Blink (the new fork of WebKit) is not a product, it’s a project that other projects (which may be end-user products) depend on. Like WebKit, it implements parts of WebRTC and provides hooks for callbacks to browser-specific implementations of the bits it can’t do itself. But nobody will ever download a “copy of blink and use it for WebRTC”. Instead, they’ll download a product that uses or embeds Blink but which has a different name. For example Chrome, Opera, or some other custom Chromium-based product.

So the way to think about it is that Chrome implements WebRTC via Blink. Blink itself is not a product, it’s just a name for the source code repository and project.

Hope that clears it up.

If this was an oversight from Google in picking a name, it should be corrected soon. Just show us that you still care and that you are good at heart.

If it was a deliberate or “i don’t care” attitude from a giant company, it is a shame – another instance of going from good to evil.

The one action might soon be forgotten in press, but will remain forever with those who are affected. The choice is yours to make – be good or evil.

This is my response to you as owner of Blink open source SIP project since 2009.

The thread is here:

https://plus.google.com/113757927151929258451/posts/NCB2kc8sehi

I find this to be confusing for a large amount of users. We developed since 2009 Blink http://icanblink.com which is an open source SIP client for Linux, Windows and Mac. With half a million downloads, Blink is well known project in the open source VoIP community.

It is unfortunate that no research was done to yield a better name for this webkit fork.

I’ve already explained why #’s of devs is a distraction here. Safari and Chrome’s behavior had already drifted in ways that made not testing both untenable. Arguing a moot point well makes it no less moot.

Regards

Re: ‘you are screwing your users if you weren’t testing on a per product basis’. Unless you have money to burn, testing combinatorics is a judgement-based business- one should test a reasonable set of combinations to cover the anticipated usage. Testing too much is a waste of time. Testing too little hurts in varying degrees. It’s a business decision.

Re: the metapoint of people expecting more from computers. You have the theory right, but the example is wrong. For instance, I know how to design a computer with a better instruction set than X86. But the x86 architecture is good enough for the masses. People, real live, non-geeky, human beings expect speed and [generally] the ‘how it does it (the apps)’ is not only not-important but is downright noisy-blah-blah-blah. Sorry, but after building O/S, middleware, frameworks for too many years– they are now ‘good enough’ and apps are where it’s interesting. Changing the junk underneath the app can and does create problems. Humans can;t track an infinitely tall vertical stack of technology. Commoditizing the lower parts allow us to move up the stack and concentrate a lot of this innovation (not all, but a lot) at the top— near where regular, non-geeky, humans live.

I don’t want to add another browser to my dev and testing mix. But to your point, given Chrome’s popularity, I will be forced to. This will slow down MY rate of innovation (given a budget that doen’t flex on maintenance). For some longer-than-I-like time, I’ll be carrying the load for two versions of Chrome. And because my customer base spans a number of browsers- I’ll not be doing much to special-case browser shiny features. It’s a tax.

Like everyone else, I’ll bet my CSS is going to bloat up some for some period of time. Gee– can’t wait.

First, you vastly underestimate the sizes of the teams involved.

Next, as I tried to explain above in the comments, this does nothing to functionally change the testing burden webdevs face. WebKit was already fragmented in ways that meant you were screwing users if you weren’t testing on a per product basis instead of assuming that “it’s all good, it’s webkit based”.

You might also misunderstand what’s going on here: we’re not giving up on the WebKit codebase. Indeed, we’re taking it it as our starting-point for Blink. We just hope to evolve it faster. And you’re wrong on the meta-point: people expect more out of computers year over year. If the web cannot deliver that change, more closed, more proprietary systems will instead fill the gap. Don’t know about you, but that seems like the definition of a regression to me.

Regards

I very nearly didn’t hit “approve” on your post because it’s cowardice to hide behind a nick while calling others slaves (or suggesting that others are advocating slavery of any sort).

Your anger and resentment are familiar to me — I was once blighted by a libertarian worldview myself. I hope for you and for those that care about you that you come to a fuller understanding of what it means to be successful in an advanced society where your wellbeing is fundamentally connected to the wellbeing of others.

As for the UK’s relative standard of living…it matters what you’re measuring. Govt control might explain some fraction of inter-country disparities, but you’ll have to work much, much harder to explain away e.g. the nordic countries:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-of-life_Index
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Poverty_Index

Pick your argument carefully; blunt self-assurance doesn’t work on me.

Regards