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Wow, you have a propensity to misunderstand things don't you?

lol calling me a troll, do you know the old adage, "it takes one to know one".

Firstly I said that Gecko was far more mature than Webkit- I did not say that Webkit is immature. Gecko is the result of almost 15 years of fine tuning for millions of web pages. Webkit is very young in contrast-being perhaps 3-4 years old at the most.


Secondly I did not lie. Although I am no expert in either the Webkit or Chromes code base it seems obvious to me from the comic published by Google that they must have made rather significant changes to the Webkit code. According to that comic when they first started to use Webkit they were only getting 23% compatibility-ie. only 23% of the pages rendered like they normally would with Webkit. Now they claim to have 99% compatibility. I of course cannot explain to you exactly what changes needed to be made- but it seems obvious that both V8 and Webkit needed to be modified to work correctly together to get correct rendering.

As i stated repeatedly in my post, Webkit does offer advantages to devs- it is far easier to integrate with other software, due in large part to it's modular design, and to a smaller degree due to it's relative lack of complexity in contrast to Gecko.

I have nothing against Webkit. I have used applications built with Webkit(epiphany, yelp and others). But IMNSHO Webkit is not as mature as Gecko/Mozilla and I prefer to use Mozilla for my web browsing needs.

Practice your reading comprehension skills before you go around calling others trolls.

Where do you get those dates from? KHTML/WebKit is at least as old as Gecko.



For WebKit to render correctly the platform implementation must be complete, as it necessarily implements a lot of the low-level rendering code. Things like rounded corners, gradient fills etc. are all platform-specific. If you're starting with a new port you'll find that page rendering is not comparable to existing ports. It is likely that all Google mean by their comic is that their WebKit/Skia combination started out as a basic skeleton and was developed until it matched 99% of the functionality in the other platforms.

Replacing JavaScriptCore/SquirelFish with V8 didn't require any major changes to the rendering engine either, as the two are nice and cleanly defined within the source tree.

The Netscape 5 source code was released in 1998, so was KHTML. However, both projects built on older code. Yes, if you trace back Netscape's heritage back to Mosaic from 1994 then you are right: It's about 4 years older. BUT! During the development of Mozilla, the Netscape 5 source code was completely scrapped. Netscape 5 was not Gecko... not even remotely. Only a few graphics survived the rewrite (the Classic theme and one or two mouse cursors).
While WebKit has probably not much in common with KHTML from 1998, AFAIK there was no "Aw, f*#k everything. We start from scratch." kind of moment. So yeah, WebKit is older.

Webkit was the core library for Safari, released as a beta 5 years ago (which means it had at least 6 years of development at Apple). Initially it was a simple wrapper around KHTML/KJS, which had been developed in anger since 1999, which makes for nine years of development.

Gecko's development started in 1997, after Netscape acquired the IP, giving 11 years of development, but development was infamously rebooted in 1999. So Gecko is exactly one year older than Webkit. Until recently, of course, the difference in developers meant Gecko supported more sites, but Webkit has more than made up the difference in the last two years.



You don't seem to know much about coding at all.. Webkit is a component in an overall application.
The Webkit component saw little change, other than hooks to allow a new JS engine to be plugged in, and the Skia library to be used. Webkit, being a redistributable layout engine, always made it easy to change drawing technologies, so none of this was particularly invasive. The work Google undertook was in the design of the overall application utilising the Webkit component.



They went from passing 23% of their layout tests to 99% of them. This is not the same as saying 23% of sites failed to render (no-one would have ever considered if Webkit was that bad). What it means is they identified the layout designs most likely to stress the layout engine. Pages which failed probably used a combination of these.




Webkit needed to be modified to support a new JS engine, and they fixed bugs in its layout, but existing performance on Safari shows that changes were incremental (though keeping in mind the usual 80/20 rule)



I'd be interested to know if you prefer the layout engines (Webkit versus Gecko) or the browsers (Epiphany versus Firefox). My experience has been that even KHTML is faster and more lightweight than Gecko, though it suffers as it does not have all the compatibility fixes Apple (and now Google) contributed to Webkit.


Likewise it may help you to check your facts on Wikipedia before lecturing those around you. The 15 versus 3/4 years development comparison was a pretty poor mistake.