WebKit dropped: Google and Opera move to "Blink"

[Richard Bair]

>> Webkit engine feels slow and tries hard to render webpages strangely.
> 
> I did some benchmarks on WebView a while back and it's performance and rendering capabilities were, in most cases for the benchmark tests I tried, perfectly acceptable for today's web pages.
>  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10762979/performance-of-webview-in-javafx

I did a bunch as well, and found that on Java 8 we were about FireFox / Safari performance level.

> One anomaly was that the 64 bit JavaScript engine (I believe) did not run with JIT switched on - which made it much slower than the 32 bit JavaScript engine.  That is an anomaly which (I hope) will be fixed when WebKit switches to use the Nashorn JavaScript engine (http://openjdk.java.net/projects/nashorn/), though recent discussions on the webkit mailing list may cast some doubt on that assumption (http://mac-os-forge.2317878.n4.nabble.com/Deleting-V8-bindings-was-Cleaning-House-td214392.html).

Yes, I think this is going to be the big question coming out of the Google / Apple WebKit divorce proceedings. Google chucks a bunch of abstractions they don't need anymore to support Apple, Apple chucks a bunch they don't need anymore to support Google. Where do we end up?

> 
>> Will we ever see something like the platform specific browser in JavaFX?
> 
> I'm (wildly) guessing that if WebView ends up being supported on iOS, that might occur through wrapping the iOS Safari control rather than the ported JavaFX specific webkit engine modifications - but I doubt such a thing would happen anytime soon as there is no roadmap for such support and any initial iOS implementation for JavaFX is likely to go out without WebView support.

Actually that's exactly what we did, which is to use the built in JS engine. Anything else would run too slow (since apple doesn't let any other JS engine JIT other than theirs). The web view iOS support should be open sourced soonish I think.

Richard