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:2005-08-07
I can see why they want to use webkit in Epiphany (size and that they use the same technologies as GNOME).
Precisely which technologies are you talking about?
It's still the most used web engine in the world (except maybe that of IE, but we'll never know what web engine they use).
They use an engine they call Trident, more officially known as MSHTML. It can easily be used by programs needing HTML rendering and documentation is also readily available. Of course you cannot get the source code, but honestly - have you ever made any use of Webkit/Gecko (simple unpacking does not count as using)? Of course there are people who need the source code, but 99.9% of users and 90% of developers do not.
Member since:2006-11-17
Precisely which technologies are you talking about?
I got it from the link provided by the other poster: "it uses libsoup for the network layer, and GStreamer for the <video> and <audio> tag support in HTML5."
The other reasons they gave looks like right reasons to me.
They use an engine they call Trident, more officially known as MSHTML. It can easily be used by programs needing HTML rendering and documentation is also readily available. Of course you cannot get the source code, but honestly - have you ever made any use of Webkit/Gecko (simple unpacking does not count as using)? Of course there are people who need the source code, but 99.9% of users and 90% of developers do not.
Actually, the source code is very important when the vendor does not bother to compile its engine for your machine. It allows some developers to compile and several hundreds of millions of users, not necessatily developers to use the browser. The license is very important too.
And actually I have made use of the source code of gecko. Indeed, there was an organisation that decided to save power by changing the colors of the browser from black on white to white on black (it makes a difference on CRT monitors and the organisation is about energy savings). Unfortunately, there was a bug in Firefox that made some menus appear transparent instead of opaque with this settings. It took me 5 hours to fix it quick and dirty and the organisation was happy.
Edited 2008-09-09 14:08 UTC
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Member since:
2006-11-17
My bad, I didn't know that. I can see why they want to use webkit in Epiphany (size and that they use the same technologies as GNOME). I don't believe gecko has any less momemtum though. It's still the most used web engine in the world (except maybe that of IE, but we'll never know what web engine they use).
Edited 2008-09-09 12:26 UTC