webcore/khtml?



I'm noticing that the gnome-webcore CVS branch is unmaintained 22 months
now.  Also Epiphany seems to be based on GECKO, the Firefox/Mozilla
back-end renderer.

I guess the simplest question is probably the best:  Why not
Epiphany/Webcore and Epiphany/GECKO?  Not a fork, but a back-end plug
architecture (Read: buzz buzz buzz) that allows users to switch their
rendering engine either during run (redraw the page on the new engine)
or with a restart.

I see a number of advantages to being able to hot or cold switch
engines:

 - Right now, Wordpress and CMS Made Simple's AJAX is perfectly capable
   of making Firefox and Epiphany 1) Lag for 10 seconds at a time;
   and/or 2) spontaneously crash (enough to trigger the crash
   detector).  This is a bug in Gecko; Epiphany does the same thing, so
   will Mozilla and anything else using the GRE.  Obvious work-around:
   Pick another engine.

 - There would be more freedom for Gnome developers to improve the
   Webcore/KHTML rendering engine.  Memory usage for example is
   atrocious in Firefox, hundreds of megabytes after several hours of
   browsing with one or two tabs open.  Epiphany somehow manages to use
   20 megabytes MORE memory than Firefox, probably because Firefox is
   XUL and Epiphany just sticks GRE inside a GTK+ window (I think).

 - Gecko will not entertain GTK+ buttons; KHTML entertains Qt widgets,
   Webcore could be made to entertain GTK+ widgets.

-- 
John Moser <john r moser gmail com>

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