To me it sounds like a good thing. We end up with 3 major rendering engines on the desktop; Gecko (Firefox), Trident (IE) and Blink (Opera and Chrome) and 2 major on mobile Blink (Opera and Chrome) and Webkit (Safari). This I think will help shake up some of monoculture.
Chrome definitely doesn't have any level of domination over the enterprise market like IE6 on Windows did. That was the problem with IE6 not the browser per se - it was revolutionary when it was released, MS just killed the team. The chance that enterprises will stick with Chrome is very unlikely.
As it stands at the moment, the only downside is the duplicated development between the Safari and Chrome teams. Webkit will suffer, but the web won't. Apple don't care enough, the web isn't the top of their priority list.
If anything, the iOS monopoly of mobile web traffic (in the first world) is a problem which certainly isn't changed by this fork.
I was all worried about this being the beginning of a proprietary browser, Google owning both a majority of user services and a majority of their browser tech stack. Both hidden in some proprietary garden.
Then I stopped sucking and looked up stuff from the article.
Blink is a part of the chromium project, and is equivalently open[fn:0]. So that means it's equivalent to any other open source fork.
Mailing list drama, duplicating technical work, etc will happen but hopefully this will contribute to having even more high quality open web implementations available.
Webkit was the only thing the mobile web had that apps did not: a mostly un-fragmented codebase. Now developers will have to test their mobile web-apps against even more browsers reducing time-to-market efficiency. Hopefully competition will lead to faster improvements by top players (Google), but the more likely scenario is the least incentivized player (Apple) will drag their feet re-creating an IE6 scenario where one browser will slow mass adaption of standards.
My problem with the Webkit monopoly was that it made it harder to use a FOSS browser. Webkit Nightly and Chromium are both nightly browsers which isn't good for the majority of people. Firefox is FOSS, but if Webkit took over, it would be hurt, as it has been.
Which means getting Apple to allow other rendering engines on iOS should be an even bigger issue with Apple users in the future. Otherwise Safari will become the IE6 of iOS.
Isn't this contradictory? If a significant/relevant chunk of people use WebKit, and WebKit development lags behind Blink (and the others), then how will this not affect the web?
> Google also argues that the decision will introduce greater diversity into the browser ecosystem and might mitigate concerns that the mobile Web in particular was becoming a WebKit monoculture.
Ahah so much hypocrisy condensed in this sentence. Yeah it's constraining to share code and have compile time #defines but if every vendor did the same there wouldn't be any common project.
The web is the common project, right? We're all working together to put together powerful and performant windows into the web, and we work together at places like the W3C and WhatWG to construct a common vision of what that means.
Diversity in implementation is a great way of hammering out the exact contours of the standards that govern the common project...
Google forked because of Apple's agenda of ramming everything but the kitchen sink into WebKit, to the detriment of everyone else. By making the boundaries between the various parts of a browser engine -- scripting engine, layout engine, window control -- more explicit, one can more easily experiment with one part without it being a house of cards.
I would fully expect that a company would have its own agenda. Google's is/was organizing the world's information. It's a bit, um, something, to expect that they don't have an agenda, ne?
A number of people were complaining about how not enough common implementations on the web was a bad thing; and how everyone using webkit would lead to complacency. Google forking webkit to make it its own might be just enough to keep them all different enough to keep standards going :)
nugget at the end: "there won't be any -blink or -chrome CSS prefixes; like Mozilla, all new experimental features will require developers to enable them in the browser's options page"
http://www.chromium.org/blink#new-features has some detail about how we plan to add features to the platform. We're certainly hoping to be pretty transparent about how things get into Chromium.
Some people here are confused about the business side of making a browser for Google. I even saw mentions that Google Chrome is just a good will project to make the Web a better palce.
While that is partially true, Google Chrome also has a very strong business strategy behind it.
Right now it is the main distribution channel for Google Search. Every download of the browser is converted (with a probability, of course) to more searches or to a switch-over from another search engine.
For quite a long time (several years) search engine quality has not been selling itself. Many people do not notice any real difference between Bing/Baidu/Yandex/Seznam and Google.
Google invented search distribution with Google Toolbar (which was a tremendous success from business side) and right now Google Chrome is the new Google Toolbar. One of the main KPIs for Google Chrome product is Google Search market share. Specifically they directly optimize for Google Search share from inside Google Chrome which when multiplied by the share of the browser converts into money.
Just wanted to clarify things, sorry if not mentioning Blink made this comment an off-topic one.
> "For example, we anticipate that we’ll be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines"
On my 2GB netbook, chrome has gone from my preferred browser to unusable due to the high memory footprint of recent builds. I wonder if this cleanup will help get the memory down to something reasonable like the level it was before Chrome 10.
I like competition but I hate having to test for yet another engine. Really hoping that developing for webkit will still result in well rendered sites/apps on blink.
They forked it because they want to take the code in another direction. They aren't being any worse open source citizen than anybody else that forks open source.
Funny how when Opera deprecates its engine in favor of WebKit we all make a big deal about how it's bad for everyone. But when Google spins off their own version, we vilify them too... For real?
Forking things is evil now? It's not like they're making this closed-source, or changing it to be so Chrome-specific that other browsers won't be able to use it.
...Or was your post satirizing the generic "Google did a thing! They're evil now!" posts? I'm sometimes bad at detecting irony.
Your comment should've been downvoted into oblivion by now. I guess HN has changed a bit. You brought no argument to support your idea, just throwing mud.
Sometimes forking is necessary, even in open source projects, some party feels the majority or the leaders of that open source project take it into a wrong direction. That's what happened to LibreOffice, too.
[+] [-] tgandrews|13 years ago|reply
Chrome definitely doesn't have any level of domination over the enterprise market like IE6 on Windows did. That was the problem with IE6 not the browser per se - it was revolutionary when it was released, MS just killed the team. The chance that enterprises will stick with Chrome is very unlikely.
As it stands at the moment, the only downside is the duplicated development between the Safari and Chrome teams. Webkit will suffer, but the web won't. Apple don't care enough, the web isn't the top of their priority list.
If anything, the iOS monopoly of mobile web traffic (in the first world) is a problem which certainly isn't changed by this fork.
That's my two pennies worth.
[+] [-] codemac|13 years ago|reply
Then I stopped sucking and looked up stuff from the article.
Blink is a part of the chromium project, and is equivalently open[fn:0]. So that means it's equivalent to any other open source fork.
Mailing list drama, duplicating technical work, etc will happen but hopefully this will contribute to having even more high quality open web implementations available.
[fn:0] http://www.chromium.org/blink/developer-faq#TOC-Is-this-goin...
[+] [-] billions|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mehrzad|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gurkendoktor|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smrtinsert|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doe88|13 years ago|reply
Ahah so much hypocrisy condensed in this sentence. Yeah it's constraining to share code and have compile time #defines but if every vendor did the same there wouldn't be any common project.
[+] [-] mikewest|13 years ago|reply
Diversity in implementation is a great way of hammering out the exact contours of the standards that govern the common project...
[+] [-] Millennium|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hp50g|13 years ago|reply
"We're not sharing our stuff anymore as it's costing too much".
A the risk of sounding like a paranoid nutbag, with stuff like NaCl, SPDY, Dart etc, it sounds like Google have their own agenda.
[+] [-] baddox|13 years ago|reply
http://www.chromium.org/blink/developer-faq#TOC-Is-this-goin...
[+] [-] Sanddancer|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pnathan|13 years ago|reply
I would fully expect that a company would have its own agenda. Google's is/was organizing the world's information. It's a bit, um, something, to expect that they don't have an agenda, ne?
[+] [-] jrockway|13 years ago|reply
To make web pages load fast and web apps run fast?
[+] [-] pjscott|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmfrk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsnk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sukuriant|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkchasma|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cnlwsu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msoad|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikewest|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jevinskie|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kapranoff|13 years ago|reply
While that is partially true, Google Chrome also has a very strong business strategy behind it.
Right now it is the main distribution channel for Google Search. Every download of the browser is converted (with a probability, of course) to more searches or to a switch-over from another search engine.
For quite a long time (several years) search engine quality has not been selling itself. Many people do not notice any real difference between Bing/Baidu/Yandex/Seznam and Google.
Google invented search distribution with Google Toolbar (which was a tremendous success from business side) and right now Google Chrome is the new Google Toolbar. One of the main KPIs for Google Chrome product is Google Search market share. Specifically they directly optimize for Google Search share from inside Google Chrome which when multiplied by the share of the browser converts into money.
Just wanted to clarify things, sorry if not mentioning Blink made this comment an off-topic one.
[+] [-] slacka|13 years ago|reply
On my 2GB netbook, chrome has gone from my preferred browser to unusable due to the high memory footprint of recent builds. I wonder if this cleanup will help get the memory down to something reasonable like the level it was before Chrome 10.
[+] [-] smallegan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linuxhansl|13 years ago|reply
"the costs of sharing code now outweighed the advantages"
Does that mean Google will only be a good open source citizen as long as it is advantageous to them and on a project-by-project basis?
Edit: Well it is part of Chromium, which is open source, so maybe I was too rash.
[+] [-] Drakim|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] fuck_google|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] JamesPDX|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ok_craig|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjscott|13 years ago|reply
...Or was your post satirizing the generic "Google did a thing! They're evil now!" posts? I'm sometimes bad at detecting irony.
[+] [-] mtgx|13 years ago|reply
Sometimes forking is necessary, even in open source projects, some party feels the majority or the leaders of that open source project take it into a wrong direction. That's what happened to LibreOffice, too.
[+] [-] moultano|13 years ago|reply