Your Webkit history is wrong [LWN.net]

Your Webkit history is wrong

Posted Jan 18, 2012 16:11 UTC (Wed) by robla (subscriber, #424)
In reply to: It's not so simple... by rsidd
Parent article: LCA: Addressing the failure of open source

Webkit started out life as KHTML. While Apple now has all the resources it could want, the Apple that started Webkit would never had had the resources to start a credible browser initiative from scratch. Open source mattered a great deal then, and it still does.

Apple, Google and many others collaborate on Webkit now. It's a fantastic example of why open source matters.

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Your Webkit history is wrong

Posted Jan 18, 2012 16:56 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

I know (and said in another comment) that Apple forked webkit from khtml. They also took it much further, very fast. Konqueror with khtml was just about usable, and yes I used kde at that time. I don't see a reason to doubt that the company that developed OS X and all its bundled apps could have written a browser from scratch. (Yes, I know the non-GUI core of OS X is open source too - and I used FreeBSD at the time.) Google picked up webkit much later, and seems to have focused on javascript since (which is not shared with safari) - I don't know whether they have a significant contribution to webkit itself.