Bug#479851: "merging" the libraries is mostly impossible

Dmitrijs Ledkovs dmitrij.ledkov at gmail.com
Sat Jan 23 18:22:29 UTC 2010


Hello,

Just some further notes about webkit to prevent further similar bugs
about other webkit ports.

Apple forked KHTML & KJS, improved it and make Safari browser because
deal with Microsoft for Internet Explorer was running out. Obviously
they had to opensource and they called the forks WebCore and JSCore
respectivly and Safari browser was sitting ontop of that with backend
call WebKit. Later they moved WebKit out of Safari closer and combined
WebCore with JSCore into just Webkit. Safari then became lighter and
could do more changes to gui. But WebKit was still tangled up with
Objective-C & MacOS frameworks. Apple needed good engine for iTunes &
iPhone. At this point they dissabled Webkit into it's somewhat current
layout to make it easy to build different types of libraries around
it.

This allowed them to do 3 ports the Webkit MacOs framework as used by
safari, the Windows C++ framework for iTunes/Safari. Then later they
reused that codebase to create Webkit for Cocoa Touch on iPhone. From
blackbox testing you can interspect that those ports (as reffered
upstream) are quite good stable/api libraries but they are very
different beasts which even Apple cannot use interchangeably across
their products. But it's very great content engine which lets you
relatively easy to make a library out of it for the purposes you need.

Then nokia did the S60 port, stated the QtWebkit and then Google did 3
more ports for the V8/Chromium. All of them are very, very different
beasts with completely different dependencies, libraries and goals.
And then somewhere there started the gtk port.



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