Re: What is Epiphany's role now?

[Adam Hooper <adamh densi com>]

On Tue, 2007-27-03 at 16:47 -0700, 甘露 wrote:

> Why on earth Epiphany can't be the mozilla 'official' recommended
> browser for GNOME like Camino for OSX.

Would *you* write a piece of software and then recommend to everybody
that they not use it?

> And why can't Epiphany support
> firefox's extensions in more direct way?

Main reason: Firefox's User Interface is built with XUL, and Epiphany is
built with GTK. So a JavaScript Firefox extension may, for instance, try
to create a menu entry in a XUL menu, which Epiphany doesn't have.

Note that any Firefox extension which does *not* use XUL should run just
fine. Actually, some Firefox extensions which *do* use XUL can run fine,
too, with the exception of adding UI elements to the main window. (I
think if you can figure out the chrome:/// url, you can get the DOM
Inspector running in Epiphany. I forget whether it runs smoothly or has
glitches, though.)

Even if Epiphany *could* run Firefox extensions natively, this would
lead to a massive amount of problems, in the form of untested
extensions. Extensions written for Firefox would be tested only in
Firefox (by their developers), and so a new Firefox extension may or may
not work in Epiphany. As far as I know, *all* Firefox extensions have an
abysmal level of testing (okay, so do Epiphany extensions). So even if
Epiphany presented a perfectly Firefox-compatible API which wrapped XUL
to GTK, I'll bet many Firefox extensions would still break in Epiphany.

-- 
Adam Hooper
adamh densi com