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Fear of a WebKit Planet

Posted by slacker_mike on · 3 comments
hypercritical.co; By John Siracusa 		Mail this story
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I must confess, I was neither surprised nor disturbed by last month’s announcement that the Opera web browser was switching to the WebKit rendering engine. But perhaps I’m in the minority among geeks on this topic. The anxiety about the possibility of a “WebKit monoculture” is based on past events that many of us remember all too well. Someday, starry-eyed young web developers may ask us, “You fought in the Web Standards Wars?” (Yes, I was once a Zeldi Knight, the same as your father.) In the end, we won. As someone whose memory of perceived past technological betrayals and injustices is so keen that I still find myself unwilling to have a Microsoft game console in the house, my lack of anxiety about this move may seem incongruous, even hypocritical. I am open to the possibility that I’ll be proven wrong in time, but here’s how I see it today.

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Comments (3)

Fettoosh ·
Pretty nice short article but author didn't mention why WebKit is still open source in spite of being used as core engine in Safari.

Although a link to the WebKit web site is included where its origin is indicated up front,
Quoting:WebKit's HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE.


it would have nice to slightly hint its origin in the article.

caitlyn ·
Um... he most certainly does mention that it's Open Source:
Quoting:WebKit is not a web browser. It’s not even a product. It’s much more analogous to Linux, an open-source project that any company or individual is free to build on and enhance.


FWIW, Midori is a WebKit based browser that I really do like.
Fettoosh ·
Quoting:why WebKit is still open source


I know he did. My point is he failed to mention Why. The answer is: Its origin is KHTML, which was developed by the KDE team and released under the GPL.

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