The web is not open and becoming increasingly less so.<p>People love to talk about how the web is about open standards and such, but it really is rather quite closed.<p>It's driven less by standards and more by de-facto implementations. Soon we can get rid of the standards committee and just talk to the implementers of webkit to define the "standard".<p>And I think even worse has been the wholesale discounting of plugins. I still strongly believe that being tied to JavaScript as really the only client side language is a mistake. It's not a great IL and limiting the language for such a pervasive platform is scary. I powerful plugin model would be, IMO, one of the best things to a truly powerful web.<p>I wish the web was more open. I wish that browsers were a truly extensible runtime that specified lower level abstractions, that allowed more innovation at the top of the stack.<p>It feels like we're walking into the dark age of the internet.
I don't disagree but I also see it more as WebKit as the "Linux kernel" of browser engines. Safari and Chrome both use WebKit but are very different in what they offer.. so they're like the Ubuntu and RedHat.<p>Is it a bad thing that AIX and Solaris fell by the wayside in a rush to Linux? I don't think so. So neither should adopting WebKit as a sort of common kernel in browsers, IMHO. But that's all it is.. MHO ;-)
I disagree with much of this article.<p>> as a contributor to WebKit you have the complete ability to drive it in a direction you wish (often for the better)<p>Not really. Follow the internal WebKit politics and you see a lot of conflicts. For example, Google wanted to push multi-VM support (for Dart) and Apple blocked that.<p>> WebKit is already a de facto standard<p>On <i>mobile</i>. Mobile isn't everything.<p>Also, should we have said "ie6 is already a de factor standard and given up"?<p>> I think one this is clear already: WebKit has completely and unequivocally won mobile at this point. They are nearly the only rendering engine used on the vast majority of mobile browsers, including the soon-to-switch Opera Mini/Mobile browsers too. There is no reason to worry about a slippery slope, the slope has already been slid down. In order for any other browser to remain relevant in the world of mobile (which, you must admit, is quickly becoming the only world we live in) they must keep feature parity with WebKit.<p>Again, this is utterly defeatist. Even if it were 99% true, should everyone give up?<p>> At this point it’s honestly a business/engineering decision for Mozilla and Microsoft (as it always has been).<p>No, Mozilla is a nonprofit and the decision would also regard whether it is <i>good for the web, or not</i>. I'm surprised to see John Resig not realize that - he used to work at Mozilla.<p>edit: And regarding the main point: jQuery worked in a space that was not standards-based. There were multiple JS libraries, and they fought for market share. No one tried to develop a standard that there would be multiple implementations for. Comparing jQuery to WebKit is odd.
<p><pre><code> In the case of JavaScript libraries virtually everyone has
standardized upon jQuery at this point.
</code></pre>
This guy really lives on his own planet. Maybe most websites that only need to add a small piece of JS functionality are using jQuery, but I seriously doubt that "virtually everyone" writing large JS projects is using jQuery. Google Closure Tools, Sencha/ExtJS, and MooTools remain quite popular, and a host of developers are skipping compatibility layers altogether and only supporting IE9+ and other recent browser versions, particularly those targeting mobile devices.
Increasingly, jQuery is not just an implementation, but is rather an API. That's why we're seeing the rise of alternatives like zepto.js that match the jQuery API de-facto standard but are implemented better (smaller, dropping IE6 compatibility).<p>Replace "jQuery API" with "Web API" and this actually argues against John's point. Multiple implementations are better for everyone.
In the past there was some amount of competitive advantage in owning the rendering/browser engine. You could add unique features, fix things your competitors wouldn't, whatever.<p>These days performance is heavily driven by the javascript runtime. While it's challenging to write a browser engine, it is much much more challenging to write a really fast JIT'ing javascript runtime. It seems unlikely Opera would have been able to close the gap, much less surpass, with WebKit on that front.<p>At that point, any competitive advantage they hold in features is being offset in a fairly substantial performance penalty. Good move making the switch. Differentiate elsewhere.
"This page best viewed in Internet Explorer".<p>Remember those days? This is not a good thing. The HTML spec should be the standard, not WebKit's bugs.
I look at the who the author and hesitate to disagree, but I've had better experience in some areas with Firefox on Android (notably webgl) than I have had with Chrome / Chrome Beta.<p>Personally, aside from a few small wrinkles, I prefer the experience of using Firefox over Chrome on Android.
I think it is obvious that WebKit has won and by a margin when it comes to browser engines.<p>For Opera it is the best move for them. They can now focus the majority of their development time on making the browser great instead of putting a decent chunk of their development time in effectively replicating what WebKit does. I think in the coming year or so Opera will be become a far better browser for it.<p>As for Mozilla and IE. You would expect Microsoft have more than enough resources to keep working on Trident/Lynx whatever it is called.<p>For Mozilla is their OS tied to their own engine? I don't know how committed they are to it. For all the releases of Firefox tabs still aren't sandboxed and phpmyadmin often freezes the entire browser when looking at monster tables... perhaps they would benefit from spending more time improving the browser and less time working on rendering.<p>I wonder what would have happened if Microsoft, Mozilla or Opera had open sourced their browser engine with WebKit. Perhaps we would have seen a split and more competition in this area.<p>Now it is who has the $$$ to continue to develop their own propriety engine.
"I don’t think anyone can successfully argue that Chome/Chromium isn’t a better browser than Safari [...]"<p>That sounds like Chrome was somehow superior to Safari. Chrome has some nice features that Safari lacks (and vice versa) but from <i>browser engine</i> perspective they are definitely on par.
Boring. They can switch to Gecko with IPC embedding for a change: <a href="https://wiki.mozilla.org/Embedding/IPCLiteAPI" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.mozilla.org/Embedding/IPCLiteAPI</a>
I find that funny because even if you add up everything WebKit, Gecko+IE+Opera+Others still have a higher browser share. And most of the "large parts" of the world don't even really use WebKit (I'm looking at China, India, Africa, parts of Europe etc) most of which are IE/Gecko/Opera
<a href="https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html" rel="nofollow">https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html</a><p>Why does Firefox do so poorly? ;_;
Mozilla is such a good organization (but to be fair can only survive with Google).
I'd say the big risk with webkit which no-one is addressing is that it's LGPL not GPL. Someone could get a dominant position and use a closed fork of it. (The fact that Apple open-sourced Webkit is to its credit.)