Google and Chromium
Update:Proving once again the Google is a company that tries to do no evil, the Chromium team have updated their announcement to more clearly identify the origins of the full page zoom and autoscroll features. Thanks guys!
I think Google is a really cool company, and I use their products and services every day. From their excellent search engine, to the great technical lectures they show on You Tube, to discussing the burning questions of the day (such as Pirates-vs-Ninjas), they provide a huge amount of benefit to the world at large. I love Google! (In fact, I couldn't even write this screed were it not for the services Google provides ;-)
However, just like when a family member does something crappy to you, I do feel that the publicity for their Chrome browser project has been somewhat disingenuous in their discussion of the benefits derived from the WebKit project.
Take for example their recent announcement, or their ongoing blog. Among their new features and bug fixes attributed to the Chromium team, they highlight two significant new features that were both provided by the WebKit project:
There is also a bit of vague hand waving about the great tools in Chrome, including the Web Inspector and ACID 3 compliance, both of which are actually provided by WebKit.
If you delve down into the detailed release notes, you can find reference to these facts, but to the typical reader this work all seems to have been done by Google.
Now, things certainly go both ways -- for example, we hope to get new bitmap rendering support in Windows from the Chromium team, and their threading and other low-level updates have been very useful. But I would hope that both of our projects would want to provide correct attribution, and at least for now this does not seem to be true for the Chromium publicists.
But is it so much to ask for there to be proper attribution?
I think Google is a really cool company, and I use their products and services every day. From their excellent search engine, to the great technical lectures they show on You Tube, to discussing the burning questions of the day (such as Pirates-vs-Ninjas), they provide a huge amount of benefit to the world at large. I love Google! (In fact, I couldn't even write this screed were it not for the services Google provides ;-)
However, just like when a family member does something crappy to you, I do feel that the publicity for their Chrome browser project has been somewhat disingenuous in their discussion of the benefits derived from the WebKit project.
Take for example their recent announcement, or their ongoing blog. Among their new features and bug fixes attributed to the Chromium team, they highlight two significant new features that were both provided by the WebKit project:
There is also a bit of vague hand waving about the great tools in Chrome, including the Web Inspector and ACID 3 compliance, both of which are actually provided by WebKit.
If you delve down into the detailed release notes, you can find reference to these facts, but to the typical reader this work all seems to have been done by Google.
Now, things certainly go both ways -- for example, we hope to get new bitmap rendering support in Windows from the Chromium team, and their threading and other low-level updates have been very useful. But I would hope that both of our projects would want to provide correct attribution, and at least for now this does not seem to be true for the Chromium publicists.
But is it so much to ask for there to be proper attribution?
Comments
What else should we have done?
I'll revise the announcement link -- I thought that was part of the Google blog roll.
When you look at the posting (http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/), it refers to the "new version of WebKit with lots of fixes and new features like CSS gradients and reflections", but then calls out Full-Page zoom and Autoscroll as separate bullet points along side the new features actually written by Google. I think this is confusing.
I feel that the autoscroll work (originally done by Maxime Britto), and the full page zoom (mostly by David Hyatt) should have been included among the "new features" from WebKit.
I think part of the problem is that browser-versus-renderer is a difficult distinction for people who don't even know what a browser itself is. Another part is that Chromium is NOT just a UI slapped on top of a copy of WebKit, and has lots of additional architectural plumbing (part of why it's taking us so long to get our port landed on the WebKit trunk!). So for example, I think full-page zoom required Skia work as well as the WebKit cross-platform changes.
Complicating this even more is that our most recent set of notes was trying to find a way to summarize three months of Chromium trunk work which also included ten months of WebKit trunk work, which is just a huge indigestible amount of changes, so we were looking to economize on our words. Maybe we trimmed more than we should have.
I guess in summary I feel like we as a team are trying hard and would like constructive criticism where possible, but also to be given some understanding slack if something seems wrong -- there's no hostile intent here, and we the engineers are pretty accessible, so flag us down when you have issues :)
We could probably have done a better job calling out WebKit more explicitly on these points. I didn't write the release text, but I think one intent was to note these as top-line items since so many users had requested them. We didn't say anywhere on the post that Google or the Chromium team deserve all the credit for things, merely that we were listing a few highlights of the latest release, which is completely accurate; but I can see how someone could interpret things the wrong way. I will try and remember to keep a closer eye on this for any release notes I look over in the future, sorry!
I still think the end goal should be a day when all parties can be a little less careful about attribution because everyone feels sufficiently respected and appreciated and knows no slights are intended. Right now I think it behooves us to make sure we make things clear in order to generate that feeling of appreciation, though.
As we discussed on IRC, some of this is a bit of karmic comeuppance from the Apple-vs-KDE period. Still, Google and Chrome attract far more interest and attention that the WebKit project and so some of the sour grapes are just due to seeing friends' work being attributed (often not at Chrome's fault) to others.
I think this will probably resolve itself over time, as people become more cognizant of WebKit and it's contributions, and there are less hurt feelings.
Also, keep in mind that there were lots of previous cases of somewhat shady consumer electronics groups that have used WebKit without contributing anything back to the community, so to some extent you are being unfairly hurt by the knee-jerk reaction to these earlier poor behavior.
Clearly, the Chromium project is in no way like these other groups, and have already contributed far more back than anyone else I can think of.
I think everyone markets their commercial products how they want to market them. Only Flock seems to credit their upstream browser on their home page :)
SquirrelFish Extreme was entirely written by Apple engineers, the original SquirrelFish had one non-apple contributor, etc...
Similar is true of the Web Inspector, all CSS features, the HTML5 support, etc, etc