[Sugar-devel] [GSoC] Sugar Browser

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

Lucian Branescu wrote:
> I am inclined to choose the second for a few reasons. First, current webkit
> is much faster and uses less memory than current gecko, which has been
> especially visible on XOs.

I'm not willing to accept this as proven.  As for faster, see
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/020434.html

As for memory usage, see
http://dotnetperls.com/chrome-memory

Webkit may be faster (although... with which javascript engine? on what
graphics hardware? with which bookmarks/awesomebar system?) but I don't
think it's so obvious.  Previous comparisons on the XO have been deeply
flawed because Gecko was scaling up all fonts and images, while Webkit was
not.

> While gecko has superior extendability (XUL
> extensions), Browse isn't compatible with Firefox extensions, so anything
> would need to be rewritten anyway. Userscripts (Greasemonkey) serve most
> needs for now and if needed, an extension API akin to Mozilla's Jetpack or
> Chrome's extensions could be implemented.

This sounds like an argument for staying with Gecko and adopting
Greasemonkey and Jetpack.

> Second, webkit is being used by a lot of projects and has the backing of
> several companies.

Gecko is far more widely deployed (~30% of all internet users).

> Furthermore, it is packaged more consistently across
> platforms/distributions.

I'm not sure what this means, but it doesn't seem critical.

> Third, pywebkitgtk and hulahop have a similar API (and pywebkitgtk tries not
> to diverge unless necessary) and it should be possible to not depend too
> much on any one of them. A thin abstraction layer could be written on top to
> handle most differences and it should only rarely be needed to go beneath
> this abstraction. While this would most likely not result in a browser than
> can switch engines at runtime, it should make any future porting much
> easier.

I'm certainly not going to complain about an abstraction layer of this
sort.  As I've said before, I think a lot of developers would enjoy an
"engine-agnostic" browser widget.

--Ben

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