The news has just come out that Opera is switching all of their browsers (both mobile and desktop) to use WebKit (specifically, Chromium). I’ve seen a lot of gnashing of teeth on Twitter and I feel like I can respond because I use to feel the same way back in 2008-2009. However this is 2013 and the Chrome/Chromium team has made it obvious that any form of stagnation or lack of innovation does not need to occur when using WebKit. In fact it possibly gives you the ability to accelerate your development, spending less time worrying about implementing common standards. I would argue that WebKit (a common framework for implementing the standards-compatible portion of a web browser) is exactly like jQuery (a common framework for implementing a DOM standards-compatible experience in a web page) at this point.
These are a few arguments against the switch that I’ve seen so far:
A browser switching to WebKit will result in stagnation
That is demonstrably not true. KDE created KHTML, Apple created WebKit based upon that, Google created WebKit/Chromium based upon that. I don’t think anyone can successfully argue that Chome/Chromium isn’t a better browser than Safari which isn’t a better browser than Konqueror. The Chrome team has proved that stagnation when using WebKit is merely a choice, as a contributor to WebKit you have the complete ability to drive it in a direction you wish (often for the better). I see no reason why the highly-skilled development team at Opera won’t be able to do the same. They can implement a number of their Opera-specific features into WebKit and it’s likely that those features will start to trickle back into other WebKit-using browsers as well.
This is helping to making WebKit a de facto standard, bugs-and-all
I don’t see this argument as being relevant any more, WebKit is already a de facto standard. I mean, everyone remembers when the browsers decided to implement -webkit vendor prefixes? It’s obvious that the “WebKit is an de facto standard” horse has already left the gate. As to the bugs: WebKit is a common code base that a number of browsers contribute to, however every browser vendor has the ability to make changes to their own fork of the code base. I see no reason why these “now-standard” WebKit bugs wouldn’t be fixed by any single vendor. Having a bug in the engine does not mean that a single browser vendor is incapable of fixing it — they would just be willfully not fixing it (as the browser vendors currently willfully clone -webkit prefixes).
In the case of JavaScript libraries virtually everyone has standardized upon jQuery at this point. This didn’t result in stagnation, which was a major concern, instead it’s resulted in a number of interesting and hyper-popular second-tier frameworks which build upon jQuery, such as: Twitter Bootstrap, HTML5 Boilerplate, and Backbone.js.
This will affect Opera’s ability to influence standards
I don’t see the switch to WebKit causing this. I do see Anne van Kesteren‘s move to Mozilla as being a massive blow to Opera’s ability to push standards though. I don’t know anything about the situation but if his moving was caused by the switch to WebKit then yes, Opera’s move to WebKit has affected their ability to influence standards.
Opera switching to WebKit is a slippery slope and/or Opera is a small player, Firefox or IE switching to WebKit would be a bigger problem
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. Let’s follow this to its logical conclusion: In a world in which WebKit is now virtually the only mobile browser vendor Mozilla and Microsoft will feel increased pressure to switch their browser engines over to WebKit in order to keep pace. Google has proved that with Chrome that WebKit stagnation is simply a choice so there’s no reason why these other companies shouldn’t be able to build off of WebKit (and possibly create WebKit hybrids, such as WebKit + IonMonkey).
The big question becomes: Should they switch?
At this point it’s honestly a business/engineering decision for Mozilla and Microsoft (as it always has been). If some percentage of your developer force is spending all of their time implementing the same standards that everyone else is implementing then switching to a common code base will give you the ability to free up some of your developers to work on something else. You saw what happened in the case of Chrome: They used their extra developer time to completely crush the competition on performance. This resulted in the everyone-wins race to become the fastest browser.
Ultimately it’s important to remember that WebKit is not a monolithic entity. It’s a shared codebase that a number of corporations contribute to. (In this respect it’s different from jQuery: Almost all contributions to jQuery comes back into the main codebase, whereas with WebKit some come back to the main codebase and some stay in a fork.) There is a lot of code sharing going on but it isn’t the be-all and end-all of browser development. Innovation can clearly still occur when working on a shared codebase and performance will almost certainly continue to improve.
martin sandsmark (February 13, 2013 at 9:51 am)
I would argue that Konqueror is a much better browser than Safari, can Safari for example show man-pages inline?! :-P
MaxArt (February 13, 2013 at 9:52 am)
That’s a very interesting post, expecially considering the author’s past in the Mozilla Corporation.
nads (February 13, 2013 at 10:00 am)
Martin, don’t be ridiculous. Safari blows and is a lazy browser, but by God it is at least better than konqueror. Also, see the x-man-page URL scheme. Its not inline, and safari really stupidly launches terminal immediately when you call it, but cmon.
Rusco (February 13, 2013 at 10:16 am)
Looking forward in seeing Operas HTML5 Forms being integrated into Webkit !
For some reasons (which I as a web developer can’t understand) each and every new CSS3 feature gets more love than the very useful HTML5 Forms, look at this, even Chrome lags behind: http://caniuse.com/#search=forms
martin sandsmark (February 13, 2013 at 10:17 am)
I don’t think you saw my tongue sticking out of my cheek, esteemed Sir nads.
martin sandsmark (February 13, 2013 at 10:18 am)
(my comment was originally about a typo in the blog, but that seems to be stripped out, maybe this blog software isn’t fond of regexes.)
mitch (February 13, 2013 at 10:52 am)
Knowing John and jQuery so this is just a hate comment I guess but I always thought jQuery was the IE7 of the frameworks. All the things I’ve seen people build for jQuery is a mess, there is no structure. jQuery is huge no doubt but it’s hindered by it’s own size. I think calling webkit the jQuery of the browsers is bogus. Just my opinion.
michael camden (February 13, 2013 at 11:10 am)
” I guess but I always thought jQuery was the IE7 of the frameworks.”
@mitch I can’t disagree with you more. Code structure is ultimately left to the developer. jQuery is flexible in that it doesn’t force you in to a structure like a more monolithic framework would.
Brad Shaw (February 13, 2013 at 11:28 am)
Great! Now if only the Chromium team would fix the font rendering problems with Chrome running on Windows I would be a happy camper. Unfortunately they’ve closed the issue (Issue 137692), which has been open since July 2012, to further comments and there’s no word on when this might be fixed. In the meantime Google’s fonts look their worst on Google’s browser, which is terrible.
Justin (February 13, 2013 at 11:33 am)
My prediction:
By 2014, all major browsers will be webkit-powered.
By 2015, browsers will have enough competing features such that we’re using something like vendor prefixes.
Mark V. (February 13, 2013 at 11:53 am)
Totally agree with Mitch on jQuery here.
And just like building something on top of jQuery yields only a short-term advantage and isn’t worth the trouble in bigger projects, all browsers switching to WebKit may sound good right now (as in: wooo, no more IE7-8-9 tinkering, great) but hurts web development as a whole in the long run.
Remember IE6? At the time it first appeared, it was actually pretty good browser. Well, better than IE5 and competition, anyway. So everyone and his dog were coding to IE6, working around bugs, adapting layout to the quirks of the layout engine. Peace and harmony, right?
Fast forward 10 years, the biggest pain of webdeveloperkind? You probably guessed right.
As soon as people start coding to the single interpretation of standard and use its bugs or unique (mis)features, the standard no longer matters, and the implementation sets the all-new standard.
Which, in turn, cannot be discarded with ease, and bug mimicking continues for decades, if not longer. No one really cares about CSS filter: alpha(opacity = 50) not being valid CSS if this works in IE6, right?
(Also, Backbone works just fine without jQuery, it uses $-function if it exists, but that’s optional. Just my $0.05)
John Resig (February 13, 2013 at 12:04 pm)
@Mark: I really don’t see how the current situation is anything like IE6. IE6 was a stagnant, closed-source, proprietary codebase. WebKit is an Open Source, highly-collaborative, widely-used codebase. Browsers will continue to compete on quality and performance, just as they have always done.
mempko (February 13, 2013 at 12:15 pm)
“It’s a shared codebase that a number of corporations contribute to”
I think this is a revealing statement. Corporations have an interest in having a monopoly player in the web space in the same way corporations had an interest in having windows be a monopoly in the operating space.
I can see many advantages to having WebKit the de-facto standard for the corporate world.
But fuck the corporate world. I don’t think humanity as a whole should be beholden to them via WebKit.
We have standards for a reason.
Rob (February 13, 2013 at 12:16 pm)
A much better comparison is the Linux kernel. Chrome is Ubuntu, Safari is Fedora and Opera is, I dunno, Mint or Arch.
Each distro is targeted at different audiences, but you can be fairly certain that major projects targeted at one distro will work in another. If one distro is in the middle of implementing something major and unusual (Unity on Ubuntu, say, or Wayland when that starts to appear) then there may be periods of divergence, but these are usually followed by convergence once a consensus emerges about the right way forward (for example, even the people who hated Gnome 3 when it first appeared will eventually end up using the Gnome 3 codebase, with MATE or Cinnamon as a front-end).
mempko (February 13, 2013 at 12:17 pm)
PS.
John, you are just pissed you had to write jQuery to begin with. I can imagine your dream is that WebKit will come with jQuery built in ;-)
mempko (February 13, 2013 at 12:18 pm)
P.P.S
Just messing with ya ;-)
mpmedia (February 13, 2013 at 12:20 pm)
> And just like building something on top of jQuery yields only a short-term advantage and isn’t worth the trouble in bigger projects,
jQuery is a facade for Dom manipulation, not a “make my code modular and maintanable magically tool”. Backbone, AngularJS basically work with jQuery ( Angular even has a jQlite framework inside it ). one library will not solve all your problems , it would be like accusing underscore not to be able to do dom manipulation or amd. So please dont critize jQuery if you do build messy code , you wrote the code.
> Fast forward 10 years, the biggest pain of webdeveloperkind? You probably guessed right.
non sens. Webkit is open source , does not have ActiveX shit or whatever and XP users can use Chrome on their desktop. did IE6 has evolved in 10years? no but webkit does everyday, and you can even fork the source and compile it youself ! Webkit is not tight to Microsoft stupidity or even Apple’s , fast forward in 10 years some business will still be using ie6 but webkit browsers will have an engine that will be closely compliant to htmlX …
Jeroen Ransijn (February 13, 2013 at 12:24 pm)
@Mark V. there is not way you can compare IE6 with Webkit. As @John Resig mentions that Webkit is Open Source. In addition I would like to add that different forks are made on top of Webkit. Chromium and Safari is not the same, and mobile safari is somewhat different as well. Furthermore, projects such as node-webkit show the real capabilities of Webkit in terms of a desktop app, or PhoneGap in terms of a mobile app. Will FireFox and IE die out soon or switch to Webkit? Probably not, I am also considering the Asian and African market, who are behind on this technologies big time.
Tim Down (February 13, 2013 at 12:25 pm)
I don’t think WebKit is really comparable to jQuery. Using jQuery or any general purpose JavaScript framework for the browser is and has always been optional for web developers; for a browser vendor, a rendering engine is in no way optional. I can develop JavaScript for the web without jQuery or a similar library, but I can’t develop a browser without a rendering engine.
bojanv91 (February 13, 2013 at 12:38 pm)
So, you say all browser vendors should go WebKit instead of what W3C proposes? Yes, we already have WebKit developers, we need Web developers who code on standards. I don’t agree with you on that part.
Jameson (February 13, 2013 at 12:57 pm)
I like competition on the Web. I used Opera precisely because it had a different rendering engine. Different rendering engines are slightly different, which keeps the rest honest.
If something in Chrome doesn’t look the same as on FF, IE and Opera, and those three browser render it the same way, then it’s a bug in Chrome. However, if Opera and FF are bot WebKit browsers, then it’s just WebKit vs Trident, the more popular one is the “correct” one, regardless of adherence the standard.
AFAIK, Presto and WebKit are the most standards compliant in terms of rendering. Losing a known correct implementation reduces good competition. We had this problem when it was just FF, Opera and IE. IE was the biggest, therefore it was “correct” and FF had to introduce flaws to remain compatible with IE. I see no reason for browser vendors to fix these bugs if 80% of browsers render it the same.
Dane (February 13, 2013 at 1:10 pm)
I haven’t standardized on jQuery.
Marc Bächinger (February 13, 2013 at 1:20 pm)
Can’t see why diversity is not a good thing in this case.
Potch (February 13, 2013 at 2:13 pm)
WebKit has only “won” mobile if we’ve decided to stop the world and judge at a moment in time. If market share freezes starting today, then indeed WebKit has “won”. But to imply competition should give up based on such a pronouncement is a little silly.
And on the subject of winning, I’ll quote myself from a HN post on WebKit:
Supporting a monoculture is trading future potential in the name of short-term convenience. This doesn’t just apply to rendering engines, or even just technology. Wishing you could wave a magic wand and make everyone use the same tools, language, conventions, or coding style is something every engineer wishes from time to time, but the world would be worse off without diversity.
Wishing one rendering engine “wins” over the others is a reasonable thing to say, and WebKit is a very fine engine. But the moment we start treating the Web as a zero-sum game and stop collaborating on the vision of a better online experience, nobody wins.
Academic Sam (February 13, 2013 at 2:47 pm)
I’d like to think Webkit as a replacement for W3C, except there is already an implementation and all WebKit based browsers automatically support proposed standards as they move through the process. If a feature gets useful enough, it will get to drop the -webkit prefix
Andrew (February 13, 2013 at 2:49 pm)
Thank goodness that it’s *just* Opera switching to WebKit. If Firefox were to switch I would be far more concerned for the future of web development.
I don’t see how WebKit is similar to jQuery at all. With jQuery, I (web developer) have the choice, but with consolidation of rendering engines nobody really has a choice. This is definitely a sad day for the Web.
tom jones (February 13, 2013 at 3:02 pm)
“Ultimately it’s important to remember that WebKit is not a monolithic entity. It’s a shared codebase that a number of corporations contribute to.”
there is a subtle but very important argument you are missing with this statement (and echoed in comments here), so please read this very carefully, and sorry for the length.
“I don’t think anyone can successfully argue that Chome/Chromium isn’t a better browser than Safari which isn’t a better browser than Konqueror.”
this is perfectly true, and in an ideal market where everybody could/would chose their own browser (based on merits or whatnot), that would be perfectly fine.
but it’s missing the political side of the argument which is *exactly at the core of this very decision by Opera*, and which regards a number missing from this press release: 500 million iOS devices that can never have (Presto) Opera installed.
(and if you don’t believe iOS App Store is the reason behind this change, i can’t really help you, sorry)
“Google has proved that with Chrome that WebKit stagnation is simply a choice so there’s no reason why these other companies shouldn’t be able to build off of WebKit (and possibly create WebKit hybrids, such as WebKit + IonMonkey).”
except for Chrome on (again) iOS, which can neither have V8 (and has even slower JS than the default browser because of lack of Nitro), nor any other addition to the web platform that Apple doesn’t like (OpenGL, WebRTC, etc).
“They can implement a number of their Opera-specific features into WebKit and it’s likely that those features will start to trickle back into other WebKit-using browsers as well.”
now, you say if Apple stopped innovating with webkit (because it was, say, opposed to their business interests regarding the App Store), Google, Adobe, Opera and others would simply take over and carry the torch.
except there is *no (magic) mechanism that would/could ever let them upgrade webkit on a billion Apple devices*, so IE6-like problems are just as likely on the “major platform of the future” if Apple thinks its in their interest.
and if you don’t think that’s bad, again, i can’t really help you.
slammr (February 13, 2013 at 3:40 pm)
@Potch
I would hardly call Opera’s switch “short-term convenience.” They’ve been dealing with compatibility problems for 20 years!
drinchev (February 13, 2013 at 3:54 pm)
I love webkit, but I hate monopoly. That’s so simple. I want to be able to render my websites on TVs, refrigerators, cars, phones, tablets, browsers with no specific modifications. I want to spend my whole time designing and coding, not answering myself the question “Will it work on [x] engine!”.
IMHO engines should not include prefixes and strictly confirm to w3c standarts, but that’s not the case. That’s not the case with webkit too. It has bugs, it’s awful sometimes, because I write most of my code side by side with Chrome and when I check it on FF I render it differently. Later on I find the reason is webkit specific bugs. I remember the times I was coding with a FF side by side, it was awful to see what the results were in IE6+, but the bugs were in IE6, not in FF.
Now it’s the future, we all use animations, transitions, web-fonts, media queries, etc. There are bugs everywhere and the competition between engines fixes them. I know open source community is really hard. If you want to submit even a small bug-fix, you have to know the code and work with it every day ( especially on those big projects ). In the end the core engineers are the guys who push the “MERGE” button.
P.S. jQuery?! I used it when it got too hard to look for javascript bugs for every browser and because it has unified support for window.className and html manipulation goodies.
maxw3st (February 13, 2013 at 5:42 pm)
Obviously there’s a somewhat inflated view of Webkit being announced here. I don’t see Webkit as the defacto standard. Firefox is actually a much better representative in that regard. I have been exploring the finer points of CSS fairly extensively of late, and Firefox unquestionably has better and more complete implementation of the W3C standard than Webkit. You need look no further than 3D rendering accuracy, although there are other features (like rem) that work fine across Firefox rendered pages, and don’t in Webkit. I cannot get Chrome to render text shadows. Firefox renders them great. Safari renders text shadow, but makes it much darker than the CSS values would indicate. This seems to be a Webkit problem with all shadow rendering. When I lay out a page in Firefox, things fit according to how I’ve marked them up. The same is definitely not the case in Webkit, especially Chrome. I constantly have to make extra allowance for dead white space on a page to mask things that aren’t quite lining up correctly.
In short, Chrome/Webkit may have declared themselves the winners of the browser wars, but to me it’s a narcicistic declaration. Fortunately there’s another open platform out there, Mozilla. Unfortunately we lost a good one today, Opera. Firefox mobile browser is certainly as excellent offering, and as Firefox OS progresses it’s sure to get better. The monopolies that are Google and Apple certainly make for formidable competition for Mozilla and Firefox, but the internet will be a worse place for all if Webkit becomes the only competition for IE.
just my humble opinion
jack
Curtis (February 14, 2013 at 2:19 am)
The real question is why anybody should be butthurt about WebKit being adopted, except to possibly play some strange, hipster-like game of “Let’s argue about something stupid and trivial like it’s the end of the world.” You aren’t getting shot at, the zombies aren’t here. It’s Opera… *Opera*.
The people this post addresses are drama queens that probably get their panties in a bunch every day regardless of whether or not Opera adopts WebKit.
Tim Priest (February 14, 2013 at 4:08 am)
Off topic, but I love these back-handed remarks people make without any basis in fact!
“…don’t think anyone can successfully argue that Chome/Chromium isn’t a better browser than Safari ….”
Hah hah. I just love the Chrome fan base. Chrome is the most resource-hungry ugly-assed browser around. It is a shining example of Google’s design paradigm.
So Chrome is slightly faster than say Firefox or Safari. Wow, I really notice that 30-40 milli second difference. Meanwhile Chrome is sucking down 1 G of main memory to display a whole 9 tabs! And if I was blind, or was partial to pigs with lipstick on, I could possibly grow to like Chrome’s looks! But I would probably have married the pig first!
Peter Frandsen (February 14, 2013 at 4:19 am)
Looking forward to Opera merging their multicolumn layout with page floats CSS into WebKit. See some great examples at
http://people.opera.com/howcome/2013/02-reader/
Good move by Opera to go WebKit – hope someday that the great people at Mozilla joins too. The web will be better, move faster, and more standardized no matter what browser (skin) you use.
pd (February 14, 2013 at 5:04 am)
Opera influencing standards?
LOL
There’s been more people ‘gnashing teeth’ than ever actually used Opera, a browser that is a bit like a geek’s Bible: nobody ever reads/uses it but they feel ever so much more morally comfortable knowing it exists.
No market share, no influence, simple.
That’s why Mozilla has done very little but copy Chrome for the last few years, including taming Firefox’s awful memory management (several years too late) and sharpening up it’s responsiveness.
That’s why Moxilla finally gave up it’s obstinate/admirable position on codecs.
That’s why Google and crApple all-but secretly install their browsers slipstreamed into other software, just as whore-like ad/share/malware does.
That’s why Mozilla learned to give away Firefox for free by fundung it through search engine deals, a concept which inOperaBle took forever to follow.
That is why Google poached a chunk of Mozilla’s developers when developing Chrome in the first place.
That is why nobody does desktop email bundled into the browser anymore (Oh how I miss Eudora though).
The only disappointing aspect of this decision has nothing to do with standards support but more to do with irrelevancy. Switching render engines alone will not make Opera relevant. They will need to do something with their browser that compels people to consider actually using it. Switching rendering engines might free up their developers to do just that, but where is the evidence? It would have been handy if they had a prototype of something new and interesting that they are doing. As it is, it’s disappointing that they are not actually announcing anything interesting, like a prototype or, well, that they’re shutting up shop for good.
Chris Bowes (February 14, 2013 at 5:06 am)
“then yes, Opera’s move to WebKit has affected their ability to influence standards.”
And this is why I am sad about it. You have written a blog to defend the switch but basically admitted there is a strong possibility that this switch has cost Opera one of their most influential employees. It is the potential loss of Opera’s influence on web standards that has me concerned about this. Nothing else, and you have admitted that this could well be the case with little more than a shrug. Sorry but if this post was supposed to defend the switch it has done completely the opposite for me.
Janghou (February 14, 2013 at 6:27 am)
@John , I would argue your comparison is a complete mishit.
Any site should work without JavaScript, a browser can’t work without rendering. I mean sites, not apps. HTML is for content, CSS is for layout and JavaScript is for functionality.
The new `HTML5` API are powerful and elegant, the JavaScript frameworks are now mainly used to overcome browser quirks/differences and delegate maintanance.
http://oreilly.com/javascript/radarreports/native-javascript-apis.csp
jQuery got popular because it worked in standard compliant browsers and Microsoft Explorer, (and it could be used by non-coders), and it gave powerful options not yet available.
If Microsoft took their duty and fixed their broken browser in the past or update their browser on any of their platforms now, how many lines of code can you spare in jQuery if you just have to support IE 10 instead of IE6-10?
Those verbose lines are an inefficiency burden to all users now, not only to IE users as it economically should. We pay a welfare loss, to raise the profits of some companies.
I don’t see that issue in the Webkit-Presto discussion.
I merely share with PPK concerns, especially after:
Opera’s power to support certain standards by implementing them has diminished.
In the past Opera sold Presto to Adobe, Nokia, Symbian, Nintendo etc. IMO those former customers all moved to webkit. Why make a product if you can’t sell it.
Wes johnston (February 14, 2013 at 8:34 am)
The more I think about this article, the more I realize is wrong with it. To address the main point about webkit being the jquery of DOM, I think there’s one huge difference here that you don’t really recognize. That is, jquery is, optional. If someone wants to come along and write something new and different to use on their site, they can. That’s allowed for a pretty great system of innovation to arise, both within and outside the jquery proper. Mozilla’s DOM.js stuff aimed to take that a step further and basically let you drag and drop any DOM model you wanted. Crazy cool innovative stuff all driven because you didn’t have to use any one piece of it.
The same isn’t true in a world with a Webkit monoculture. In that world someone that’s wants to try something new/different/innovative is stuck first trying to recreate webkit. Any deviation from webkit and its quirks (and despite a few billion spent on advertising it as a perfect implementation of HTML5, webkit has plenty of quirks), and the web starts to break. In that sense, this IS VERY similar to the same world we had when there was an IE monopoly, and its why its fair to make the IE comparison here. Anyone who wants to do something new is first stuck writing quirks mode for Webkit, and that just gets worse as time goes on and more webkit quirks become unwritten “standards”. Innovation is basically limited to “what can webkit do”.
There are other issues here. The assumption that anything that can be implemented can be implemented (well) in webkit. The assumption that amount of work/innovation/productivity scales linearly with number of engineers working on a project (i.e. again despite a billion dollar ad campaign and an order of magnitude more paid engineers, I don’t think I’d say that webkit actually implements that much more of HTML5 than anyone else, and that ignores all the interesting innovations we’ve seen in Layout/JS/Graphics).
Mostly I’m surprised to hear this from Opera because, in many ways that go far beyond DOM Api’s (and Opera was very competitive about implementing DOM Apis), Presto was superior to webkit, especially on mobile. All that innovation is lost at this point, and most of it won’t be easily plugable into a new system without basically making webkit into presto. Sad to see it go.
WebkitSucks (February 14, 2013 at 10:26 am)
http://blog.methvin.com/2013/02/tragedy-of-webkit-commons.html
“jQuery Core has more lines of fixes and patches for WebKit than any other browser. In general these are not recent regressions, but long-standing problems that have yet to be addressed.”
“When we started our jQuery 2.0 cleanup to remove IE 6/7/8 hacks, we were optimistic that we would also be able to remove some bloat from lingering patches needed for really old browsers like Safari 2. But several of those WebKit hacks still remain. Even when they have been fixed in the latest Chrome or Safari, older WebKit implementations like PhantomJS and UIWebView still don’t have the fix. We’ve had to put back several of these as users reported problems with the beta. It’s starting to feel like oldIE all over again, but with a different set of excuses for why nothing can be fixed.”
Webkit is the new IE6.
Ed (February 14, 2013 at 10:44 am)
I still think Opera/Presto is the fastest Browser, much better done then Chrome. Only let down is compatibility with website.
If only they could open source it, i am sure a community will be there to push things forward.
Aziz Ali (February 14, 2013 at 3:57 pm)
Loved the post, that you for putting it our there. It gave me a good sense of how open-source technologies that are mainly used by corporation compare with something like JQuery which is used by everyone.
Thanks John
Ali (February 14, 2013 at 9:07 pm)
This will only help killing opera browser and move its users to chrome. In the end google will win.
I can’t understand why opera thinks maintaining a rendering engine is more difficult than adapting webkit to their current browser.
One thing to keep in mind is that, projects like Google chrome, Chromium, Android are open source but not free software (free as in speech). They are more or less tied with google products/servers. If one doesn’t agree with this, I suggest him just search “google” in the source code of those projects. To give an example, an innocent chrome user usually doesn’t know that the URLs he/she types in the address bar are first sent to google servers and then the user browses that site. Just to collect these statistics, google has made a subtle plan by integrating google search with the address bar. By this way, nobody can blame google.
So this should give a clue what kind of things monopoly may cause.
gonchuki (February 15, 2013 at 10:11 am)
I love how you preach about “moving forward” and “innovation” when both WebKit and Chromium keep bugs that are sometimes 4 or 5 years old and for pretty basic rendering tasks.
sample 1: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20606 (2008)
sample 2: the first bug Opera engineers fixed, opened back in 2007
sample 3: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=23440, a text-shadow rendering bug from 2009.
And like these, there are many others that developers simply had to live with for years, and will continue to do so. Does the WebKit monoculture mean the new “standard” is to not use letter-spacing and avoid having blur in a text-shadow?
We need to draw a line and see where “everyone using WebKit” is good and where it is bad. There’s a lot of WebKit fragmentation already and while you might be only thinking that its a fragmentation of “cool features and innovation”, I only see it’s a fragmentation on the bugs each version has.
The Android/iPhone/iPad fragmentation doesn’t make it better either. A little more than half of the world is still running Gingerbread, where there’s no Chrome and the stock browser is a 2 year old WebKit. Manufacturers won’t provide an upgrade path, carriers don’t want that either. Users without disposable cash are stuck on an ancient platform which is slowly becoming the new IE6. Apple is doing the same by selectively making their products obsolete and stop supporting them even if they have the required hardware (iPad 1 vs 3GS, anyone remembers?).
Just for once, it would be nice to look at the facts objectively instead of simply expressing unconditional love because it’s “open source”. One thing is to be able to see the source, other is to be vetoed and forced to create a fork, which ultimately results in a different implementation with the same name.
Janghou (February 16, 2013 at 10:36 am)
@John, on second thought, if you mean that jQuery is the most popular free and open framework among others, not necessarily the best, that just helps people getting things done, I agree with you.
BTW can someone explain to me why Yahoo always rated Opera, now called `the Douglas Crockford of browsers` as an B or C grade browser, while Internet Explorer 6 was always rated A grade?
To me that was an insult to anyone striving for compliance to open standards, and I think it really hurt Opera. Or did it only mean Yahoo was run by second-class experts.
Chris (February 17, 2013 at 10:27 am)
Let me get this straight. Webkit, as managed by Google, is the default “winner” of “mobile” because Google defaults to it. And this is NOT similar to our past situation with Microsoft/IE because “Webkit is open”?
YGBFK.
Jasa Pembuatan Website Toko Online (February 18, 2013 at 9:37 pm)
If only they could open source it, i am sure a community will be there to push things forward.
Christopher (February 19, 2013 at 3:53 am)
Funny comparison, when I just read this blog by jQuery developer Dave Methvin: http://blog.methvin.com/2013/02/tragedy-of-webkit-commons.html?m=1
Here’s the essence: “jQuery Core has more lines of fixes and patches for WebKit than any other browser.”
way2sms (February 20, 2013 at 2:56 pm)
@justin
by 2014 there will be more advanced technology then webkit. But good to know that we are reading something written by a professional who worked for mozilla corporation, it creates a sense of authority.
jxyz (February 21, 2013 at 3:39 am)
This @mempko guy at the top is cute: “We have standards for a reason”
Oh really? What reason is that? To save your from the corporate overlords?
…do you know who is effectively writing those standards? The internet will be owned by the big corporations whether you want to believe it or not, but disbelief doesn’t make it not true.
JJ (February 21, 2013 at 5:51 pm)
Webkit is jQuery of rendering engines? Poor Opera. Frankly – jQuery sucks as JS framework. It’s useless for anything else then making things pretty. And webkit… well, Safari looks nice. So what? It’s still worse browser I ever saw since IE7.
James Nguyen (February 26, 2013 at 3:09 pm)
The Safari browser is the worse browser in the pack, especially in mobile. Apple is now taking control of webkit 2; while Google is very much a monopoly with Webkit (chrome). Opera bets its farm on someone else turf. The outcome can be predicted as a certain DOA.