

Shift leaves only three major web rendering engines on the market

And then there were three.  


I. Opera Joins Up





II. First WebKit Product on the Way


Opera Mmini
Opera will release new mobile and desktop browsers based on WebKit.




III. Users Are Mostly Opposed to Switch






Comments     Threshold


RE: WebKit...
By Flunk on 2/13/2013 3:47:00 PM , Rating: 2
Seeing as WebKit started off as a fork of the KHTML rendering engine for the Open-Source KDE project I can't see a problem. Google certainly has enough money to fund the project by themselves.

Seriously, why do so many people think that Apple is essential for everything these days. The real reason WebKit exists in it's current form is a whole host of companies decided that it would be cheaper to work on one open-source project than build their own web browsers. They were definitely right too.

RE: WebKit...
By Tony Swash on 2/13/2013 5:32:15 PM , Rating: 1
This article gives a very detailed breakdown of which company contributes what to webkit. Lots of data.

To quote from the article

Some interesting results are the share of contributions by the two main companies behind the project (Apple and Google), and how it has evolved from a project clearly driven by Apple, before 2009, to the current situation, with Google leading the top contributors table, and both Apple and Google being almost equal in contribution share over the whole history of the project. During the last years, it is also noteworthy how the diversity of the project is increasing, with new players starting to show a significant activity.

It looks to me like webkit is in a very healthy situation. Both the major contributors, Google and Apple, want a healthy, open, standards based internet for different reasons. The end result is very good for everyone except possibly Microsoft, I wonder why they bother developing their own browser engine now that they have clearly lost the battle to control the web standards, it seems a bit pointless.

RE: WebKit...
By spaced_ on 2/13/2013 10:28:31 PM , Rating: 2
Indeed. Open source = good for everyone. Except of course the greedy.

Microsoft should open source Trident. Or just dump it.

