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Feb 09

Will the real WebKit please standup

Comic, Tech, Web Browsing Add comments

webkits

I recently heard a conversation in Palo Alto which had the following in part of it:

  • Chap A: Are you testing in WebKit?
  • Chap B: Which WebKit?

I have heard this before. I am running into this issue myself right now. Something that our team is playing with uses some bleeding edge standards, and some recently were added to WebKit nightly. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that they are in Chrome, AIR, Mobile Safari (in this case it is), or the other people who use and fork WebKit (from Nokia to Titanium).

On the one hand companies are highly leveraging each others work when they choose WebKit. Forking isn’t necessarily an evil thing anymore, especially if everyone is giving back to the cause as much as possible. The WebKit team implements CSS Animations, and you hope that it will be placed in browsers that use WebKit in the future. Watching the WebKit community deal with the many large companies will be interesting indeed in the coming couple of years. Luckily, the core team is top notch, and continue to push forward.

6 Responses to “Will the real WebKit please standup”

  1. Rob Campbell Says:

    As more people are using (and forking webkit), we’re going to see the number of compatibility problems increase. I expect as the space grows (and the base diverges) we’ll have to treat Webkit derived browsers like Safari, Mobile Safari and Chrome as separate entities.

  2. Jon Tirsen Says:

    In some ways it has an added benefit: The web developer community might become less focused on supporting a particular browser (”make it work in IE7″) and more focused on building for particular browser capabilities (”make it work without CSS animations”). It’s harder and more work but in the long run it’s better for the web.

    I think this is going to be more and more common as the browser market opens up and diversifies. Which is a good thing.

  3. Ryan Stewart Says:

    Aww. Adobe AIR looks way cooler than that guy! ;)

    =Ryan
    ryan@adobe.com

  4. V1 Says:

    You forget that Dreamweaver live view is also using Webkit and that is the real webkit ;)

  5. andrej Says:

    There’s only one real webkit, and that is kde’s khtml…

  6. Powell Says:

    Gr8 discussion going on.Carry on guys.

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