Google Is Now the Biggest Contributor to Webkit

Apple and Google may be increasingly at odds, but there's at least one thing on which they're still working together, the Webkit HTML rendering engine powering both Safari and Chrome, as well as a bunch of other desktop or mobile browsers. But working together doesn't exclude some form of competition and it looks like, at least by one metric - code commits, Google has overtaken Apple for the last few months.

A Google developer has put together a graph which tracks down the number of commits, source code updates, all the big contributors, Apple, Google, Nokia and RIM, submitted for the past two years which shows that Google has been the number one contributor since November last year.

First though, a little history lesson is in order. Webkit was initially developed by Apple but was built on the KHTML library created by KDE developers and used in the Konquerer web browser. Apple adapted the code for its needs and used it in Safari and finally released the whole project under an open-source license after an initial rough relationship the KDE community. Since then it has been adopted by a number of browser makers, most notably Google uses in Chrome and Nokia in its S60 browser for the Symbian mobile OS.

There are several big caveats with the graph data, as the Google developer notes. It's, by no means, a tool to measure the importance of the contributions any one company makes to the project. Counting the number of updates doesn't provide any measure for their importance, as one small bug fix may weigh in much more than thousands of code lines.

Still, the graph shows that Apple has decreased the numbers of commits per day for the past year or so, while Google has significantly ramped up theirs. This led to Google overtaking Apple in November and widening its lead since then. The graph does show some big spikes from Apple ahead of major Safari releases, as the company tends to submit its updates in bulk, so an upcoming release might push it ahead of Google again. Google on the other hand has been increasing the number of commits as it finished adapting the code for Chrome and started focusing more on upstream features.


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