[haiku-development] Re: R1/a4 initial planning

Am 22.02.2012 16:17, schrieb Ingo Weinhold:

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). I certainly understand the reasons why to develop a WebKit
based browser. OTOH the current situation is that we have a browser which
certainly shows promises, but is by far not complete, is based on a WebKit
version which the current development gets more and more ahead of, and whose
main contributors don't seem to have enough time to invest in the foreseeable
future to catch up.

BeZilla was with us for a long time and, while not always up to date, was at
least moving along. I don't know, maybe that was only due to continuous hard
work of the BeZilla team, but it does at least seem to me that Mozilla simply
also has a stronger platform abstraction, resulting in changes to the actual
browser less likely to break a platform port (bought with less nativeness).

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.
I don't think this is or has ever been much of a "complete, full-featured browser" versus "small browser with only the essential stuff" problem. This has always been a problem of reliability and integration.
BeZilla managed to get more and more reliable. Only the latest versions got reliable enough. In the intergation department it never got far enough IMHO. The latest version still prevents a regular system shutdown.
Similarily, the problem with WebPositive is not that it has too few features compared to a "full browser". I think the problem is that it is not reliable. Both in terms of randomly failing in the same situation that it worked in before, as well as not being usable for many situations at all (think of accepting an untrusted SSL certificate). Then the port itself is incomplete, for example transformations are not supported in the rendering layer, the problems of the network layer, no caching.
I think if the WebKit port would be more complete (most importantly rendering and network backend), and if it would "just work" and be 100% reliable, then almost nobody would complain it can't do this or that feature that Firefox or Chrome can do. A good, native integration would almost certainly feel more important to a lot of people. 

Best regards,
-Stephan

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