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
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.