A brief analysis of the origins of Chrome and WebKit

The tide of the internet has never ceased, and the surf boards that surf the web have become increasingly sophisticated. There have been three browser wars since people entered the internet age. The first browser war was IE and Netscape, and eventually ie toppled Netscape with the sheer size of windows, and the second browser war against Netscape was a fire Fox Firefox, a bite of IE body a large fat; Firefox and IE are lingering in the endless, suddenly out of thin air to kill a chrome--this family of Google's young man suddenly grow up to the extra Jingzhuang, on a string of fierce momentum, chasing two predecessors jiao panting.

Chrome is punching two seniors

What kind of person is this chrome? Can develop such martial, in just a few years to become the Internet browsing a major mainstream, the market share overtook the Firefox does not say, even in a short period of time over the Microsoft Empire of IE, the world three points of the third browser war pattern?

Chrome has defeated Firefox in market share

The blood of Chrome.

Out of curiosity, a lot of people gossip about the origins of chrome, and then find that chrome behind the WebKit name. Friends who have research on browsers should also have more or less heard of WebKit's name. WebKit from the KDE Open source project, thriving in the Apple Safari Project, it has a lot of innovation, in recent years the popular HTML5 and CSS3 trend and webkit off the relationship. WebKit small, flexible but also very powerful, and the source code open, won the industry favorite. From the browser on the Nokia S60, to Safari on the iphone with an expensive kidney, we can see WebKit.

Webkit (left) and Safari logo, a look at the fate of the deep

Google has never been a slow-smelling company, and WebKit's excellent nature has attracted the internet's Beikewen vision. In September 2008, Google released a beta version of Chrome, and Chrome was unveiled. Chrome uses the WebKit code, inherits the WebKit's fine typesetting engine, the rendering page speed is astonishing.

The first beta version of Chrome

Now that Chrome uses the WebKit source code and the WebKit typesetting engine, can we assume that Google has made chrome just by adding a shell to the WebKit?

The gene mutation in chrome

Chrome is WebKit's vest, which is not accurate. In fact, the WebKit is made up of two parts, one part is the WebCore typesetting engine, which is used to parse the HTML language and CSS framework, and the other part is the Jscore JavaScript execution engine, which executes the Web page JS script. Chrome simply inherits the WebCore part of WebKit, using Google's proud "V8" engine on the JS engine, which greatly improves the speed of script execution, which is why Chrome is so fast.

WebKit include WebCore and Jscore.

In addition to this, chrome also encapsulates a layer of WebKit glue,chrome in the WebKit that calls only the WebKit Glue layer of the interface using the WebKit component. At the same time, Chrome source code and WebKit also have a big difference, Google WebKit source code to comb, make code more readable, compile more efficient, and have their own open source project--chromium.

Chromium and chrome: Trial products and finished products

Now that you've mentioned chromium, here's the difference between chromium and chrome. Do not know since when start, popular such a saying--chrome open source. This is wrong. Chrome is not a free software, there is no open source code. Even with Firefox, Chrome is closed-because it cannot provide a wide range of applications like Firefox, which makes chrome less scalable and more customizable than Firefox. So, Chrome is open source software.

Firefox is very open

This is mostly because people confuse chrome with chromium. Although the name is very similar, the icon interface function is similar, also belong to Google, but in fact the two are really different. Chromium is a free software that follows the BSD license to open source, and developers can use chromium source code for development. We can think of chromium as Google's Open source program to develop chrome, chromium the equivalent of Chrome's experimental open-source version. There are also subtle differences in functionality, and Chrome has more widgets than chromium PDF reader, Flash player, and Google update.

Chromium (left) and chrome

In short, chromium is an experimental project, and Chrome is a commodity. The code that developers can use is open source chromium, not closed source Chrome. If you hear someone say, a certain browser based on the Chrome core, the speed is very fast! At this point we should know that this browser actually uses the chromium kernel.

The popular Chromium

Currently using the chromium kernel of the famous domestic browser has 360 speed browser, Sogou browser, the World window browser speed version, and so on, a lot. But we found that although the chromium kernel is very popular with browser vendors at home, the more primitive webkit is almost deserted. What is the reason?

People are more interested in chromium

Of course there is a reason for that. As mentioned earlier, Google WebKit code, chromium code readability and compilation efficiency is much higher than the WebKit. Contrast chromium code, WebKit code is comparable to the Bible, development is much more difficult. WebKit This is not what you want to do, you want to get the AH. What's more, Chromium's V8 JS engine is more efficient than WebKit's jscore, and it's good and powerful.

Given the large differences between chromium and WebKit, we should not simply assume that Chrome/chromium only has a vest on the WebKit. Give Google engineers some applause, because of their excellent and efforts, the world has an excellent browser kernel.