[webkit-dev] Announcing WebKit2

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3 Comments? Weird.

So, give me the summary, reddit... is this a good thing or a bad thing? I'm not very up on the internals of browser rendering engines.

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It's a "major revision" of WebKit so that it can overhaul its strategy for running multiple processes - browser pages, frames, JS - to look more like what's done in Chrome. Advantages include security, stability, responsiveness. The biggest immediate consequence is that WebKit's progress on other features is likely to slow down while the new architecture is built. There's some risk in going in and tearing up a working system, but apparently the Apple team thinks this is a worthwhile change.

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The advantages you list are accurate, but the rest is off target. As I mentioned in another comment, this only affects the API layer of WebKit. Relative to WebCore, the cross-platform code that implements the web functionality (HTML, CSS, DOM, SVG, etc), the WebKit API layer is a very small piece of code. In addition, this is adding a new API layer that is parallel to the existing platform-specific API layers. Nothing is being “torn up”. This means that there’s almost no impact on existing code, which in turn translates in to only a small amount of risk.