1) using that test, Apple didn't make webkit either. It's a fork of KHTML and why everything still uses LGPLv2
2) very little of what goes into making a browser successful is just the render. In WebKit and now Blink make up only a small percentage of the total browser.
Chrome/Chromium was developed for quite a while using Webkit. Chromium was created in 2008 and only after Google had already captured a third of the browser market share (according to Statista) did they fork it (April 2013).
The fact that basically all of the big companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple) use Webkit or Chromium shows that it's very difficult to build and maintain one successfully IMO. I think that Mozilla are essentially the only ones developing something that's somewhat competitive, not to mention that most smaller companies (e.g. Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Island etc.) all use Chromium.
I'm not saying that it's easy to succeed with a product even after you've bought it, or started it from a fork (see less successful Chromium/Webkit forks). I'm just saying that it was not something built from the ground-up in Google. For example, v8 was and really changed a lot of things in the JavaScript world including Node, Deno etc.
Kind of easy to forget the true innovation of Google chrome these days. I will try to remember this again any time I see an aww snap on my web browser because it would have been all tabs all windows dead at once before Google chrome.
Firefox only declared it completed electrolysis in 2018, nearly a decade after this comic.
zbowling|2 years ago
linkgoron|2 years ago
The fact that basically all of the big companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple) use Webkit or Chromium shows that it's very difficult to build and maintain one successfully IMO. I think that Mozilla are essentially the only ones developing something that's somewhat competitive, not to mention that most smaller companies (e.g. Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Island etc.) all use Chromium.
I'm not saying that it's easy to succeed with a product even after you've bought it, or started it from a fork (see less successful Chromium/Webkit forks). I'm just saying that it was not something built from the ground-up in Google. For example, v8 was and really changed a lot of things in the JavaScript world including Node, Deno etc.
cmrdporcupine|2 years ago
1. The V8 JavaScript engine, which blew away everything else. 2. The sandboxed, multiprocess, threading model.
Those were the two things emphasized in the original Chrome "comic" at launch, if I recall:
https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
thanksgiving|2 years ago
Firefox only declared it completed electrolysis in 2018, nearly a decade after this comic.
sjwhevvvvvsj|2 years ago
dilyevsky|2 years ago