Apple has announced that it is moving the development of WebKit onto GitHub, which is of course now owned by Microsoft.

WebKit is Apple's web browser engine that is used by Safari, Mail, and App Store among other Apple apps. The engine offers an SDK, and Apple says WebKit offers a full browsing experience for your content, offering a platform-native view and supporting classes to display rich web content using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and handle the incremental loading of page content.

Making the announcement, Jonathan Bedard, Operations engineer at Apple on the WebKit team, said:

"On June 23rd, the WebKit project froze its Subversion tree and transitioned management and interaction with our source code to git on GitHub."

Bedard said that the move to GitHub was due to the need for the WebKit project to support contributions and feedback from developers around the world:

"GitHub has a very large community of developers, especially web developers, with whom the WebKit project works closely with to improve the engine that brings those developer’s creations into the hands of users around the world."

Bedard said Apple has also found that GitHub’s API enables the building out advanced pre-commit and post-commit automation with relatively minor modification to existing infrastructure, and provides a modern and secure platform to review and provide feedback on new code changes. 

The main drawback, according to Bedard, is that git hashes are not naturally ordered. To get around this, the WebKit team is using “commit identifiers” in workflows that require bisection. These provide a count of the number of ancestors a commit has, and they uniquely identify a commit based on that commit's relationship to the default branch and the number of ancestors that commit has.

More Information

WebKit On GitHub

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