Opera made the bet he proposed and lead themselves down a path to irrelevance.
I wonder whether this scenario is now going to play out in the opposite way, with Google ditching Blink for Servo once Mozilla finishes morphing Gecko into Servo with the Firefox Quantum project.
Who would win then? Google's money and marketing power, or Mozilla's independence, trustworthiness and being the renderer's creator?
> the more code engines share, the more de facto standardization of bugs we would see, so having genuinely separate implementations is very important.
Well it's not like there aren't any bugs in the specs. And whether there are bugs in the code or the specification, it's the same process for fixing them : politics :)
2007-jan-21 hash:
ec06b3461cf0eaf3d3e4d7a2e429bddb
$ curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rocallahan/blog-archive/master/hashed-blog1.txt | md5
9ba0c5cba20cff553500f034f58d5bb7
that said, the others check out, so i'm sure it's harmless.
it only have optimistic views of google promoting webkit.
completely ignores the fact that google effectively took over the project, killing old features it didn't like and preventing any new contribution from making it to main line unless they fit their plan.
Cool idea to just post the hashes for the future. I think I might do it too on my blog :-)
At the time this internal skepticism about the future of Gecko was very palpable from outside. Which is why it was infuriating to see Mozilla jumping on every bandwagon they could, eventually ending up with the OS silliness: it really felt like they were trying to run from their own browser and from their own tech, like they were ashamed of not being cool.
Thank god they eventually “saw the light” and they’re now back on track.
>* There is a huge overhang of security-critical bugs; we have to choose between addressing that and making forward progress. We are putting code-cleanup projects on the back burner for the same reason.*
Have they considered rewriting it in R... oh, hang on.
I expected an article about 1990s browser wars. 2007-2008 is not ancient in my book.
Jan 21th 2007
[...] Furthermore, there's a wider community relying on
Gecko --- embedders, XUL developers, extension authors, Web
authors, and their users, who would not be well served if
Gecko suddenly nose-dives. [...]
Somehow, everybody pretends as if Webkit is some proprietary, closed source rendering engine, but after all, it is the great success of the KDE/Konqueror rendering engine, being adopted by some huge corporations (Apple, Google). [1]
While I appreciate that we still have the independent Firefox and its brand new Quantum engine, sometimes I feel like the Konqueror/KHTML team does not receive the appropriate tribute for laying the foundation for the dominant KHTML/Webkit/Blink engine.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Origins