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. -- MCBastos This message has been protected with the 2ROT13 algorithm. Unauthorized use will be prosecuted under the DMCA. -=-=- ... Sent from my IBM PC-XT. *Added by TagZilla 0.066.2 running on Seamonkey 2.1 * Get it at http://xsidebar.mozdev.org/modifiedmailnews.html#tagzilla _______________________________________________ support-seamonkey mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
