Open Safari
In the mad rush around the fact that Apple is, in fact, switching to Intel CPUs and despite my having to eat a helping of crow, the world does keep moving. And WebCore/WebKit is part of that world. What is WebCore? It’s an HTML rendering library based on KHTML. It’s open source and forms the basis of browsers like OmniWeb and Safari. In short, it’s the best-looking web engine out there and part of the family that’s the biggest [open-source] challenger to Mozilla’s Gecko engine. WebKit is a more developer-friendly framework that makes it easy to embed a web-browser view into your application. JavaScriptCore is, well, a JavaScript engine.
A few weeks back, there was a bit of commotion caused in the geek community (that is to say, on Slashdot) when one of the KHTML developers complained about people’s misinterpretations about how closely Apple works with them. Since KHTML is GPL software Apple has no obligation to return their changes to the KHTML team, yet many user of KHTML seemed to assume that was happening and blamed the KHTML developers for the fact that KHTML didn’t match WebCore feature for feature.
The reason KHTML lagged behind is because WebCore was developed Apple-style. Revisions to the code were tracked in Apple’s internal Source Control System (which the public doesn’t have access to), bugs were tracked in Radar, Apple’s internal bug-tracking system (which the public doesn’t have access to). All the public had access to was the opensource.apple.com server on which the source for the latest version of WebCore was stored. Obviously, this made it difficult for the KHTML team to know what changes had been made for what reasons and when those changes had happened.
That was then. Today, David Hyatt, leader of the WebCore/WebKit/JavaScriptCore/Safari team at Apple, announced that WebCore, WebKit and JavaScriptCore are moving from opensource.apple.com to a new, OpenDarwin-hosted server at webkit.opendarwin.org. The source is now hosted in a public CVS repository and the bugs are now tracked in a public database. WebKit has changed from an Apple project that gets released as open source, to an open source project that is managed by Apple employees. The difference is slight, but significant.
What does this mean to users? Not much, Safari will still be released as it was before, and new versions of WebKit, et al., will still be wrapped in those releases. What does this mean for geeky users? A lot; anytime they want, they can build a new version of WebKit, et al., for there system. Right now, the currently shipping version fails the Acid2 rendering test, the version in CVS passes. Getting that version before the rest of the kids on the block would be kind of nifty.
