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If this is an April fool's joke, I suspect that it's
only aimed at the die hard Epiphany fan base.

So far the worst APril Fools joke for me was the announcement on the OpenBSD mailing list that they had succeeded at porting 3D drivers for ATI and Nvidia. There are many of us who would be thrilled at that development, and I didn't realize it was a joke at first. Bummer!

I hate April fools. Not just today, but all year. Because all this crap ends up in Google search results *forever*.

However, if it is an April Fools joke, I fell for it this morning.

I reproduce, here, the response I posted back to the epiphany mailing list in response to the announcement, just in case anyone is interested. Because this Gecko vs Webkit issue is going to become a very important one in the future, if it is not already:

===
Wow. I understand where you are coming from. I have watched, over the
years, as mozilla.org^Wmozilla.com has become more obsessed with their
own Windows product and harder for Linux-oriented projects and distros
to work with. I can certainly see the advantages of moving to webkit.
And I like, and am excited about webkit.

However, as the administrator of XDMCP/NX servers which serve about 120
business desktops, I must emphasize that it is *critical* for me, and
presumably others in similar positions to mine, that Epiphany continue
to work with all the sites that my users need to do their jobs.

We do a lot of warranty claim processing with a plethora of different
vendors of commercial kitchen equipment. And I find that sites with web
apps like these are more likely to be IE only. And I strongly suspect
that when they do decide to support another browser, they do not just
write to web standards. They take their site and make whatever
modifications are necessary to make it work with that browser. And
"that browser", when I'm lucky enough that they care about anything
other than IE, is Firefox.

I'll be honest. While one part of me is cheering this move. It scares
the hell out of me as an administrator.

I'll respect your decisions. Thanks for all your hard work. And good
luck.

-Steve Bergman
===

Insert obligatory "2008 is the year of the Linux Desktop!" comments.

Nah that will be 2010 and "Ubuntu X" ....

http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/linux/debian/2008040101-renaming-d...

Yes, Wouter Bolsterlee, lead developer (I think) responded to my querying email thusly:

===
2008-04-01 klockan 19:03 skrev Steve Bergman:
> Is this really the plan, or an April Fools joke, BTW?

Many people are asking this. It's not a joke, but many people still don't
believe it. Check again tomorrow if you still don't believe this is serious.

mvrgr, Wouter
===

Edit: Wouter has emailed me back, clarifying that he is not, in fact, lead developer.

Edited 2008-04-01 17:25 UTC

You could give this link a try (http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/howto-test-the-webkit-engi...), I haven't done it myself but I have used Webkit powered Epiphany on Ubuntu before fast but it was no way ready for prime time.

Epiphany is an excellent browser and better integrated with GNOME (for example supports GIO) then Firefox.

I hope Fedora will make Epiphany it's default browser. That whould be really great.

Edited 2008-04-01 18:43 UTC

Does Epiphany support Firefox's extensive browser extensions?

It has its own Python-based extension mechanism. Extensions for Epiphany are easier to write, and analogues to popular FF extensions, like adblock, are there. I did not use a lot of FF extensions, and did not miss any when I switched to Epiphany. YMMV.

Uhm... Apple did a great job by promoting WebKit as an OpenSource project?

Pardon me, but I seem to remember that WebKit originated from KHTML, didn't it?

And apple improved it immensely, to a point where people are considering Webkit over the already established KHTML.

Just because something is a derivative does not make those who build on it inferior. For a while, KHTML wasn't accepting apple supplied patches regularly and applying them to HEAD.

It took a long time for a consensus to happen but it appears that KHTML is actually going to be deprecated and replaced with Webkit, or the Webkit supplied with QT.

So yeah, Apple has played a MAJOR part in getting Webkit/KHTML into a position that people want to use it. Nokia has noticed this as well and used the code in on their mobile phones, Abrowse has adopted it as well.

Consider this akin to gcc/egcs where the fork is actually somewhat a driving force in the development of the original code.

The problem on the KDE side of things still goes on: Pretty much all parts of KDE are going to include WebKit (from Qt 4.4) in some form -- Plasma, Amarok 2, etc.
OTOH there isn't much work to integrate it into Konqueror. If I'm not mistaken, only one person works on the WebKit KPart while the current KHTML maintainers prefer to focus on KHTML and do not attempt to integrate WebKit into Konqueror. They probably fell for the anti-WebKit propaganda by Mozilla Corp.

Or maybe they just prefer on working on something under their control rather than a third party? Webkit is no panacea. It's not something that can just be dropped in (to Konqueror for instance) and be up and running.

Read: http://zecke.blogspot.com/2008/01/joys-of-debugging-webkit.html

It's not a slam at Webkit; it's written by someone who is quite enthusiastic about it. But to me it illustrates just how far from easy it would be to replace KHTML with Webkit. It's obviously doable, but I don't think it's as trivial as some make it out to be.

KHTML was a neat base but it relies heavily on Qt/KDE technologies. WebKit transformed KHTML into a really neutral framework that can be used by Cocoa, Qt, GTK, etc. without many problems.

Apple did a good job with WebKit to form a truly platform-agnostic rendering engine.

I would give a lot more credit to KDE considering they created the rendering engine. Apple wasn't very helpful in the beginning either. It was only community pressure that forced them to be more helpful to the KDE team in return.