On 22/02/12 15:17, Ingo Weinhold wrote:
On 2012-02-22 at 06:43:59 [+0100], Ryan Leavengood<leavengood@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:Anyhow, I'm not trying to be Mr Negative, but the WebKit and Web+ project should be looked at realistically: it will take a lot of time to just get it decent, and years to catch up with other browsers, if ever.This does indeed sound rather negative. It actually makes me wonder, if it wouldn't be a good idea to invest time in a good Firefox port (maybe even as a GSoC project).
Mozilla did away with a lot of the native platform rendering layer way back around Firefox 2, replacing it with a Cairo-based one. IIRC the challenge of getting a Cairo port going was the biggest blocker to us keeping up to date with Firefox releases. I have no idea if Cairo is still the way all platforms do their rendering in Firefox, or what other changes have been made to the platform abstraction in the (many, many) years since I last looked.
But even if (re-)porting Firefox is not considerably less work than catching up with WebKit, it would at least bring us a complete browser.
That is true, the UI essentially uses the same rendering engine (or at least, it did at one point) so as soon as the engine worked a full browser UI should not be far behind. It might be worth trying with a GSoC project, and we might get lucky with the student. The interface used to be horrid for embedding into a native browser application (which is why Apple went with WebKit for Safari), but even "standard" Firefox would be a nice alternative to have.
Simon
