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Apple's WebKit2 Coming Soon, Will Offer 'Sandboxing' of Processes

To be fair it's not hard to ruffle the feathers of the open source community, they seem to like having their feathers ruffled.

A vocal minority complained, but really Apple's Webkit team did a lot of good work to remove a lot of dependencies KHTML had on the KDE an QT.

And think where the world would be without WebKit. No Safari, no Chrome, no Chrome OS, no mobile Safari, no Android browser etc.
 
The WebKitPlugin safari has now is crap. It always makes my computer run hot. iStat Pro says it's running at 40+%😡
 
Stella said:
Great - it should make Safari a lot more stable.

Nice to see Apple continue to progress , unlike microsoft who seemed to rest with IE 6 and fall to sleep for several years, and wake up to find the world had surpass them and then play the catch up game.
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It will make areas of WebGL, 2D and 3D Transforms placed in separate processes so they won't slow down the browser, as well.
 
Darkroom said:
by "people" i'm assuming you mean apple zealots who are incapable of any real actionscript development while looking toward steve jobs to sooth their daddy issues.
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Time to gains some new skills and find a new career. You'll get farther than complaining about your Flash career opportunities shrinking.
 
kas23 said:
So, if Apple borrowed (not stole, Apple would never steal anything) this concept from Chrome, do this make Google a good company again. Or, are they still evil?
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This is not a new concept. This is a fundamental operating system concept, before concurrency became all the rage.

Try again.
 
*LTD* said:
Open Source is great to draw on for resources and ideas. The community isn't known for leadership, however. For example, it eventually took Apple to save FreeBSD. Code was percolated back and forth from Apple to FreeBSD, but Apple contributed a helluva lot more.
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Where do you get such a misinformed nonsense from? Apple never saved FreeBSD, because the project certainly was not in need of being "saved" from anything. Apple took FreeBSD, forked it into their "Darwin" project and replaced the FreeBSD kernel with their own inferior, beach balling Mach kernel design.

Apple takes more from the Open Source community than it gives back. And there are decades of evidence that Apple does not play well with others. Their recent iPhone SDK EULA changes are just the tip of the iceberg.
 
Key differences are highlighted between Chrome and WebKit2

http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2

webkit2-stack.png


http://trac.webkit.org/attachment/wiki/WebKit2/chromium-webkit-stack.png

Notice that in this case, the the process boundary is *above* the API boundary. Chromium WebKit does not directly provide a multiprocess framework, rather, it is optimized for use as a component of a multiprocess application, which does all the proxying and process management itself. The Chrome team at Google did a great job at trailblaizing multiprocess browsing with Chrome. But it's difficult to reuse their work, because the critical logic for process management, proxying between processes and sandboxing is all part of the Chrome application, rather than part of the API layer. So if another WebKit-based application or another port wanted to do multiprocess based on Chromium WebKit, it would be necessary to reinvent or cut & paste a great deal of code.

That was an understandable choice for Google - Chrome was developed as a secret project for many years, and is deeply invested in this approach. Also, there are not any other significant API clients. There is Google Chrome, and then there is the closely related Chrome Frame.

WebKit2 has a different goal - we want process management to be part of what is provided by WebKit itself, so that it is easy for any application to use. We would like chat clients, mail clients, twitter clients, and all the creative applications that people build with WebKit to be able to take advantage of this technology. We believe this is fundamentally part of what a web content engine should provide.
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mdriftmeyer said:
This is not a new concept. This is a fundamental operating system concept, before concurrency became all the rage.
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Isolating tabs in separate processes was shipping in Internet Explorer beta builds before it was seen in Chrome.

(Just reinforcing the "not a new concept" point.)
 
AidenShaw said:
Isolating tabs in separate processes was shipping in Internet Explorer beta builds before it was seen in Chrome.

(Just reinforcing the "not a new concept" point.)
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Correct, but indeed Apple's WebKit2 did add a new approach with their new framework available to more than the browser, but all applications leveraging the WebKit/WebKit2 engine.
 
When are we going to see this in the nightly builds? I'd love to test this out, since I have long abandoned Safari in favor of Firefox and Minefield. Hopefully this will make mobile safari and desktop safari more stable.
 
Ries said:
Things are already done in parallel, its called threading. Process swicthing is alot heavier than thread switching, so performance will go down, but stability up, cause processes can't harm each-other directly.
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Maybe. A large amount of thread-synchronization code doesn't have to run, and memory management becomes a lot cleaner and easier. You have more per-process overhead, but don't wind up with one big fragment heap.

I'm interested to see benchmarks, but imagine any gains or losses will be drowned out by other changes in the framework.
 
Finally. This was supposed to come out back when Apple launched Safari 4 but it didn't. Finally its nice to see Safari catching up.
 
Did Chrome get hacked? I heard it was safer because it sandboxed everything. Does this make Safari unhackable or does Apple being open about it leave Safari vulnerable?
 
albusseverus said:
Did Chrome get hacked? I heard it was safer because it sandboxed everything. Does this make Safari unhackable or does Apple being open about it leave Safari vulnerable?
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Nothing is unhackable. This will improve the ability to sandbox Safari significantly though.
 
txt reflow

one feature (other than flash support .. which is a no no now) i want to see in new safari ... or "webkit2" ... text reflow or reformat when zooming ...
 
AidenShaw said:
Isolating tabs in separate processes was shipping in Internet Explorer beta builds before it was seen in Chrome.

(Just reinforcing the "not a new concept" point.)
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Correct, but process separation was first introduced [mentioned in 2002] by the Multizilla developer – which is where mozilla got the tabbed browsing idea from – i.e. this was long before Ben Goodger made the switch to Google [run for the money]. I guess nobody here knew this...
 
*LTD* said:
Open Source is great to draw on for resources and ideas. The community isn't known for leadership, however. For example, it eventually took Apple to save FreeBSD. Code was percolated back and forth from Apple to FreeBSD, but Apple contributed a helluva lot more.
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What planet do you live on? 🙂
 
Friscohoya said:
What if people shun this like flash?
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How are they going to shun it? its webkit and the only people to reject it would be Google with the open source world like Epiphany more than like going to embrace it along with other developers who use Webkit.

As for comparing it to Flash, how on earth did you equate Webkit2 to Flash? good lord, go back to what ever rock you crawled out from under.
 
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