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Keeping Firefox integrated

Nicu - the question is, who would you rather have as an ally? Mozilla, or Apple? I know which one I'd pick - the people who open-sourced the browser and have been maintaining the very good Firefox experience for Linux (even if there are details to fill in), not the company making a proprietary platform that competes with ours for desktop marketshare.


That said, there is actually work ongoing now to integrate Tango for example. I don't think it's going to be easier or make more sense to change rendering engines just for the remaining integration points that could have been done as a Mozilla patch instead.

Posted on Oct. 19th, 2007 at 09:58 am | | Leave a comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend

Comments


[info]nicubunulj

Apple?

Yeah, you have a good point about Apple...

I am pretty happy with Gecko, but not with Mozilla Corporation and their Firefox policy (I am also a Thunderbird user and I am worried about its fate).

Still, WebKit is the evolution of KHTML, which was developed from the start as FOSS.
Posted on Oct. 19th, 2007 02:51 pm (UTC) | | Thread | Reply

(Anonymous)

webkit

Webkit is light, fast, and free... what else do we need?

Go on Epiphany/Webkit!
Posted on Oct. 19th, 2007 03:09 pm (UTC) | | Thread | Reply

[info]katzj

One problem with the "could have been done as a Mozilla patch instead" approach is the trademark guidelines around Firefox. Iceweasel just doesn't have the same ring to it
Posted on Oct. 19th, 2007 03:26 pm (UTC) | | Thread | Reply

[info]http://room-303.com/blog/

About trust

I myself am pretty happy with Apple using an opensource project as a base of their proprietary software. VMWare is using free software in their proprietary applications and lots of people actually love their products. Same about Apple.

Now having said that, WebKit has far better architecture when it comes to embedding, works faster, has smaller memory footprint and happily uses GTK the way it was meant to be used instead of doing crappy hacks like cloning several instances of one widget and overloading its painting context.

The "very good experience" you are talking about includes not being able to recompile Firefox for your distro (well, you can always call it iceweasel or stormhamster), mysterious crashes resulting in your profile becoming unusable (right now my Firefox has a no-op downloads window for example) and some bugs open for 7+ years :)
Posted on Oct. 19th, 2007 03:43 pm (UTC) | | Thread | Reply

[info]cgwalters

Re: About trust

As for WebKit and GTK+, I agree it is a more ideal architecture than XUL, but at the core, I don't see it being worth rewriting the browser for it rather than fixing the remaining XUL issues (to the point where it's basically equivalent in experience) - honestly I feel it's largely fine now, but I can understand disagreement there.

The Debian/Mozilla issue is certainly painful.

Mysterious crashes - well, replacing the browser engine with one with far smaller market share is certain to create more problems for users than any bugs Firefox might have.
Posted on Oct. 19th, 2007 04:15 pm (UTC) | | Parent | Thread | Reply

[info]http://room-303.com/blog/

Re: About trust

My point was if there is a bug in WebKit, Apple is chased down by their user base to fix it. They are commercially bound by various contracts. If a bug is found in Gecko, it's evaluated for security issues and if it's non-critical, goes into a huge TODO bin. You want it - you fix it, send us a patch and we might review it. That's my experience with Mozilla.
Posted on Oct. 19th, 2007 04:20 pm (UTC) | | Parent | Thread | Reply

[info]http://claimid.com/ozamosi

Well... Mozilla is making a platform that competes with ours for desktop marketshare too, with XUL. I think the reason people want WebKit is that it's supposed to be faster and lighter (I haven't seen any benchmarks nor have I any real webkit experience, so I can't really say - however, the difference between Epiphany and Firefox tells me that the browsers probably have as big part in this as the engine), and that it's supposed to offer better integration options easier. Therefore, it sounds like a superior option to gecko, and there would then be no reason to keep using gecko.
Posted on Oct. 19th, 2007 03:50 pm (UTC) | | Thread | Reply

[info]cgwalters

That's all hearsay though; certainly WebKit has done well in the embedded space, but *shipping code* matters so much - Firefox is an actual functioning web browser which is continuing to improve, whereas WebKit is still just "in theory".

For an example of the kind of awesome work Firefox is doing to improve their reliability, see:
http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2007/10/16/keeping-an-eye-on-things/
Posted on Oct. 19th, 2007 04:17 pm (UTC) | | Parent | Thread | Reply

[info]cgwalters

I forgot to mention too - XUL is still Free Software so it's not competition, it's part of the ecosystem.
Posted on Oct. 19th, 2007 04:18 pm (UTC) | | Parent | Thread | Reply

(Anonymous)

Apple and Mozilla Corp both compete with GNOME. For technical reasons, WebKit is a better choice by *far*. So yeah, let's go with it. :)

(Btw. Tango needs to be integrated? That's another example of broken design right there).

Posted on Oct. 19th, 2007 03:53 pm (UTC) | | Thread | Reply

(Anonymous)

Fix Downloads

@About Trust

I had the problem with no download window being displayed. Deleting downloads.rdf in my profile directory fixed it for me.
Posted on Oct. 19th, 2007 04:12 pm (UTC) | | Thread | Reply

[info]http://room-303.com/blog/

Re: Fix Downloads

Thanks, that fixed it for me.

Now, that's another bug in Firefox - depending on files being in the correct format. I believe software should run predictable even if I use some fuzzer to corrupt all the config files. It might warn me that the files are broken and exit but should not result in memory corruption or crashes.
Posted on Oct. 19th, 2007 04:24 pm (UTC) | | Parent | Thread | Reply

(Anonymous)

Re: Fix Downloads

It is just a bug. Mozilla has bugs, like any software. They can be fixed.

If you believe that WebKit is bugfree I have a bridge that I'd like to sell to you.
Posted on Oct. 19th, 2007 05:01 pm (UTC) | | Parent | Thread | Reply

[info]http://room-303.com/blog/

Re: Fix Downloads

Sure that's a bug. All software has bugs. This one shows they don't use fuzzers.
Posted on Oct. 19th, 2007 05:09 pm (UTC) | | Parent | Thread | Reply

(Anonymous)

Those are my choices?

Are you asking that as a rhetorical question that has an obvious answer? I see no obvious answer here. Both have serious upsides and downsides. And why can't we have both as allies?

It's a silly question to ask, though. The Mozilla Foundation was created for Mozilla, and if we wanted to promote WebKit and were afraid of Apple, we could make a Foundation for it, too. Why not ask "Who would you rather have as an ally: AOL, or Apple?"?
Posted on Oct. 19th, 2007 11:50 pm (UTC) | | Thread | Reply

(Anonymous)

Re: Those are my choices?

I rather like the idea of a WebKit Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation both being allies. Or rather, both kissing ass to try to be The Better Linux Browser.
Posted on Oct. 20th, 2007 03:23 am (UTC) | | Parent | Thread | Reply

[info]kevin_kofler

ABI

Another advantage of KHTML (and as far as I know WebKit too) is that you don't have to rebuild all the applications depending on it for each security fix. Mozilla's stubborn refusal to keep a stable ABI for even security fixes is a big annoyance.
Posted on Oct. 20th, 2007 03:50 pm (UTC) | | Thread | Reply

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