Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: The Future of Epiphany

["Magnus Therning" <magnus therning org>]

On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 4:14 PM, Steve Bergman <sbergman rueb com> wrote:

Wow.  I understand where you are coming from.  I have watched, over the
years, as mozilla.org^Wmozilla.com has become more obsessed with their
own Windows product and harder for Linux-oriented projects and distros
to work with.  I can certainly see the advantages of moving to webkit.
And I like, and am excited about webkit.

However, as the administrator of XDMCP/NX servers which serve about 120
business desktops, I must emphasize that it is *critical* for me, and
presumably others in similar positions to mine, that Epiphany continue
to work with all the sites that my users need to do their jobs.

We do a lot of warranty claim processing with a plethora of different
vendors of commercial kitchen equipment.  And I find that sites with web
apps like these are more likely to be IE only.  And I strongly suspect
that when they do decide to support another browser, they do not just
write to web standards.  They take their site and make whatever
modifications are necessary to make it work with that browser.  And
"that browser", when I'm lucky enough that they care about anything
other than IE, is Firefox.

I'll be honest.  While one part of me is cheering this move.  It scares
the hell out of me as an administrator.

I'll respect your decisions.  Thanks for all your hard work.  And good
luck.

Let me weigh in, even though I don't really know what I'm talking about here :)  AFAIU webkit is the basis on which Safari (Apple's browser for MacOSX) is built.  Wouldn't this mean that Epiphany-webkit will work pretty much everywhere that Safari works?  There are also numerous other users of webkit, see the Wikipedia page to get an idea of the size of the market it's likely to have (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit).

I also vaguely remember that Apple chose the rendering engine used in Konqueror.  After talking to KDE developers I've understood that while Mozilla always seems to come down on the side of supporting the standard, Konqueror came down on the side of supporting the web pages found "in the wild".  That at least used to mean that Konqueror was better at dealing with IE-only sites.

So, the former would suggest that there is little to worry about when it comes to webkit not being supported by sites out there, and the latter would suggest that for those IE-only sites webkit will do better than Gecko anyway.

/M