[dba-Tech] How could IE fix it problems fast

Hans-Christian Andersen hans.andersen at phulse.com
Sat Dec 15 16:20:00 CST 2012


I'm with you on this. Some people have suggested they don't like that idea, because they think there should be another browser engine to keep the competition up, which I'd normally agree with, but the sad fact is that this is not a level playing field and IE has been a detriment to the web rather than a welcome competitor. They can either go with WebKit or even Mozillas Gecko would be just as fine.

> The company is called WebKit. (Note: the OSS KDE first created KHTML, Apple adopted it (swiped it), but then the product's designers forked, refocused and it became Webkit.)

I just want to correct you here. It's not possible to swipe OSS code unless you violate the OSS license. I'm not sure why you would use such terminology? If you fork an OSS project, you simply have to comply with the license (GPL, LGPL, BSD, etc). In this case, it was the Lesser GPL license, which means you can take the code and use it how you like, but any modifications of the code requires you to contribute your modifications back to the project.

To make things clear, WebKit was created by Apple employee Don Melton in 2001 as a fork of KHTML and then was open sourced by Apple's Safari developer Dave Hyatt in 2007. No product designers forked Apple's code and created WebKit, as you suggested.

You can read the facts from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Origins

Konqueror (the de facto KHTML browser) was my favourite browser for such a long time. It brings a tear to my eye to think that the work of the KHTML devs would eventually dominate the world. *sniff* :)

- Hans 



On 2012-12-15, at 12:16 PM, Jim Lawrence <accessd at shaw.ca> wrote:

> Microsoft and all other browser builders have had to content with the
> incredible speed of advances in the internet especially when it comes to
> browser presentation and client programming.
> 
> Many browser developers have tried to avoid client browser issues by doing
> all/most the computing on their servers and then pushing the results to the
> client. This may work temporarily but performance is going to be seriously
> hampers both for the client, who has to wait while a page is being remotely
> rendered and downloaded and for the BE data supplier who has to add more
> hardware and bandwidth just to support the clients. I have been complaining
> about this for a long while.
> 
> Both Apple(Safari) and Google(Chrome) have taken a progressive approach by
> simply not worrying about trying to keep up with the ongoing trends and have
> just focused on building super fast browser layout engines, KHTML and V8
> respectively and have been funding an OSS third party application for the
> latest and greatest HTML5, CSS3 and beyond. The company is called WebKit.
> (Note: the OSS KDE first created KHTML, Apple adopted it (swiped it), but
> then the product's designers forked, refocused and it became Webkit.)
> 
> http://www.webkit.org/
> 
> Webkit is so fast because, even though it is developed in JavaScript, it
> compiles its' JavaScript into native machine code.
> 
> If MS was willing to accept the new order mashup and embrace it, IE11 could
> be a leading browser contender with minimum effort and minimum costs. 
> 
> Aside: I do know there is a big pride thing in the way but going it alone is
> not the answer and having a proprietary developers browser does not make
> business sense on any level.
> 
> Jim    
> 
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