Re: webcore/khtml?



On Sat, 2006-09-09 at 00:36 -0400, John Moser wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-09-08 at 23:48 -0400, Adam Hooper wrote:

> > So, technically, there's no reason not to do it. Realistically, it's a
> > matter of putting in a lot of effort.
> 
> Technically there's almost no reason to do it as well, am I correct?
> (besides, of course, the convenient smoke-and-mirrors ideas of "some
> users prefer X to Y" and "sometimes X has bugs not in Y and vice versa")

Well, there's certainly reason to do it -- otherwise, you wouldn't have
written to the list in the first place :). A small part of the reason is
purely political -- "look, Mozilla, we don't need you, we *choose* you,
so don't give us reason to switch". With the existing proof-of-concept,
this is already available to us. The rest is technical: smaller memory
footprint, potentially faster page loads, works better for a few web
pages, etc.

But webcore has a large set of bugs. Having used Gecko for ages,
Epiphany developers are aware of most of the icky Mozilla bugs, but the
webcore ones would be brand new. That leads to:

- a huge amount of effort to work around some annoyances (witness just
how much work went into Epiphany's "focus location bar on new tab"
behaviour)
- a huge amount of effort to fix webcore where it doesn't play nice with
Epiphany
- after all that, double the current effort just to maintain Epiphany

So, the cost is high. We're not quite sure just how much benefit there
is. Who knows -- there's a chance that the benefit outweighs the cost
(at least to certain people). And the beauty of open-source is that
anybody who's willing can go ahead and do it, and then we'll really
know.

But nobody wants to :).

-- 
Adam Hooper
adamh densi com

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