Re: Backends - was: ANNOUNCEMENT: The Future of Epiphany

[Reinout van Schouwen <reinouts gnome org>]

Hello Robert,

Op dinsdag 01-04-2008 om 14:17 uur [tijdzone -0430], schreef Robert
Marcano:

> Why I think Gecko is still important on Epiphany, because the enterprise
> sector. Currently I am working in a project related to a massive
> migration to Linux on the desktop, and our current browser in testing is
> Epiphany, for two reasons: it is Gecko, required by many applications
> from third parties, those that only develop for a few browsers and do
> not support (officially) any standard compliant browser; and the GConf
> integration, moving to WebKit exclusively will destroy our preference on
> Epiphany and make us harder forcing us to use plain Firefox.

I understand your concern and there's little I can say to mitigate them.
The reality is that Mozilla's APIs are constantly changing, and almost
all development effort is going towards the Firefox product and
embedders are treated as an afterthought. We haven't been able to
implement often requested features because of limitations on the Mozilla
back-end for years. Switching to WebKit gives us the chance to change
this. Rather than spending effort to keep Epiphany compiling with
various releases of Firefox and XULRunner, we could fix actual bugs. :)
So if WebKit is not among the supported engines in your enterprise
project then yes, I'm afraid Epiphany is out of the picture for the
forseeable future. (Unless of course, your company is willing to pay
someone to maintain the Gecko back-end. It's Free software, after all.)

> Like in any opensource project, the maintainers are the guide the
> project, but I am worried that a decision like this (if it is real and
> not only a way to test the waters) was done without too much user
> involvement (correct me if I am mistaken, but I never heard of someone
> proposing this in the public)

Please don't think this decision was taken lightly, we have a huge
investment in the current codebase. But there is no way that any user
involvement could have offset the technical reasons behind this
decision.

regards,

-- 
Reinout van Schouwen