recall) were not. (b) You are trying to argue with my stated motivations for decisions that I was part of and you were not. (c) You seem to want to assign blame.
Maybe my impressions are wrong. But given this, I find it hard to reply in a way that would be constructive and would not further escalate. I hope you will forgive me for not debating about it further.
In light of this, your initial "if Google had only upstreamed their multiprocess support...we almost surely" and reiterations on this point within the thread do seem a bit like PR sleight of hand, since out of context it implies willingness to do so was the only issue on their part.
2) My recollection is that we talked about it around a year after Chrome was released. Chrome Beta release date: September 2, 2008 Date of WebKit2 announcement: Thu Apr 8, 2010 (after <1 year of development) I don't have records of the meetings where we walked though.
3) Does the reason for saying no affect whether our choice to make our own thing was reasonable?
This is somewhat moot with 1) and 2) being the case (or at the very least strongly perceived to be the case on your side). At any rate neither side being able to settle on a single version of events signals a communication problem, which makes the whole value of this hypothetical joint undertaking fuzzy anyway.
Nah, you're not misunderstanding, Apple/WebKit has a track record of doing this.
To be clear, I do not consider Blink to be a hostile fork. I wish the Blink developers good luck & godspeed.
As long as the license allows it and the maintainer is not burdened in any way, no?
Compare to forking to solve a very specific or specialized problem that doesn't make sense to merge upstream, like a set of changes that only apply to a very narrow audience or esoteric use-case. In such a case, it's common that changes that do affect the main project are still merged upstream and special care is done to make sure the forks don't diverge too much.
I always believed (hoped) you guys would never be corrupted and do the right thing for the world and not be swayed by organizational affinities / commercial gains.
You have a greater responsibility than to your company or country to keep the web open.
Think on that before you have a further public 'kiddy debate' on she said / he said and throwing the rattle out of the pram.
Disappointed.
I don't know much of this history, but was integrating Chrome's processor model into WebKit feasible at the time that WebKit2 was built? What were the reasons for not doing so?
The position we're taking is that the Content layer (in Chromium) is the right place to hook into the system: http://www.chromium.org/developers/content-module That's where we've drawn the boundary between the embeddable bits and the Chrome and browser-specific bits.
Regarding the history, I'd suggest adding some questions to the Moderator for tomorrow's video Q/A: http://google.com/moderator/#15/e=20ac1d&t=20ac1d.40&... The folks answering questions there were around right at the beginning... I only hopped on board ~2.5 years ago. :)
Actually, they didn't say that the pain of maintaining their own work was too much of a burden, they said the pain of maintaining their model within the constraints and obligations WebKit had was too much of a burden (and, imposed too much of a burden on WebKit with regard to what WebKit wanted to do), so they decided fork so that WebKit can do what it wants to do without worrying about Chrome while Blink does what is needed for Chrome without worrying about WebKit.
> Why can't Chrome implement WebKit 2?
Implementing WebKit 2 wouldn't solve the problem going forward. Changes to WebKit to serve Chrome's needs would still have to meet all of the commitments WebKit has, and Chrome would still be placing demands on WebKit.
> This seems like a failure of open source.
Forking isn't failure. The purpose of open source isn't to create a monoculture, it is to enable groups to share effort when they have common goals, and to allow groups with divergent goals (including where those goals diverged after a period of shared work) to continue to benefit from the shared work without having to start back at square one. This is a success of open source.
For a cross-platform project, this is a stunning policy change. I don't know what was the chicken and what was the egg, but it looks like this split was inevitable.
I've always found it curious that open-source advocates rail on people that fork or split from projects instead of maintaining code that they believe isn't worth maintaining.
1. Google builds new process architecture into Chromium.
1a. Apple asks for it to be contributed back to Webkit.
1b. Google either says "no" or doesn't care but expects Apple to do all the work (note that if Google doesn't do it then this would mean the same functionality being implemented at two different points in the code tree -- webkit and chromium)
2. Apple decides to build its own multiprocess support into Webkit2.
Seems to me that the forking is probably overall a Good Thing, no-one is angry at anybody else, it's just a very important codebase which now has way too many stakeholders.
1. Google builds a new process architecture into Chrome as a product differentiator. (It was a major part of Chrome's initial marketing)
2. WebKit 2 is built (mostly by Apple?) to bake the same type of architecture straight into the core framework -- anyone using WebKit can use it and get the same security/stability benefits.[1]
3. Google says that the pain in maintaining their separate, non standard, process architecture is too much of a burden to continue to contribute into WebKit proper, so they must fork.
Why can't Chrome implement WebKit 2? Are there major advantages to Chrome's process model that are not present in WebKit 2? Is there a reason why WebKit 2 cannot be patched to provide those advantages?
This seems like a failure of open source.
[1]: see the first paragraph on http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2