Opera moves to WebKit and V8

Posted Feb 16, 2013 10:17 UTC (Sat) by geofft (subscriber, #59789)
In reply to: Opera moves to WebKit and V8 by Company
Parent article: Opera moves to WebKit and V8

And yet, we're on a comment forum full of people who would be ecstatic if Linux had 95% market share, those pesky BSDs remained (or became, in OS X's case) a distinct minority, and the not-really-POSIX platforms like Windows just disappeared. (Myself included, in fairness.)

A lot of the usual reasons to worry about monocultures go away, I think, when you have a large public development community and when there are independently-driven forks in use with somewhat different code, especially for newer code (the distro kernels, in Linux's case). So I'm not too worried.

What worries me more is, for instance, Apple's requirement that everyone writing a browser on iOS must be using the system WebKit (the so-called Chrome for iOS included), since that keeps all power to patch that web engine for an entire platform in one entity's hands. Opera for Android and Chrome for Android both using WebKit, using different forks of WebKit, not so much.

Opera moves to WebKit and V8

Posted Mar 12, 2013 5:38 UTC (Tue) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] (1 responses)

> What worries me more is, for instance, Apple's requirement that everyone writing a browser on iOS must be using the system WebKit (the so-called Chrome for iOS included), since that keeps all power to patch that web engine for an entire platform in one entity's hands.

That sounds very much like the distros vs. upstream argument on bundled libraries... for exactly the same reason, unbundled system libs allow the distro/OS to patch all users of that lib with a single patch to the system lib, instead of requiring dozens of apps, some of them obscure and rarely used enough to not be as well tracked as the major browsers, be patched.

Seems quite reasonable to me.

Now if, say, firefox isn't allowed to run on iOS (I don't know, iOS is a walled garden I don't even visit), or links or lynx, the text-mode-browsers, because they use some non-webkit library, then that's a different matter indeed. But requiring unbundled system libraries is standard practice among distros as well... for good reason!

Duncan

Opera moves to WebKit and V8

Posted Mar 12, 2013 7:24 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

Firefox is not a webkit based browser, so it's not that it's bundling it's own webkit, it's that it's not using the Apple blessed browser engine, so it's not allowed on iOS