2008/4/1, Christian Persch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > Hello; > > Over the last few months, the Epiphany development team has been > discussing the future of the Gnome web browser. We feel that we haven't > been living up to the full potential of a well-integrated Gnome > application, due to both internal and external constraints. > > The Epiphany user interface is built on top of an abstraction layer > above the web rendering engine, enabling us to support multiple > back-ends. Currently Epiphany supports the Mozilla browser engine > (Gecko), and the WebKit engine. > > The Epiphany dependency on Gecko creates a number of problems for us. > The Gecko release cycle is very long (e.g. Gecko 1.8 was released with > Firefox 1.5 in 2005; 1.8.1 with Firefox 2.0 in 2006 and 1.9 will be > released sometime this year with Firefox 3.0), prone to delays and not > synchronised with the unvarying 6-month Gnome release cycle. > Furthermore, it and the feature work on Gecko are mostly driven by the > Firefox browser, our main competitor on the Gnome desktop. Also the > embedding API of Gecko (GtkMozEmbed) has been unmaintained and stagnant > for a long time. Finally, the current plans for "Mozilla 2.0" bring much > uncertainty to us, as well as much work to account for their proposed > big API changes. > > We are a small team, with only one maintainer and a hand-full of > regular contributors. Maintaining the abstraction layer, and the Gecko > back-end require lot of effort and time. Much time alone is spent on > keeping up with Gecko API changes, and we have not had much > contributions to the Gecko back-end in a long time. > > Therefore we have decided to radically change the future of Epiphany > in the upcoming 2.24 development cycle. We will drop the abstraction > layer, making the code more maintainable, allowing faster development > and enabling us to take advantage of the features of the back-end > directly. > > Furthermore, we will choose only one web engine back-end to support > and concentrate our efforts on it instead of spreading our efforts to > multiple back-ends and restricting us to the common features all > back-ends support. > > This single back-end will be * WebKit *. > > We see several advantages in WebKit. These include: > * The WebKit APIs. The API has been designed from the ground up, and > feels like any other GObject based API. A two-way GObject bindings to > the web page's DOM, and to JavaScript is in development; > this will allow us and our Extensions to access the DOM directly, which > hasn't been possible before in Epiphany in either C or Python. > * WebKit uses Gnome technologies directly. Similarly to Gecko, it uses > Cairo for graphics, and Pango for the rendering. On top of that, it uses > libsoup for the network layer, and GStreamer for the <video> and <audio> > tag support in HTML5. > * Starting in time for Gnome 2.24, WebKit/GTK+ will implement a > 6-month release cycle synchronised with the Gnome release schedule. > * We feel that WebKit has the momentum, and can bring more developers > to both Epiphany directly and the Gnome platform by extension. > WebKit/GTK+ already has more people working on it than are working on > either GtkMozEmbed or the Epiphany gecko back-end. > * WebKit is a better match for *other* uses in Gnome, e.g. as a HTML > widget in Yelp, in Devhelp, and as an editor in Evolution replacing > GtkHTML. > > We will propose WebKit as an approved external dependency for Gnome. > > In case that we are unable to complete this development in time for > 2.24.0, we will delay the new Epiphany to 2.26. For this end, we will > maintain the gnome-2-22 branch in a state that allows us to potentially > make the 2.24.0 release off of that branch. > > Signed, > The Epiphany developers > > Wouter Bolsterlee > Cosimo Cecchi > Diego Escalante Urrelo > Xan Lopez > Christian Persch > Reinout van Schouwen > Alp Toker
for (i=0;i<as_much_as_i_can;i++) +1; -- Un saludo, Alberto Ruiz
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