Comment by j-pb
5 years ago
Blink is exactly a good example on why starting out with SQLite would have been a good idea.
Blink is a fork of Webkit, an engine soo much better than the alternatives, that it almost over-night became the de-facto standard.
Did webkit ruin the web? Eventually apple and google disagreed and blink was forked of off webkit.
The same thing would have happened to SQLite as the foundation of a living WebSQL spec.
It's ironic that Mozilla pushed IndexedDB through, yet they were among those too lazy to provide their own implementation. Instead they simply dump everything into SQLite, same strategy done by Apple. They left it to google to implement the only differing implementation based on LevelDB.
But hey, it's totally important to have multiple independent implementations...
There are at least three implementations of IndexedDB. Two are built on top of SQLite, but are different codebases aside from that, as far as I'm aware - I don't think Mozilla just merged in Webkit's IndexedDB implementation. Firefox's implementation came out well before Safari's, for a start.
What would be your opinion if everybody just decided to use Google's implementation of WebRTC wholesale, rather than building out their own systems? What if Mozilla decided to rebase on top of Blink, and give up on building its own rendering engine, tomorrow?
I wouldn't mind if they realise that their implementation is bad enough to be replaced, it would be a win for all. The implementations would start to diverge again anyways. The engineering time saved by piggybacking of a working implementation can the be reinvested into improving the fork massively, or into simplifying the design and specification.
Like I said, webkit and blink are the perfekt example for this.
As for the first point. It doesn't really matter if they have their own glue code, all the important parts are shared.
Right, so the web was a wonderful place when IE6 was the only browser anyone developed for, and for the short period of time when Chrome was the only browser anyone developed for. This definitely didn't affect anyone's ability to choose a browser which met their needs, and definitely didn't result in half-baked and overly complex specifications being forced through the standards process by the only browser vendor with any power.
If Google got their way, we'd be shipping modified LLVM bitcode to clients ("PNacl"), and every browser would be shipping some random fork of LLVM stuck in the past forever. If Microsoft got their way, GMail would be an ActiveX plugin.
Gecko has massive improvements over Webkit/Blink, btw - WebRender is huge.
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