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As I understand things, the Mozilla codebase is a much older, vastly more complex and significantly less embedding-friendly environment than WebKit and derivati
by _wmd 8y ago
As I understand things, the Mozilla codebase is a much older, vastly more complex and significantly less embedding-friendly environment than WebKit and derivatives. At least from here, it is easy to see why the choice may have in part been technically driven.
(I'm a diehard Firefox user but not gonna lie, side-by-side, I'd prefer surfing through WebKit's repos by a long shot!)
- bluGill 8y agoWhich is odd when you realize that WebKit is older than the firefox engine. (WebKit is a direct descendant of khtml, Firefox was busing re-writing their Gecko engine when WebKit forked)
- belltaco 8y agoHow much of a rewrite was it? IIRC they fixed a lot of bloat issues and called it a rewrite, but it wasn't a full rewrite.
- classichasclass 8y agoIt wasn't much of a rewrite (at least of the underpinnings) and embedding was always fragile even when it worked. A lot of this is XPCOM overhead which can't be completely eliminated. I think the lack of embedding has hurt Gecko showing up in more projects. Their solution was XULRunner which inverts the model by embedding your app in Gecko instead of the other way around, and they don't even support that anymore. I'm hoping GeckoView takes off on Android and makes its way back to desktop, but I'm afraid that will happen too late for people to care about it anymore.
- efreak 8y agoI believe Firefox focus is already using geckoview instead of webview
- DonHopkins 8y agoI don't buy that argument. Getting a facelift doesn't change the year you were born. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/03/dutch-court-rejects-emile-ratelband-request-20-years-younger https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/03/dutch-court-re...
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoIs this true even post-Quantum? I thought that was a major rewrite.