lol let's not pretend that Apple has limited resources though. Apple has a very limited amount of core developpers (e.g webkit being abandonware) and they are probably mediocre on average but obviously this is artificial scarcity.
To help you understand the magnitude/impact of this difference, a single 100K commit difference account for more human resources than a whole native GUI framework (e.g cocoa, gtk 72,090 commits, QT ~80K) has received in its lifetime
now multiply that by 8 and you get an idea of how obscolete webkit is regarding human resources.
They might ? have hired more devs recently but if true, it's already a decade too late.
Are you seriously gonna ignore that pulse also shows the diffs (additions/deletions) and that corroborate with commit rate.
Moreover I have expertise in web features, i have read a big chunk of chromestatus.com features and the gap between chromium and webkit is even bigger than the gap between chromium and gecko.
Finally the most meaningful metric is: webkit: ~60 developers worked on it this week, chromium: >700 developers
The gradient gap is pathetically big
...5 of which came from actual Apple employees. Putting it in perspective, the WebKit Open Source maintainers made more contributions today than the people who are paid to do so.
I’m not sure how you’re counting contributions, but well over half of WebKit commits come from Apple employees and (skimming the commit history) I see nothing that refutes that in the most recent commits. The majority of the other commits come from Igalia, with a handful of contributions from Sony, Google, etc. and then some random interested contributors.
Mediocrity can be very hard to explain but it can be asked for many things at apple. Why does the richest software company on earth has made almost zero innovative software products nor technologies this decade?
The only technical talent at Apple is making hardware.
