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Showing posts from February, 2013

Tragedy of the WebKit Commons

With Opera announcing that their future products will be based on WebKit, the Internet is abuzz with discussion about what that means and whether it's a good thing. Looking at it as a jQuery developer, it's a good thing if it gets WebKit participants to fix bugs and update older implementations. I can't be optimistic without some evidence that things are really going to change. We don't know how many of Opera's core developers will move to WebKit development, but the press release isn't encouraging:  "The shift to WebKit means more of our resources can be dedicated to developing new features and the user-friendly solutions."  I suspect they want some cost savings by eliminating Presto technical staff, or -- in the most optimistic case for their employees -- refocusing existing staff on the parts outside WebKit core that make browsers different. Opera did  land their first WebKit patch  so they wanted to make a statement that they weren't gettin