Google goes on the Blink in WebKit fork FURORE When Opera Software killed its web browser's rendering engine Presto, and announced it will instead use WebKit, the company did so with the best intentions. WebKit was a surefire bet: by mainlining the brain juice of Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari - the top dogs on the web and on smartphones - Opera hoped to break out of …
"Blink, though, is unlikely to see Apple transfer. It is even less likely Microsoft, the web’s other browser maker heavyweight, would join. Rather, Microsoft will use the weakness of WebKit and uncertainty of Blink to stress the common sense and stability of sticking with its own browser roadmap rather than trusting somebody else’s."
That paragraph rather destroys the argument of the rest of the article, don't you think?
The argument that somehow someone will come and add a bunch of stuff that gets in the way of what google wants is really quite silly. Google has an easy solution for this, refuse the patch. Every major OSS project does this. Those submitting the refused patch can then fork, but that doesn't affect Google's work.
Well, as Webkit is LGPL licensed according to WP, Blink must be too. So it's open: Google have to publish their changes.
As for the article author's argument that diversity suffers because of a fork which he thinks/hopes will become the dominant platform (instead of errm, now, let's see.... Webkit!?)... what pills has he been popping?
Tabbed browsing began in Opera I believe. As did mouse gestures. I still miss Opera's right-mouse-button-hold plus repeated left-button-clicks to go whizzing back through the browser history, since I had to move to Chrome to escape Opera's other innovation: the never-fixed memory leak.
Utter tripe. Opera have been behind pretty much everything you know and love about whatever browser you use.
HTML5, CSS, yep, both originated at Opera.
Tabbed Browsing, MDI, yep, Opera too.
BrowseJS (Greasemonkey to Firefox users), yep, Opera..
Mouse Gestures, yep Opera.....
I could carry on...
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Why, does it want a slower less compliant rendering engine?
Don't just tell me that IE10 sucks, show me something that Firefox does better in terms of page rendering. If you find that job difficult, what do you think that means?
IE6 used to be the bane of my web development. I used to hate it so much, but I'm not in an entrenched fanboy-fact-denial position. I use Chrome because of the way it looks and the UI, but IE 10 has one of the best rendering engines out there right now, shame the element inspector is a bit poor.
I also love Chrome syncing to mobile.
I found this interesting; from http://www.chromium.org/blink
"Historically, browsers have relied on vendor prefixes (e.g., -webkit-feature) to ship experimental features to web developers. This approach can be harmful to compatibility because web content comes to rely upon these vendor-prefixed names. Going forward, instead of enabling a feature by default with a vendor prefix, we will instead keep the (unprefixed) feature behind the “enable experimental web platform features” flag in about:flags until the feature is ready to be enabled by default. Mozilla has already embarked on a similar policy and the W3C CSS WG formed a rough consensus around a complementary policy."
So no more vendor prefixes! (at least in Blink) That will make the CSS tidier but it does mean we can't use shiny new features as soon as they become available in one browser.
As someone who is at the sharp end, so to speak, developing frameworks and the like to test my employer's web-based, and other, products, the phrase that's currently presenting itself for inspection is "Just because you can, doesn't mean that you should."
Or, if you prefer the Dilbert version: "If it ain't broke, fix it until it is."
Is just me , or does any one else see this coming. You are using google products and a it says best viewed with chrome. You are using google products and it's not quit working right with your browser and you get a pop that says best viewed with chrome as it's code for some non standards HTML that chrome does.
"Is just me , or does any one else see this coming. You are using google products and a it says best viewed with chrome. You are using google products and it's not quit working right with your browser and you get a pop that says best viewed with chrome as it's code for some non standards HTML that chrome does.
House Rules"
The problem there is Google would lose users and thus eyeballs viewing ads. Google makes no money from Chrome, it, like all Google "products" are there to get people online viewing adverts. Google have for the most part been very standards friendly.
Chromium will always be available as an alternative, they are effectively the same browser and if Google did choose to take that path - I doubt they would - people would simply switch to Chromium.
If you look at the time/money Google has piled into Android, is it really that hard to believe they just want to improve the browser/experience?
I think Google should be congratulated for finally demonstrating how to bring "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" to the Open Source world. Meanwhile any third-party developer who integrated webkit into their product in the belief it would make HTML rendering easy has my sympathy.
"Google, as a collection of websites, now supports just two versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox – the current release and the one previous."
GMail has already lost my business, because I, like 38% of the world, still use XP. Not a smart move to deliberately exclude 38% of your potential customers, Google. I'm not installing Chrome, either.
hmm, and how many of that 38% of the world are still using an out of date version of IE?
It's not Google that is excluding you, you're doing that to yourself by consciously choosing to use an old out of date web browser rather than installing something newer.
Expect to get blocked by more than just Google in the future. For example my bank has a similar policy for logging into their online banking service. "Using an old out of date web browser! Nope, you're not coming in."
If you want to blame anyone, blame Microsoft for choosing not to release their newer browsers on XP.
To be fair, XP is a dead man walking, with just days over a year left until MS stop fixing security holes. It only makes sense for so long to hold off on new features because people are using an outdated browser. Besides, Ignore the prompts and the fundamentals of gmail still work in IE8.
Is Chromium a less objectionable option than Chrome?
All your base are belong to us.
So the moment Google sees the last bastion of independence in browsers which is Opera has given it up to use the same one as all the rest Google forks away from it to pull a Microsoft and make their own version. It may not be long with Opera giving itself unto the Beast before Google writes the standards.
Sorry but a little bit ignorant of LGPL Licensing. If Google added optimisations to their products APIs for Blink would those need to be made open to everyone because of the LGPL license for Blink or could they be kept behind closed doors?
For example Microsoft cannot have a true YouTube app on Windows Phone or Windows 8 because Google is blocking access to the APIs, if Google built in YouTube optimisations into Blink would anyone be able to see them and implement them?
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