[Sugar-devel] Request to add webkitgtk as a external dependency

[Bryan Berry]

On Tue, 2009-07-14 at 23:41 +0530, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
> I initially tried out whatever I wanted to do with Gecko, however, it
> looks like performance can be degraded quite a bit with larger books.
> To ensure proper pagination (the current form of Read depends on the
> document being properly and consistently broken up into pages), I need
> to pre-render the entire book beforehands to get an idea of the
> dimensions (under a predefined set of graphics settings, so that the
> dimensions come out in a device/screen independent manner). However,
> with large books like War and Peace (which consists of more than 350
> XHTML files), the basic pre-rendering code takes around 18 seconds
> with Gecko (using Hulahop) and around 2 seconds with Webkit. This is
> on my desktop machine - I did not try the comparison on an XO-1. All
> the pages are quite simple, with no images, and minimalistic
> formatting.

I side w/ Sayamindu on this. Rendering native texts in a reasonable
amount of time is really important for a lot of parts of the world. I
can certainly say it is for South Asia. If webkit speeds up rendering of
indic scripts by a factor of 9, then it is worth having two browser
engines IMHO.

> WebkitGTK seems to fast gaining acceptance among application
> developers

I see the same. 

-- 
Bryan W. Berry
Technology Director
OLE Nepal, http://www.olenepal.org