I mean, Blink is a fork of WebKit, so yes? But it’s also even less-responsive to upstream contributions so, outside of embedded systems that had previously adopted WebKit, I seriously doubt it'll recapture the traction it had before the fork.
"recapture the traction"? It is used by literally billions of devices of varying form factors every day. It has probably 100x the number of users as Gecko/Mozilla Firefox and one of the wealthiest companies on the planet sponsoring development, and I don't see Apple betting on Gecko or another fork of Chrome anytime soon.
Who said anything about Apple? I would never suggest Apple use another fork or the fork they incubated/created/developed. I was replying to a comment asking if WebKit, which != Safari could be a replacement for the Chrome-driven world we are in and when used by people who aren’t Apple.
And yes, it is absolutely bigger than Gecko. No question. But are you going to tell me with a straight face that WebKit has the same amount of traction with third-parties as Blink? Because sorry, that’s not the case. That was the case for about 5 years, when post iPhone, everyone and their brother decided to use WebKit to power their mobile browser for whatever mobile OS they were building for (Android, BlackBerry, Symbian/Maemo/Meego, webOS, Tizen) or for whatever embedded systems they were designing for in-car systems or whatever, but after the Google fork became demonstrably different, the surviving players in that arena switched to Blink because Google was faster at iterating and easier to work with for upstream commits (easier does not mean easy).
It is a fork, but that was really long time ago, most parts of both engines were completely rewritten so for all intents and purposes these are completely different engines.
They’ve splintered a ton over the years for sure, but there are still similarities. But yes, this isn’t like the first few years when Blink was just WebKit with V8.
But on the whole, Blink is still more similar to WebKit than it is to Gecko.
Brendan Eich IIRC said they looked into building Brave on top of Webkit but it was so hard to compile and embed across all three platforms that they went with Chromium. Same story with Gecko.
So that's another reason why we now have a Blink monoculture: because the alternative engines didn't spend any effort in making them usable by third party applications.
WebKit is used by the WebkitGtk library which all of these include.
But it's been stagnating for years and it's still not a viable replacement for Gecko and Chromium (broken scrolling on scaled screens, WebAuthn is unsupported so I can't login to my email account, etc.)
In any case, if I recall correctly Eich's comment, the biggest difficulty was building webkit for Windows. The documentation was very out of dated, and it's understandable given Apple's focus on its OS. Even this GitHub says it's a web engine for "macOS, iOS and Linux".
If Mozilla bite the dust, unfortunately Firefox/Gecko developers will lost the job, then possibly some of them start developing WebKit or based browser on Apple or different corp. I don't want it.
AFAIK, Apples control over WebKit is not any less than Googles over Blink, which many say is the source of many of the webs problems. I remember the days Apple posted tarballs infrequently. I'm wondering if this move may open development up, and thus may become a codebase more widely 'owned' than Blink's.
I think "control" here is somewhat unreasonably pejorative.
They each do the vast majority of the dev work in their respective engines, so it's "control" only because if they want a feature they'll just implement it. Similarly neither implements things that aren't of interest to them - I can't speak for blink but webkit isn't going to oppose people contributing support for new features unless the implementation is not good (I assume this is a universal across all projects), or it's considered harmful (features that are inherently insecure - a la SVG raw socket access - or inherently harmful - e.g. new tech to aid tracking).
The problem with Blink is not necessarily that Google controls it, the problem is that Blink owns the lion's share of the browser market. This makes Google's control of Blink a problem, since it effectively means Google controls the lion's share of the browser market.
That's only half of it - the problem is that the duopoly maintain a stranglehold over their respective portions of their markets. Remember that Ios forces browsers to use their Safari engine, which is a step more egregious than MS' forced IE bundling. Both together make the problem far worse, and neither alone would make things better. Google and Apple are a huge problem for the web. So to answer the original question, no.
Microsoft's stranglehold over the browser market was a pretty huge problem, irrespective of their business model. The web is way too important to be so tightly controlled by one single company, no matter who they may be.
Microsoft's business model was 'we need to deal with Netscape before the Web kicks our ass' followed by 'we own the market now, no need to spend resources improving this'.
Of course, Firefox and later Chrome came around, so in the end the Web kicked Microsoft's ass anyway.
> Microsoft's business model was 'we need to deal with Netscape before the Web kicks our ass' followed by 'we own the market now, no need to spend resources improving this'.
I think it was a bit more general: "We want to keep a stranglehold on the Apis used to write general software". The ability to write software once for the web and have it work on web browsers on any platform was viewed as an existential threat.
However, the observation that they only developed IE as long as they were worried about that threat and then left it to rot afterwards is spot on.
Their strategy was aimed against their competitors interests, not their users interests. Microsoft in the bad old days still saw their users as paying customers and not just a source of data to be exploited.
It isn't Microsoft that has entered the extinguish phase for ad blocking browser add-ons. I also don't remember Microsoft doing anything as anti-user as trying to keep pop-up blockers from working back in the bad old days.
Pop-ups were universally reviled, but also explorer aggressively pushed lots of random half features to support their products - the only difference is that they didn't publish a "spec" as google uses to create a veneer of not being anti-user.
MS's anti-user was in the form of ensuring that necessary sites would not work in other browsers (including the Mac IE engine, whose name I have forgotten, and therefore IE mobile). They didn't block ad blockers, etc because they didn't support any kind of extensions :D
It wouldn't unfortunately. It's merely one stranglehold in a duopoly; Blink and Webkit are controlled by their corporate overlords in their respective spheres of influence. Ios won't allow non-Safarized browsers (think back to the IE days, but worse), and Google decides what goes in Blink.
So in short, no. If Mozilla dies, then there will be trouble and would need someone to carry on their work as the last remaining 'freedom' blessed engine.
right? We already have an IE-esque level of monopoly and associated behavior from chrome/blink. Making it just blink+webkit seems like it would be even worse - even though they have diverged significantly it's also wrong to think they're "different" in the sense of gecko and blink/webkit or even presto.
I think the real problem is the gecko and spidermonkey seem to be falling significantly behind on real user experience. This is ignoring the Firefox application itself which I find super irksome.
But as their gross built in tracking+advertising shows they are at least somewhat hurting for cash which does not help, and encourages gross stuff like said spam+tracking.
It doesn't help that the google folk keep shoving out half-assed specs for whatever some google team has decided they want/need with specs but little thought of generally of how to make more universal solutions. That just means you've got constant pressure to implement ever increasing numbers of standards just to stay in place - if apple (and technically MS in the past) has difficulty keeping up with the constant "spec" spam it's hard to see Mozilla managing in the longer term.
Apple has iOS browser control on complete lockdown, so even if it performed as bad as Gecko, they’re pretty well off.
> bite the dust
If I were ceo of Mozilla I would have cut off Firefox development like 5 years ago. It doesn’t look pretty, but AOL and Yahoo changed assets, they don’t look as ugly. But I also hate a lot of what they currently stand for, and they don’t really have assets. They’re like some NPR for web standards documentation, and while it is the best, it’s not very valuable. Google seems to have a lot of leading control while Mozilla is angry outside, with a megaphone, and red-orange dyed hair.
They’ve always been open source, they’ll die of natural causes.
None of Mozilla's virtue signalling serves to bring back the Firefox of yore. Firefox has instead followed Chrome's heels at every turn to the point I might as well just use the real deal rather than a third-rate knock off.
I want a lean, effective browser that I can tailor to my specific needs and desires, and Firefox has been not that for at least 20 years.
Mozilla is (supposed to be) a collective of computer programmers, not activists and lobbyists. So fuck their advocacy, more accurately virtue signalling. All of it. The specifics don't matter. Fuck all of that noise. If they go back to making some good software I might be more supportive and respectful of them again, but not a step before.
I guess, I hate to be more pessimistic than I already am, but when I see pointless petitions to “Facebook: Stop Group Recommendations” I don’t see anyone over there truly “fighting the good fight”. I think GNU is a far better example of this type of action.
I think an open source foundation has to stand on the shoulder of a valuable product to get noticed. GNU has all of its things, Mozilla is an acoustic guitar busker playing “bulls on parade by Ratm” outside of a Barnes and Nobles.
