Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 9th Sep 2008 11:15 UTC
With the recent surge in WebKit adoption, many have stated to question the usefulness of Mozilla's Gecko browsing engine, claiming that WebKit is far superior. Some even go as far as saying that Firefox should ditch Gecko in favour of WebKit. Ars Technica's Ryan Paul explains why that is utter, utter bogus. "From a technical perspective, Gecko is now very solid and no longer lags behind WebKit. A testament to the rate at which Gecko has been improving is its newfound viability in the mobile space, where it was practically considered a nonstarter not too long ago. Mozilla clearly has the resources, developer expertise, and community support to take Gecko anywhere that WebKit can go."
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Gecko is a DOM/CSS renderer with a little (?!? perhaps a lot) extra under the hood (XPCOM, XUL, and the far too underappreciated XBL).
WebKit is a combination of two things: WebCore (the DOM/CSS renderer) and JavaScriptCore (the scripting engine).
Now Gecko is more than just an HTML renderer, and as such is more complex. WebCore is much more focused and streamlined, which in my experience makes it easier to port.
As far as the three Gecko extras go, I could easily do without XPCOM (a Microsoft COM 'clone') and XUL (just another UI markup). The only thing I wish I didn't have to live without is XBL. XBL allows XML elements to be defined like objects, and an XML document to be treated like a graph of objects. I just cannot express how obvious and useful this concept is, or how clearly XBL enables you to apply it, because I'm just too lazy.
But that's what Google is for.
So I'm glad to hear Mozilla is sticking with Gecko. I just wish they'd make more of an effort to stick XBL in places OTHER than Gecko.