Submitted by Epiphany, GNOME’s web browser, will drop support for the Gecko engine, focusing on WebKit instead. “we will choose only one web engine back-end to support and concentrate our efforts on it instead of spreading our efforts to
multiple back-ends and restricting us to the common features all back-ends support. This single back-end will be WebKit.” Assuming this is not an April Fool’s joke, that is. Seriously, we ought to just shut down teh intertubes every April 1st. It’s getting out of hand.
If it is a prank, it’s at least a good one. Most of the Fools Day crap on the Internet is a combination of obvious bullshit and non-humorous. While I’d prefer funny pranks (if we have to have these pranks at all), I do appreciate well crafted pranks like this one that are entirely plausible enough to make us scratch our heads and wonder if it’s true.
Personally I’m really looking forward to an entirely useful Epiphany w/ WebKit, if for no other reason than letting me test sites on the WebKit layout engine without needing to install KDE or OS X.
Just like Apple told the dev of cheese in gnome to pull it out, it’s a April fools.
If this is an April Fool’s joke, as I suspect it may be, it’s the worst joke ever. It appears everything in the post is true. The Webkit APIs are clean and the base appears to be slick, small, and super fast.
Also, we know that Gecko, despite being an amazing engine is slow to develop and has a long lead time.
That means his argument is actually a really good one, joke or not. So I really hope this is a Gmail-esque real news announcement on April 1 style thing.
Edited 2008-04-01 16:48 UTC
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
===
Not that I have any problems with Gecko, but DAMN i hope this is not a joke.
I don’t understand the “Is this a Joke” remarks.
This event was expected for almost a year, as the developers were constantly bumping the WebKit engine in other GNOME apps (check Alp Toker blog).
K. Ralho
Yeah, the April Fools stuff gets tired REAL quick. I think Epiphany is a great browser (prefer it over Firefox when running Gnome). A switch to Webkit would be wonderful.
I hope this is true, it certainly reads like the truth…
Even the mailing list says “Check again tomorrow if you still don’t Believe this is serious”.
Epiphany Webkit, X.org improvements, Murrine with the alpha stuff, stabilised Compiz … I’m so easily pleased and excited!
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
From: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs <at> apple.com>
Subject: WebKit and GNOME
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.desktop/36244
Edited 2008-04-01 17:30 UTC
.. and see how the communtiy will react. If all hell breaks loose they will say: “April fools!”
If not they only have to maintain a much leaner and nicer engine.(Would make sense to me.)
One of the developers listed in the announcement is Alp Toker and I have seen him developing on WebKit for a very long time, much longer than I have been working on the Haiku port of WebKit. They have been working really hard to make the GTK WebKit port top notch, so this announcement really makes sense to me.
Either way even if they aren’t dropping support for Gecko, the WebKit support will still be there.
I’ve been Googling around a bit for Fedora 8 or 9beta packages using the WebKit back end. Does anyone happen to know of any?
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.
I don’t know anyone who uses Epiphany but the switch to WebKit might make it more worthwhile to try.
Gecko-based Epiphany just seems like an old version of Firefox with no market-share. Granted, Epiphany does use native GTK widgets but that means next to nothing to me.
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.
I don’t know much about webkit or browser design, but in a lot of ways it would be nice if all the browsers used the same backend if only for the sake of web designers.
This is awsome news. WebKit is a really nice rendering engine. While Apple has some problems morphing their other projects into true community-based projects (like the Darwin Calendar Server), Apple did a good job with WebKit to form a truly platform-agnostic rendering engine.
I wonder what Asa Dotzler (CEO of Mozilla) has to say about the news. In recent weeks he’s constantly bashing Apple/Safari/WebKit, saying that Apple will not play fair with independent ports and such. The truth is that Mozilla doesn’t play fair with all embedders, building XULRunner just around Firefox, not taking care about the needs of other projects — if you ever used Camino you’ll probably know what I mean.
I whish the Epiphany all the best. Even tough I’m a KDE user, I may switch to Epiphany as my primary browser — at least until Konqueror with WebKit is ready (hopefully for 4.1, but there are afaik no firm plans for the switch).
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.
That’s not a valid argument because WebKit is free software and can be forked at any time.
WebKit is also not controlled by Apple. The Mac port is, the Qt and GTK ports are not. All involved parties have equal commit rights.
The argument of yours is especially invalid when you consider that KDE relies on Qt and Qt is really only controlled by Trolltech. KDE keeps a copy of Qt in the KDE SVN but that’s it: a copy.
KDE 4.1 will ship with WebKit anyway because KDE 4.1 will rely on Qt 4.4.
The question is: Will launching Konqueror load an additional rendering engine into memory.
True, but with actual support by the KHTML guys, a working version can be achieved in time for KDE 4.1. Without their support we can only hope.
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.
For those who don’t believe it, this is not a joke. They have been working on this forever.
Well this has been in the works for sometime now, and I for one am glad as I am a webdeveloper and a fan of GTK so I can have FF with Gecko and Epiphany with Webkit so that I can thoroughly test out my website.
I want a browser as extensible as Firefox, but with the webkit engine =). Is it possible to add this engine to Firefox or is Firefox browser written very closely with Gecko engine for it to be do-able.
embed/xulrunner and embed/mozilla have gone:
http://svn.gnome.org/svn/epiphany/trunk/embed/
Exciting time!