This is my contribution for Mozilla Labs concepts. PLEASE, SWITCH TO WEBKIT !Why develop two HTML engines that are supposed to do exactly the same thing, when you could join forces and develop only one ? The user doesn't have access to the engine, it's the "user experience" that matters !
Dump Gecko !
Development in Webkit is much faster ! In less than four months (beginning in January, 2008) Webkit got around 50 points in Acid3, while there are no plans for Gecko to support it yet.
Webkit is faster, smaller, portable !
It's been proven that Webkit has low overhead ! Consider the actual list of architectures that support it:
- Safari on Mac
- iPhone's Safari Browser
- Epiphany on Gnome (gtk+ port)
- Integrated to Qt (Qt 4.4)
- Browser for Google Android phones
- Nokia S60 phone
- (planned) Konqueror on KDE 4.1
- etc !
Dump the legacy !
Even though supporting buggy websites is still important these days, the slow development of Gecko, compared to Webkit, hints to us how bad supporting legacy code can be to maintenance. Let's switch the development models. We can't wait a full year to support Acid3 and other standards when we can wait just four months !
It's free software !
Why duplicating efforts when everything is free source ? Just build the shell above a single great engine that gets the job done. You can do it, because it's free software !
(for a more critic opinion of the same problem, see the post from October 2007 in the Peer Pressure blog)
