Google Forking WebKit to Create New Web Rendering Engine for Chrome

[gnasher729]

This is a good move on Google's part. It will bring enhanced, richer results to all. The mentality at Google is improve, improve, improve. While certainly not perfect, I give them credit for a positive attitude and willingness to take risks.

The mentality of Google is collect, collect, collect. (All the information about you that they can get). They probably want to avoid another $22 million payout when they spied on Safari users, which was found because Google changed the code that allowed their hack in their own Webkit branch.

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Actually, it probably is as they say it is. Chrome's multiprocess model is vastly superior to WebKit2's model in terms of stability (while also being much more resource-hungry). Apple has jumped on-board with the pointless WebKit2 multiprocess model. I believe most of the code Google will be removing is the code support for this. That will be a much better engine for google. I suspect this fork will follow WebKit closely where it can though. Besides for the multiprocess model, WebKit is still an amazing engine.

Yeah, sandboxing to prevent exploits from doing damage to your machine is a "pointless multiprocess model".

Google currently has 95 webkit reviewers versus Apple's 59. And Google currently responsible for the majority of commits (49% vs Apple's 25%).

What's the size of these commits? If Google tries to impress people like you, the easiest thing is to order their developers to make many, many small commits instead of a few big ones.

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What personal data does Google sell to advertisers?

1. As Google fans love to point out, they don't _sell_ your data. They rent it out. So they can sell (sorry I mean rent it out) again.

2. For you to be negatively affected by this, the advertiser doesn't need to know who you are. If you try to buy an item and they hike up the price for you because they have your browsing history and know that you are very interested in that kind of item, it doesn't matter if they know it is "samcraig" or not.

 

[ConCat]

Yeah, sandboxing to prevent exploits from doing damage to your machine is a "pointless multiprocess model".

I knew I'd get blasted for saying that. Here's my reason: Apple uses WebKit2's process model to claim that now Safari is a much more stable browser. The hilarious fact is that while Safari no longer crashes, WebKit still does, and you still lose all your work in all open tabs when it occurs. There is very little point in implementing such a model. Chrome's model allows for only the tab that caused the crash to crash, leaving all the other tabs intact. That is in my view a vastly superior model. WebKit2's model seems only a shadow of what it could have been.

Also, it's worth pointing out that Apple has no use for WebKit-based sandboxing, when they already have a perfectly functional implementation in the OS. I think you may want to rethink that.

 

[Nale72]

Most active means nothing. The actual largest committed code impacts on the development process shows Apple with the majority. In short, quality over quantity of actual commits.

What's the size of these commits? If Google tries to impress people like you, the easiest thing is to order their developers to make many, many small commits instead of a few big ones.

As always on these forums when it comes to a pissing contest on who's best. If Apple sells/contributes more it's always the quantity that matters and what shows who's the best. When someone else outsells/contributes more, we're supposed to not care about the numbers, because then Apple has better quality, and that's the only thing that counts.

I'm not saying that Apple hasn't contributed more to the actual user experience the last years, even though these charts tend to say otherwise. If they have, good for them. I just wonder why some people have to get so defensive and by default say that it's probably some kind of manipulation on Google's part to look good. Source on that?

2. For you to be negatively affected by this, the advertiser doesn't need to know who you are. If you try to buy an item and they hike up the price for you because they have your browsing history and know that you are very interested in that kind of item, it doesn't matter if they know it is "samcraig" or not.

Source on that? Or is this just another hypothetic tin foil theory? I find it hard to believe that web shops have can have access to your browsing history and being able to cross match that in real time so that when you surf in to their site they by default can hike up the price for you.

 

[Dr McKay]

1. As Google fans love to point out, they don't _sell_ your data. They rent it out. So they can sell (sorry I mean rent it out) again.

2. For you to be negatively affected by this, the advertiser doesn't need to know who you are. If you try to buy an item and they hike up the price for you because they have your browsing history and know that you are very interested in that kind of item, it doesn't matter if they know it is "samcraig" or not.

That wasn't the highlighted part, what personal data does Google give companies? I looked at my advertising profile and it just says I'm a Man, probably between 30-40 who has an interest in Computers, Video Games and Technology. Can I have a source that says they give my personal data to companies?

From Google's policy page

People have different privacy concerns and needs. To best serve the full range of our users, Google strives to offer them meaningful and fine-grained choices over the use of their personal information. We believe personal information should not be held hostage and we are committed to building products that let users export their personal information to other services. We don’t sell users’ personal information.

Source

 

[iBug2]

That wasn't the highlighted part, what personal data does Google give companies? I looked at my advertising profile and it just says I'm a Man, probably between 30-40 who has an interest in Computers, Video Games and Technology. Can I have a source that says they give my personal data to companies?

That is your personal data since it is data about your age, your hobbies, your preferred websites, your searches, which answer to your search you like best etc etc. This is all personal data. Just because it cannot pinpoint to your name and address does not mean it's not personal. Why is that so hard to understand? If I search for a lot of websites about atheism and prefer the ones that are pro choice, that is a very personal data about me. More personal than my age or even name.

 

[Renzatic]

That is your personal data since it is data about your age, your hobbies, your preferred websites, your searches, which answer to your search you like best etc etc. This is all personal data. Just because it cannot pinpoint to your name and address does not mean it's not personal. Why is that so hard to understand? If I search for a lot of websites about atheism and prefer the ones that are pro choice, that is a very personal data about me. More personal than my age or even name.

But none of this data is tied to your name, address, or even your Google account. You're seen as a semi random point, who happens to visit atheism and pro choice sites.

This gives them data showing that people who frequent atheism sites also frequent pro choice sites. Which in turns means the next atheist site you visit, might just have a pro choice ad plastered somewhere on it.

But you? Google doesn't know who you are.

 

[adder7712]

Using Open Source and Standards is the way to go for browsers. Is Google becoming the new Microsoft?

Blink has to be open source because it is forked from an open source project which is also in turn forked from another open source project.

Honestly, I haven't seen this many tinfoil hat wearers other than on certain YouTube videos.

 

[sillypooh]

Safari is the most clean browser around. It doesn't phone home, it has a straightforward privacy policy, and creates the most compliant renders. Web programmers never have to adjust to Safari's quirkiness because virtually there isn't any.

How some people trust an advertising company like Google with their online privacy is beyond me. Every day you hear stories of their often low and despicable tactics... "Don't be evil", are you kidding me?

And to all the people who claim it cannot handle many tabs opened, when was the last time you checked Safari, 2007???

 

[rmwebs]

This is actually pretty bad for Apple. Google were the biggest contributors to WebKit in recent years, improving it massively. Opera were poised to bring all their developers, and were committed to some serious work on WebKit, but have confirmed they will be using Blink. WebKit's about to be seriously slowed down in terms of development speed. Look at the graph on the homepage, and mentally remove Google from the image, and the commits are pretty low.

Oh and the nonsense about Chrome being the new IE6....really? Some people really need to learn about web standards and basic history before saying such silly things.

 

[AllieNeko]

The amount of reality distortion in this thread is crazy. WebM wasn't a "hijack" it was an attempt to AVOID MPEG LA's patent nightmare (note - MPEG LA has NO relation to MPEG and has invented nothing. They're a patent licensing entity). Sadly, WebM was doomed to fail, since H.264 is supported in hardware on many chipsets.

As for forking - remember, Apple forked KHTML, no one whined about that on here. Big companies fork open source projects for their own uses. I'm not saying it's good or bad. Change can still be merged back upstream, at least for awhile. Ultimately, who knows if it'll be good or bad. But WebKit is not some standard thing - it's Apple's fork of KHTML. It makes sense for Google to want to fork it for themselves.

 

[adder7712]

Love the arguments on fragmentation. The web is already really fragmented (Gecko, WebKit, Blink, Presto, Trident, KHTML) but all aforementioned rendering engines adopt common standards to address compatibility issues.

 

[ctcampbell]

Yup. This isn't too grand for Safari. Google was responsible for the vast majority of updates and contributions to WebKit. Apple was just along for the ride.

From the original report:

"... both Apple and Google being almost equal in contribution share over the whole history of the project".

 

[adder7712]

Safari is the most clean browser around. It doesn't phone home, it has a straightforward privacy policy, and creates the most compliant renders. Web programmers never have to adjust to Safari's quirkiness because virtually there isn't any.

How some people trust an advertising company like Google with their online privacy is beyond me. Every day you hear stories of their often low and despicable tactics... "Don't be evil", are you kidding me?

And to all the people who claim it cannot handle many tabs opened, when was the last time you checked Safari, 2007???

Implying you have privacy on the web.

 

[michelepri]

More standards making web developers crazy, this can't be that good. But Apple is not known for simplicity when it comes to web development and programming standards. Apple Iphone programming languages are notoriously absurd.

 

[rmwebs]

Safari is the most clean browser around.

I agree, it's got a very 'minimalist' feel to it, nothing really gets in the way. However that's not always ideal. The lack of addons/plugins can be a bit of a pain at times.

It doesn't phone home

Actually, since it was integrated into iCloud, it does. Not sure if the pre-lion versions were updated with it, but I know the mountain lion version does call home as Little Snitch picks it up all the time.

it has a straightforward privacy policy

Do you have a link to it? I've never been able to find Apples privacy policies that are specific to apps. The one at http://apple.com/privacy is for the website. One thing Google has going for it there, is that its very easy to find the privacy policy for the individual service/app/whatever that you're using, and it doesn't have any 'gotchas'.

and creates the most compliant renders. Web programmers never have to adjust to Safari's quirkiness because virtually there isn't any.

How some people trust an advertising company like Google with their online privacy is beyond me. Every day you hear stories of their often low and despicable tactics... "Don't be evil", are you kidding me?

This right here is where your post's credibility died. We here all the time on MacRumors about how Google is evil, however when it comes to proving it and backing comments up, posters either vanish, or come back with the same 1 liner about the Safari exploit, which was clearly an isolated incident involving a dodgy developer at Google, and some poor security on Apples part.

We get people claiming Google sell your info (which is crap), and that they dont protect your privacy (again, crap). But when was the last time we saw them selling info?

The answer is never. It's not in Google's interest to sell personal information, that would completely undermine their business model. The whole purpose of Google's income is to KEEP user info as protect as possible, and only allow advertisers to say 'I want to target people who like Golf'. Google then do exactly the same as everyone else (Apple included) and store anonymous info about your search terms. This is then used so that the system can say 'Oh, this guy likes Golf, well in that case, lets show him some golf related ads next time he's on a site with adsense'.

This is no different to Apple showing genius results based on what songs you liked, or Amazon personalising their home page to display products related to the ones you've recently viewed.

The whole 'Google is evil' thing is completely misconceived. They are no more 'evil' than Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo or any big tech company out there. Their practices aren't 'dodgy' they are an industry standard.

 

[Renzatic]

From the original report:

"... both Apple and Google being almost equal in contribution share over the whole history of the project".

Consider me corrected.

 

[sillypooh]

But none of this data is tied to your name, address, or even your Google account. You're seen as a semi random point, who happens to visit atheism and pro choice sites.

This gives them data showing that people who frequent atheism sites also frequent pro choice sites. Which in turns means the next atheist site you visit, might just have a pro choice ad plastered somewhere on it.

But you? Google doesn't know who you are.

Many people have Gmail accounts or have a username on Google's many services. Search for something on Google and you'll see that Google knows you. Visit any website and Google knows it's you as well because the vast majority of web developers use Google Analytics to see site visits and popularity. So the site you visit calls Google. Google also parses your Gmail account for keywords to get your interests, to better serve you with relevant advertising.

Google is an advertising company. It's their business. That's how they make money. When was the last time you trusted an advertising agency in telling you the truth? Why would they care about you?

Google parses Gmail accounts. Says who they don't parse the data for your name? Hi Jim, how are you... Dear Mr. Johns, thank you for....

Now maybe Google doesn't sell your name to its many advertiser clients, right now, but they surely have that info and they surely know who you are. Who long do you give them to keep that information to themselves? It's a business, hint hint.

 

[vmachiel]

So Oracle is siding with google, announcing that opera will trade in webkit for blink: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/...-blink-as-part-of-its-commitment-to-chromium/

Maybe, Apple should follow suit and go with Blink. I mean, if anyone can make a rendering engine following all the web standards it's google. And it would free up some resources to focus on things like icloud, maps etc.

Thoughts?

 

[iBug2]

But none of this data is tied to your name, address, or even your Google account. You're seen as a semi random point, who happens to visit atheism and pro choice sites.

This gives them data showing that people who frequent atheism sites also frequent pro choice sites. Which in turns means the next atheist site you visit, might just have a pro choice ad plastered somewhere on it.

But you? Google doesn't know who you are.

I already said that. But the data is still personal. So people should stop saying that it isn't.

 

[sillypooh]

I agree, it's got a very 'minimalist' feel to it, nothing really gets in the way. However that's not always ideal. The lack of addons/plugins can be a bit of a pain at times.

Hmm. When was the last time you checked Safari?
https://extensions.apple.com/en-us/

Actually, since it was integrated into iCloud, it does. Not sure if the pre-lion versions were updated with it, but I know the mountain lion version does call home as Little Snitch picks it up all the time.

Sure. The user with an iCloud account needs that service.

Do you have a link to it? I've never been able to find Apples privacy policies that are specific to apps. The one at http://apple.com/privacy is for the website. One thing Google has going for it there, is that its very easy to find the privacy policy for the individual service/app/whatever that you're using, and it doesn't have any 'gotchas'.

I meant the default for tracking policies, cookies, is "never track". So much so that Google had to circumvent that policy to continue tracking you.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/us-europe-investigate-googles-bypass-of-safari-privacy-settings/

This right here is where your post's credibility died. We here all the time on MacRumors about how Google is evil, however when it comes to proving it and backing comments up, posters either vanish, or come back with the same 1 liner about the Safari exploit, which was clearly an isolated incident involving a dodgy developer at Google, and some poor security on Apples part.

We get people claiming Google sell your info (which is crap), and that they dont protect your privacy (again, crap). But when was the last time we saw them selling info?

The answer is never. It's not in Google's interest to sell personal information, that would completely undermine their business model. The whole purpose of Google's income is to KEEP user info as protect as possible, and only allow advertisers to say 'I want to target people who like Golf'. Google then do exactly the same as everyone else (Apple included) and store anonymous info about your search terms. This is then used so that the system can say 'Oh, this guy likes Golf, well in that case, lets show him some golf related ads next time he's on a site with adsense'.

This is no different to Apple showing genius results based on what songs you liked, or Amazon personalising their home page to display products related to the ones you've recently viewed.

The whole 'Google is evil' thing is completely misconceived. They are no more 'evil' than Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo or any big tech company out there. Their practices aren't 'dodgy' they are an industry standard.

Read my above post. Read the above link about Google's tracking Safari users who don't want to be tracked.

Honestly, it comes down to trust. Do you trust them?

 

[Winni]

Safari is the most clean browser around. It doesn't phone home, it has a straightforward privacy policy, and creates the most compliant renders. Web programmers never have to adjust to Safari's quirkiness because virtually there isn't any.

How some people trust an advertising company like Google with their online privacy is beyond me. Every day you hear stories of their often low and despicable tactics... "Don't be evil", are you kidding me?

And to all the people who claim it cannot handle many tabs opened, when was the last time you checked Safari, 2007???

We live in a time where platforms no longer matter and where users hop between multiple hard- and software platforms several times a day. People no longer need to care whether they are using iOS, Android, Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD or whatever else there might be on the market. What they care about, however, is that their app of choice is available for that platform.

Safari runs only on Apple's two operating systems, thus it is as irrelevant as Microsoft Internet Explorer which only runs on Microsoft platforms.

If you want something that is open and truly platform independent, you have to use Firefox or Chrome and developers will focus on the browsers with the largest user base. (Which, as of today, still is Firefox.) It's that simple.

 

[everything-i]

Great, another load of inconsistencies between browsers. Have these people got any idea how much pain this is going to cause for web developers.

 

[Oberhorst]

The one thing that bothers me most in Chrome is the fact that you can't scroll down a page before it's loaded. Really annoying. Safari lets you scroll before the page has fully loaded. I hope that'll change with Blink.

 

[ReneR]

One thing we do not need, ...

... is yet another fork :-/ So much wasted time and resources, can they not get their act together?!?

 

[sillypooh]

We live in a time where platforms no longer matter and where users hop between multiple hard- and software platforms several times a day...

Safari runs only on Apple's two operating systems, thus it is as irrelevant as Microsoft Internet Explorer which only runs on Microsoft platforms.

Since this is a website about Mac news, I assumed people knew I was talking about browsers for Macs.

If you want something that is open and truly platform independent, you have to use Firefox or Chrome

As a Mac user, why would you care if Safari is available on Windows?