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

[Alp Toker <alp atoker com>]

Robert Marcano wrote:
> I am not speaking of only Epiphany, I mean the entire GNOME Desktop, we
> have Evolution using gtkhtml, yelp using Gecko, epiphany in the future
> using WebKit. The user lose the choice of selecting one rendering engine
> if we do not start thinking in building a plug-able rendering engine for
> all of them. We had it with epiphany now, lets expand it to other apps,
> instead of following our closed world of each app do everything again.
> But now I sound a little repetitive, stubborn by genetics jajajajaj :-)

This is one point most developers are agreeing on. There's little value 
in pluggable web engine backends. The abstraction layers tend to limit 
functionality and increase maintenance overhead with little benefit to 
the user.

There are WebKit patches for Yelp, Devhelp (removes 2000+ lines of Gecko 
embedding code, replaced by ~100 lines of WebKit code and drops the 
requirement for a C++ compiler), some experimental WebKit work in 
Evolution and most (all?) other GNOME applications which use web content.

As I understand it some of these projects are now just waiting for the 
external dependency to be finalised before switching to WebKit by default.

Speaking as an upstream WebKit maintainer we're happy to adapt the 
project to meet the needs of GNOME developers, both in terms of features 
and in project organisation, release cycle for the GTK+ port etc. We 
want to see software like Epiphany and GNOME become the driving force 
behind browser development rather than the other way round.

I hope this helps clear up some of your concerns.

Cheers!