WebKit Developers Discuss Removal of Google-Specific Code 92
hypnosec writes "WebKit developers have already started discussing the removal of Chrome- and Chromium-specific code from the rendering engine in a bid to make the code easier to maintain. Just a couple of days back, Google announced it will go ahead with a WebKit fork to develop a new browser engine — Blink. According to Google, having multiple rendering engines — just like multiple browsers — will allow for innovation as well as contribute toward a healthy open-web ecosystem. The discussion was started by Geoffery Garen, an Apple WebKit developer. He said Google's departure is an 'opportunity to streamline' the code of WebKit, which would eventually make development 'easier and more coherent for everyone.' Garen expects that developers who will be working on WebKit in the future should help to clean up the code. However, Adam Barth and Eric Seidel — two Google WebKit developers — have already offered their help."
Google plans on making the switch to Blink in the stable Chrome release in around 10 weeks. They've posted a half-hour video explaining how the transition will work.
Clean It Up Boys (Score:5, Interesting)
The removal of Chrome specific code from WebKit, and non-Chrome code from Blink will benefit everyone in the long run. Both code bases and rendering engines will be smaller, faster, less buggy, etc.
The down side to all this is checking code in another browser model as well as a different js debugger in Blink.
World Wide Web of Moving Targets
Re:On the Origin of Species (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, in this case Webkit is planning to drop V8 support. I'm kinda freaked out by the fact that Webkit apparently isn't script engine agnostic as it should be, but now all the incentive to make it such may be lost.
Forks in general tend to cause much duplication of effort, especially if both branches remain popular. Given enough time, fixes for one fork aren't obvious to implement in the other. You shouldn't really fork a project unless you cannot reach a peaceful decision.
In this case however, Google just didn't want to contribute to the new Webkit2 with generalised multi-process support, because that would make it easy to develop a multi-process browser, which just happened to be Chrome's main selling point.
The Webkit folks made the right technical decision, Google made the right marketing decision. A fork was inevitable, sadly.