I wrote an article for the New Yorker about the evolution of web browsers, the impending demise of , and Google Chrome’s new HTML rendering engine.
Chrome’s recent move to Blink undercuts the primary olive branch it promised to Web developers upon Chrome’s release in 2008; those developers now need to test their Web sites in an additional rendering engine. But there is an argument in favor of the change: WebKit is now very widely used, especially in mobile devices, in much the same way that Internet Explorer 6 dominated the market and brought a near-halt to real innovation in the look and feel of the Web a decade ago.
2 responses to “Blink Blink Blink”
Hi there,
Apple did not open source Webkit. Their “rendering engine” was originally KHTML created by the KDE team. Can you please update your New Yorker article to reflect this. You spend so much of your article giving proper credit that this oversite can’t stand. Additionally its even more important as Apple has been such a poor free software community member / collaborator. Please update your article in light of the following:
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/05/04/29/1556252/safari-and-khtml-may-never-meet
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/05/05/12/1555240/safari-vs-khtml
http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2011/05/06/#20110506-applewebkit_lgpl
and
http://www.tuaw.com/2011/05/09/apple-releases-ios-4-3-3-webkit-source-but-stretches-the-spirit/
Perhaps a paragraph about the GPL / LGPL might have been appropriate too?
and finally.
As your article was primarily composed of discussion of the relationship between browsers it might have been nice to have read some about Mosaic and the relationship that Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator have to that piece of software:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)
It was a pretty complex article and you’re right that we didn’t have space to really dive into the lineage from KHTML to WebKit, but the 2005 timeline is still accurate. I’ve forwarded your comments to my editor, though — thanks for reading!