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Blinkbait

A few more Blink-related links. (This article’s title was stolen borrowed from Thomas van Zuijlen.)

• Krzysztof Kowalczyk, an early WebKit contributor, shares his thoughts. Apple and Google weren’t too happy with each other. Apple didn’t want even the possibility of inserting Dart into WebKit, while it did not want to copy Chromium’s multi-threading, either, and instead opted for WebKit2, which so far has gone nowhere. Money quote:

  The employees of both companies were treading lightly on the dev list but you could feel that WebKit wasn’t a love fest of like-minded engineers but 2 lions circling each other, always prepared for the battle.

• Maciej Stachowiak discusses the same, but states that Google was unwilling to contribute its multi-threading to WebKit, forcing Apple to re-invent the wheel with WebKit2.
• The WebKit project started removing Chromium-specific code. Some see this as an escalation of the Apple-Google fight, but I see it as common sense: Chromium no longer needs to be supported, so let’s remove its code. WebKit’s main problem is that it has far too much platform-specific code, so why not remove some when you have the chance? Makes sense to me.
• The Register has more on this round of house-cleaning.
• Niels Leenheer of HTML5 Tests repeats some old history that’s useful in this context.

Oh, and I got some questions about Chrome on iOS: obviously it will not use Blink, but will continue to use Apple’s WebView. Installing another rendering engine on iOS devices is not allowed, so other browser vendors are restricted to using WebView (Chrome, most other browsers) or a server-side rendering engine (Opera Mini). So Chrome on iOS will not be affected by the Blink fork.

Speaking of Opera Mini, an underreported angle is that eventually it will go over to Blink, too. That means that Google (or at least Chromium) will have a significant footprint in the developing world — a larger one, I would say, than its direct competitors (which basically means Apple nowadays). I’m not sure how that’s going to help Google make more money, but it certainly won’t hurt.