MCBastos wrote:
Interviewed by CNN on 10/08/2011 16:45, Justin Wood (Callek) told the
world:
PhillipJones wrote:
Rather than being locked into Firefox running itself into the ground and
following suit. I suggest the developers at SeaMonkey say goodbye to
Mozilla and switch to web-kit engine. Then you can work at a slower pace
and fix bugs and provide something users want. rather than what Mozilla
demands you do.
Not going to happen, sorry.
People keep coming back with this "switch to Webkit" idea like it was a
real option, it was easy and it was some sort of magic bullet. It is
none of those.
First of all, you have to consider that Seamonkey is written in XUL. XUL
was created specifically to be a cross-platform user interface
development language/environment. The only way to run XUL is on Gecko.
There are NO other implementations. So, to port Seamonkey to another
platform means rewriting it from scratch.
Now comes the second thing: the mail client. Which currently is related
to Thunderbird, which also runs on XUL and Gecko. So besides the
browser, there is the need to either rewrite the entire mail client or
to find a way to integrate a separate, existing client which evolved
independently of Webkit browsers.
Then, the third thing: Webkit is a smaller, more focused project than
Gecko. Meaning it's an HTML rendering engine, and just that. Gecko is a
much more ambitious and complex project. This means Webkit is
comparatively small and lean. But it also mean that Webkit has nothing
that comes even in the same *continent* regarding running an UI. You
have to write the UI using native widgets. So that project of rewriting
Seamonkey's UI? Now it is *three* separate projects: one for Windows,
one for Mac and one for Linux.
To sum up... the amount of work involved in porting Seamonkey to Webkit
is staggering, several times bigger then to keep updating and improving
the current software on Gecko.
And the gains, frankly? I expect to be small to nonexistent. Gecko *is*
a fine browser engine. Webkit is currently better than Gecko in a number
of metrics, but not by that much, and Gecko is improving fast too. But
there are points where Gecko is ahead of Webkit -- witness the recent
WebGL demos, which run fine on Firefox 5 and Seamonkey 2.2 (current
releases), but not on Chrome 13.
The losses, though, would be huge. First of all, forget the current
extension ecosystem. It would no longer be compatible, plain and simple.
To be able to use Chrome extensions, Seamonkey would have to forgo a lot
of its own design roots and get very close to the Chrome design.
Worse, we would be talking about a few years before having a
production-class product. In that time, the current Seamonkey would be
languishing without improvements, becoming more and more obsolete and
bleeding users.
The final product, if it ever saw the light of the day, would look
nothing like Seamonkey -- it would be an unholy amalgam of Chromium and
some mail client (Evolution, perhaps?), years late, lacking features
that Seamonkey has now, less extensible... and no users left by then.
I can't imagine a surer way to kill Seamonkey than attempting to move to
Webkit.
We got to get away from Mozilla and having to following them Lock step.
They've all ready Po'd the number one people that use FF by more or
less flipping off Businesses. At the rate they are going Mozilla will be
just a memory in year or two.
Come up with something else. I don't care if it webKit or first aid kit.
So long as we have a product we can have something that doesn't break
something new every 4-6 weeks. We are being killed with this fast
release stuff. tried 2.3.3a and does not do PDF's. Half of my Web site
is pdf's I'm have to resort to using Chrome or iCab or Opera to test
items I add.
--
Phillip M. Jones, C.E.T. "If it's Fixed, Don't Break it"
http://www.phillipmjones.net mailto:pjon...@kimbanet.com
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