WebKit? Should it be the future?

It seems like there are several WebKit based browsers out there, on PC and Cell Phone. WebKit is free and it is widely used, which means it is standard now.

Why develope everything for IE to compete WebKit? Why not just use WebKit as well? To be honest, not only using WebKit for IE saves money, time, and web developer adoption, but, there is a secondary effect, to kill WebKit. It doesn't sound logical, but I believe the day IE adopting WebKit is the begining of the end of WebKit. It is just a mentality community issue. Why develope IE in house when WebKit is the obvious easy path.

Actually I think IE should make it Open Source. It is not like it is making money anyway. And there are so many law suits by greedy EU.

blowdart said:

Because a homogenous/monolithic environment stifles creativity? Because having rivals is good for everyone?

Competing browsers has held the web back, not propelled it forward IMO.

If you have multiple implementations of everything you need to set standards. Standards committees take years to make decisions because everyone wants to have their little bit of influence. Meanwhile, none of the implementations meets the standards exactly which is a headache to content creation.

Having one rendering engine that tracked a more streamlined standards process would be better for everyone.

blowdart said:

rhm said:

*snip*

Oh yea. Because <blink> was a great idea. Having a dominant engine destroys the idea of standards and discussion, and we'd get the likes of google adding properitary stuff to the "standard" like they want to do with HTML5 to support their new toy.

WebKit has already added their own proprietary extensions in the same way that MS did (e.g. WebKit's better-than-IE-scrollbar styles). If every browser was webkit based I'd have to put up with lots of websites misusing this feature.

"To be honest, not only using WebKit for IE saves money, time, and web developer adoption, but, there is a secondary effect, to kill WebKit." That made absolutely no fucking sense.

rhm said:

blowdart said:

*snip*

Competing browsers has held the web back, not propelled it forward IMO.

If you have multiple implementations of everything you need to set standards. Standards committees take years to make decisions because everyone wants to have their little bit of influence. Meanwhile, none of the implementations meets the standards exactly which is a headache to content creation.

Having one rendering engine that tracked a more streamlined standards process would be better for everyone.

Competition is good.  Lack of competition is stifling.  Perhaps competition doesn't make things as good or as easy as they should or could be, but the alternative is worse.

joechung said:

"To be honest, not only using WebKit for IE saves money, time, and web developer adoption, but, there is a secondary effect, to kill WebKit." That made absolutely no fucking sense.

I think he meant "there is a secondary effect, to kill Safari/Firefox/Chrome" instead.

joechung said:

rhm said:

*snip*

Competition is good.  Lack of competition is stifling.  Perhaps competition doesn't make things as good or as easy as they should or could be, but the alternative is worse.

The thing is, competition is incompatible with standards. What we have at the moment is the web world trying to have it both ways. In the '90s you had browser implementers trying to add new stuff to compete. Then the competition is supposed to be to have the best standards compliance, but because this isn't sexy it's happened very slowly, and the problem is that the standards suck. I mean they really really suck hard.

There is a parallel for this situation from history: UNIX. Multiple proprietary implementations of an original concept, all with different diverging stuff added for competition reasons. Then an ineffectual, glacially slow, standards body creates standards they are all supposed to adhere to. In the end everyone switches to a single de facto open source implementation: Linux.

As an example of the other way to do it, take for example the establishment of the Jpeg file format as the standard for lossy image compression. Of course there's a standard for it, but very few people ever read it because along with the standard, the committee released a reference implementation that everyone could use royalty-free.

There's a chance for Webkit to become the Linux of HTML rendering engines. People are increasingly disappointed with the performance of Gecko (the engine used by Firefox). But of course there's also IE. Microsoft seem to think they have to own the technology behind IE, even though it doesn't work very well and MS don't have a penny from it.

I like that browsers are becoming interesting now, and I think proprietary extensions are fine, especially when you design them to be explicitely proprietary, such as with css properties that are prefixed with the programs name.

After all, without these, we wouldn't have things like canvas, content editable and various other things that are now part of new standards so all browsers can implement them.

IE8 was a good catch up, but its time the IE team stopped jizzing on about 'user features' like accelerators and added security, and actually started to do something interesting with IE.. why isn't IE one of the guys leading the way, as a result, IE is considered to be the bottom of the stack .. the 'dumb vanilla browser' whenever benchmarks of crap come up.. and thats unfair because in a lot of cases IE7 and IE8 are pretty good.. for example, firefox 3 (latest public release) is TERRIBLE at handling animations, it stutters and 'bugs out' often, where as IE6+ can run the animation perfectly fine.

I've got high hopes for the next IE, but I'm already getting worried that nothing has been said yet.. I feel browsers should be developed along with the developers that target them, and this should mean a good open discussion that is always there.. before IE8 even shipped it would be great that the IE team started talking to a community about what they wanted to do next, and asked them what they wanted most.. as well as talking with OTHER browser developers about the general direction of browser technology..

rhm said:

joechung said:

*snip*

The thing is, competition is incompatible with standards. What we have at the moment is the web world trying to have it both ways. In the '90s you had browser implementers trying to add new stuff to compete. Then the competition is supposed to be to have the best standards compliance, but because this isn't sexy it's happened very slowly, and the problem is that the standards suck. I mean they really really suck hard.

There is a parallel for this situation from history: UNIX. Multiple proprietary implementations of an original concept, all with different diverging stuff added for competition reasons. Then an ineffectual, glacially slow, standards body creates standards they are all supposed to adhere to. In the end everyone switches to a single de facto open source implementation: Linux.

As an example of the other way to do it, take for example the establishment of the Jpeg file format as the standard for lossy image compression. Of course there's a standard for it, but very few people ever read it because along with the standard, the committee released a reference implementation that everyone could use royalty-free.

There's a chance for Webkit to become the Linux of HTML rendering engines. People are increasingly disappointed with the performance of Gecko (the engine used by Firefox). But of course there's also IE. Microsoft seem to think they have to own the technology behind IE, even though it doesn't work very well and MS don't have a penny from it.

"Then an ineffectual, glacially slow, standards body creates standards they are all supposed to adhere to. In the end everyone switches to a single de facto open source implementation: Linux."

Oh, really? Many commercial Unix variants still exist, and drive many a corporate network. Then there's BSD and the commercial variant of it, OS X.  Linux is not a defacto standard any more than IE is.

And competition is HARDLY incompatible with standards.  Take language standards as an example.  C++ has a standard which has been pushed forward because of competition among compiler vendors.  Standards move slow.  That's a good thing, because it ensures what's standardized is well thought out.  Competition is what actually innovates and provides things for standards to consider.  That's a good thing, because without this new ideas would rarely be tried out.  It's a symbiotic existence, and frankly, having either without the other isn't such a great idea.

Microsoft can't "kill" Webkit, it's protected by the LGPL, it will forever stay open source.

rhm said:

joechung said:

*snip*

The thing is, competition is incompatible with standards. What we have at the moment is the web world trying to have it both ways. In the '90s you had browser implementers trying to add new stuff to compete. Then the competition is supposed to be to have the best standards compliance, but because this isn't sexy it's happened very slowly, and the problem is that the standards suck. I mean they really really suck hard.

There is a parallel for this situation from history: UNIX. Multiple proprietary implementations of an original concept, all with different diverging stuff added for competition reasons. Then an ineffectual, glacially slow, standards body creates standards they are all supposed to adhere to. In the end everyone switches to a single de facto open source implementation: Linux.

As an example of the other way to do it, take for example the establishment of the Jpeg file format as the standard for lossy image compression. Of course there's a standard for it, but very few people ever read it because along with the standard, the committee released a reference implementation that everyone could use royalty-free.

There's a chance for Webkit to become the Linux of HTML rendering engines. People are increasingly disappointed with the performance of Gecko (the engine used by Firefox). But of course there's also IE. Microsoft seem to think they have to own the technology behind IE, even though it doesn't work very well and MS don't have a penny from it.

rhm said:

There's a chance for Webkit to become the Linux of HTML rendering engines.

There's going to be 400 ever so slightly different versions of it, each incompatible with the next and each breaking in new and exciting ways with every update? Can't wait....

rhm said:

blowdart said:

*snip*

Competing browsers has held the web back, not propelled it forward IMO.

If you have multiple implementations of everything you need to set standards. Standards committees take years to make decisions because everyone wants to have their little bit of influence. Meanwhile, none of the implementations meets the standards exactly which is a headache to content creation.

Having one rendering engine that tracked a more streamlined standards process would be better for everyone.

well ....

"Competing browsers has held the web back, not propelled it forward IMO.

AndyC said:

rhm said:

*snip*

There's going to be 400 ever so slightly different versions of it, each incompatible with the next and each breaking in new and exciting ways with every update? Can't wait....

I'm not aware of any real problems with application compatability between different versions of Linux. And besides, I'm talking about the kernel, not the system as a whole. But I appreciate your snark.

wkempf said:

rhm said:

*snip*

"Then an ineffectual, glacially slow, standards body creates standards they are all supposed to adhere to. In the end everyone switches to a single de facto open source implementation: Linux."

Oh, really? Many commercial Unix variants still exist, and drive many a corporate network. Then there's BSD and the commercial variant of it, OS X.  Linux is not a defacto standard any more than IE is.

And competition is HARDLY incompatible with standards.  Take language standards as an example.  C++ has a standard which has been pushed forward because of competition among compiler vendors.  Standards move slow.  That's a good thing, because it ensures what's standardized is well thought out.  Competition is what actually innovates and provides things for standards to consider.  That's a good thing, because without this new ideas would rarely be tried out.  It's a symbiotic existence, and frankly, having either without the other isn't such a great idea.

Funny you should mention C++. I was tempted to raise C++ as another example of how the battle between competition and standards holds progress back.

C++ is 30 yeards old! Even if you consider that it didn't really get going until the late '80s, that still makes it 20 years old. And how much progress has it seen in that time? Very little. Compare with how much C# has developed in under 10 years as a result of being the product of one company. Even Java, which likes to be seen as standards based (even though the standards are controlled by Sun) has moved on a lot more.

Maybe the people that write C++ don't want it to change that much, which is fine, but then don't hold it up as an example of how standards and competition work in harmony for progress. They don't.

rhm said:

wkempf said:

*snip*

Funny you should mention C++. I was tempted to raise C++ as another example of how the battle between competition and standards holds progress back.

C++ is 30 yeards old! Even if you consider that it didn't really get going until the late '80s, that still makes it 20 years old. And how much progress has it seen in that time? Very little. Compare with how much C# has developed in under 10 years as a result of being the product of one company. Even Java, which likes to be seen as standards based (even though the standards are controlled by Sun) has moved on a lot more.

Maybe the people that write C++ don't want it to change that much, which is fine, but then don't hold it up as an example of how standards and competition work in harmony for progress. They don't.

As much as I love the .NET framework, you can't use it (or Java) as evidence that standards "hold things back".  Let's look at a few things here.

1. C#/.NET are standardized, with a standards body.  The standard does not match the progress of C#/.NET as provided by Microsoft, but that goes back to what I said about "competition" pushing standards (keeping in mind that this time, the competition isn't really other C# vendors).

2. While not really a standard, Java is updated through a process extremely similar to how standards are done with the JSR process.

3. What really makes both of these proceed so much quicker than C++ is a combination of (defacto) control by a single commercial entity, and it could be argued that many design mistakes have been made because of this.

C++ has actually progressed at a fairly decent rate, actually.  The next standard for C++ brings about a lot of changes to the core language (that many folks actually don't want or are concerned about, btw), not to mention a lot of new libraries.  It's a different kind of language than C# and Java, that requires a more conservative rate of change.  There's a lot to dislike about C++, and I'm glad I no longer live in that world, but I'm sorry, I can't agree with you here.  C++ is a stellar example of how standards SHOULD work.