Top Firefox OS bloke flames Opera for WebKit surrender A top bod at Firefox-maker Mozilla has ruled out replacing its web browser's brains with WebKit - and lamented Opera’s surrender to the web engine favoured by Apple and Google. Opera revealed last week that it will eventually dump its own web browser's engine Presto after 18 years for the one-two-punch of WebKit - the open- …
No it's not, because it's free and open...
In an ideal world, everything would be Webkit based, and everything would only require testing on Webkit, consumers would finally get a fully working web, rather than the broken web we have today.
"The web needs multiple implementations of its evolving standards to keep them interoperable" If everyone used Webkit, they would be not interoperability to worry about.
Mozilla's problem is they see how this is going. I would bet money that Firefox will be using Webkit in the next couple of years, despite what he said.
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I give you Nokia's WebKit browser. Use it for 10 minutes or so then get back to me.
One browser engine to rule them all won't fix your problems. There'll always be bad implementations and different versions of WebKit about, and if WebKit is the only engine out there then the incentive to fix problems is gone.
One browser engine to rule them all won't fix your problems. There'll always be bad implementations and different versions of WebKit about, and if WebKit is the only engine out there then the incentive to fix problems is gone.
<u>THIS</u>
I have nothing against WebKit. I've got plenty of browsers that use it and most of them are fine. I have something against whatever buggy, unfixed version of WebKit they cram into Chrome in order to claim all the latest gadgets and buzzwords.
The first problem with this is that different renderers interpret the standards differently. Case in point: IE5-7 CSS Box Model. They fail the Acid 2 rendering tests. If there is a single renderer, there is no motivation to fix any issues ("our interpretation is correct"). Having multiple renderers helps keep each other sane w.r.t. the standards.
The second problem is that different renderers implement different parts of the standard at different times. Case in point: MathML and SVG. Mozilla have had MathML implemented for a long time, same with SVG. WebKit is only just adding support for MathML. IE has only added cut-down SVG as of IE9 and a more complete version as of IE10. If there was a single renderer, there would be no incentive to implement the other specs (how long has Microsoft dragged their heels on SVG support).
The third problem is that having a single renderer, there will be less sway for others to push for standards as they do not have an implementation to base it on. Especially if the single implementation is pushing their own version.
Also, think about things like eBook readers or text-to-speech/assistive technology programs reading web content. Those have different requirements which may be counter to what the single renderer provides, which that renderer will be reluctant to provide as they go against their goals (think of things like SSML support and the CSS Speech module).
For Mozilla, their stack is tied to their rendering model. They are using XUL (which takes advantage of CSS and JavaScript), which WebKit does not support; the browser runs as a XUL page. They are working on "Paris" DOM bindings to create fast JavaScript <=> Native bindings, which are dependent on their DOM model and JavaScript model (which would be different if they switched to WebKit). They have a rendering stack that supports Direct2D and DirectWrite for fast rendering on Windows Vista and later (and -- along with Microsoft -- were the first to provide a rendering stack using those technologies).
Competition is good and fuels progress. Two is good (e.g. Microsoft and Mozilla); Three is better (e.g. Microsoft, Mozilla and WebKit). Think back to the progress made when Google released their fast JavaScript engine with Google Chrome -- all browsers increased in performance as there was competition in that space, with Chrome put pressure on the other browsers.
Not sure I'd give it more than one. But that doesn't mean Eich is wrong about the monoculture.
Yes it being open makes it more defensible than being dependent on a closed source binary, but only from the perspective of being able to preserve old versions and fork the code. From the perspective of "the bad guys found a problem in our code base and have an active exploit in the wild" a monoculture in OSS is just as bad as a closed source one.
mozilla should fix the memory problems (i assume its memory problems though it could be how it interfaces with the plugins container as stopping that in task manager often stops the lock-up) with firefox before bitching about others choice in browser engine.
im now forced to use chrome (which i hate) because firefox is unstable, and that instability has been getting worse for at least the last 3-4 full revisions. i was a supporter of firefox for years but i dont have time to wait for firefoxs random 5 min lock-ups.
and before people bitch that its my choice of browser plugins - i have tried it on fresh installs of win7 (x86 and x64) and fresh firefox installs with NO plugins. its worse on the x64 systems though it happens on both. and it occurs on pages with minimal content (ie the google home page) or loaded up with heavy flash content.
i hope they fix it soon cause id be back to firefox in a heartbeat.
What are people doing to their Firefox installs? All I ever hear people say about Firefox these days is that it's full of memory leaks, hogs loads of RAM, is really slow and crashes all the time.
I've not run into any of those problems and I use FF heavily on a daily basis for web development. I'm loaded up with lots of plugins too.
Lately FF on the Mac is a pile of poo. It chews up huge amounts of memory; takes ages to start-up and shutdown; frequently falls over / locks up; and won't play nicely with a whole raft of web pages. Ok, some of this is not just down to FF but all the same I expect it to play nicely. No browser is perfect I know. So perhaps it's simply that I have come to expect more from FF than from the others.
I did not know why FF performed so miserably in your computer(s). I normally use FF more then 12 hours every day without a single crash, In addition FF is the fastest web browser in terms of rendering web pages, even faster than Chrome, though its start up time is a bit slower , but no more than a second or two.
I've not run into any of those problems and I use FF heavily on a daily basis for web development. I'm loaded up with lots of plugins too.
Snap. I use it under Linux, where it doesn't have some of the Windows-based optimisations, and it's rock solid. And really, on my development machine, which is currently using 1.5GB of my 8GB RAM to run Netbeans and an attached Tomcat instance, do you think I give two shits about my bajillion Firefox tabs using 400MB?
At one previous work place I had to disable ipv6 in Firefox, otherwise it would do these random lock-ups. Maybe your network is similar? Other than that I'd just have to assume the Windows version is a lot worse... I've been using FF in Linux far longer than I care to remember and (other than that 1 network) never felt any need to change.
Sadly, you are correct. It pisses me off while FF goes into CPU la-la land and then gets religion and processes the message queue and one ends up totally lost.
It is, by any measure, a memory hog of biblical proportions. Is it just too hard to write tight code these days, are programmers lazy, is the problem intractable? ... questions questions.
For a faster, "better" FF try www.palemoon.org (still a memory hog though)
The upside to the "Webkit Monoculture" is that you have many Companies and individuals contributing to a common codebase. Whilst monocultures can be a "bad thing" in terms of one company controls the code for 'X' software, in this case it is a collaboration success, having Opera's engineers onboard with the project can only be a good thing.
The engine itself is not something the average user thinks about. They're more interested in what the favourites or history looks like. If Opera can create a few unique features in their GUI that separate them from the usual bunch then they might do well. It's just a case of marketing it.
He said: “Monoculture remains a problem that we must fight. The web needs multiple implementations of its evolving standards to keep them interoperable.” His lengthy essay continued:
-- well, the question remains, why? The reason why an IE monoculture is / was bad, is that it's a closed source single platform. When that is a de facto standard, it becomes a major problem for anyone not wishing to be tied to a single company's platform(s).
But why is there any advantage to having a standard with multiple implementations, versus a single implementation that is itself open and portable across multiple platforms?
OK, potentially, competing implementations can encourage better implementations of the standards (e.g. faster Javascript), but a single, open, portable implementation could lead to faster evolution / innovation.
So for those people who bought Opera because it was different, did we really, in the end, just buy Safari?
I remember a time when, while not overwhelmingly adopted by the public, Opera was known for being THE standards-compliant engine, even in the face of those who attempted to redefine standards with broken implementations *cough* Microsoft *cough*.
Ah, well, life is like a party.
Paris, the party must end.
which can't even render correctly half the pages.
As a web developer with a not-insignificant amount of front-end experience, bollocks. Gecko is more consistent than anything else. I'm sure some tool will now link me to the Mozzy bug tracker, as if that proved something over every other browser that totally doesn't have a bug tracker.
But then I'm still wondering how your second sentence is justification for the first.
> As a web developer with a not-insignificant amount of front-end
> experience, bollocks. Gecko is more consistent than anything else.
I don't care about Gecko's consistency - whatever that means. Consistency in rendering pages? Obviously not.
I care about Firefox not being able to render half the pages Google Chrome or even Konqueror have no problems rendering correctly.
"Upgrade to the latest Firefox 18". No, thank you. I don't have time to waste upgrading Bloatzilla every two weeks in the hope that some wonderful latest version won't need 2GB of memory and 4 CPUs at 98% on startup. Firefox is the only software which makes my laptop sound like an F-16 taking off because of the cooling fans.
This means a lot, coming from the browser that hasn't rendered tables correctly for over 14 years.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=915
Even Internet Explorer does *layout* better than Firefox. Here's another FF layout fail example:
https://bug736458.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=606729
coming from the browser that hasn't rendered tables correctly for over 14 years.
I'm no FF advocate but fair's fair. If you bothered to read the bug report you would see it is nothing to do with "correct" table handling, but undesired behaviour when presented with invalid table code. There is no "correct" handling that eventuality.
Presto is a decade old, and is the third Opera rendering engine. The first version to be released using it was 7.0, although due to its extensible design, the Presto that exists today is more different from what was called Presto in Opera 7, as that was from Elektra used in Opera 4-6 before it.
Sad to see Presto go, I wonder if Opera would release that as open source so any group motivated could carry on with that and keep the ecosystem healthy.
Both Chrome and Safari have the same lack of customizability. You can't seem to move buttons around or change the behaviour in the same way you can with FF or Opera, despite the rendering engine being excellent. Opera have a real opportunity if they can combine the widespread compatibility and reliability of webkit with a decent interface that actually lets you set it up the way you like.
"If we were a more conventional business, without enough desktop browser-marketshare, we would probably have to do what Opera has done"
This has NOTHING to do with desktop marketshare (which is doing just fine at over 70m or so users). It's got EVERYTHING to do with being able to make a proper browser for iPhone.
We all know Apple only allow browser skins that use their own webkit browser control (a gimped version minus Nitro JS engine, as they don't want a level playing field).
Moving to Webkit means much easier development on Android, means they can release a proper browser for iOS, and means they have less of a website compatibility headache because lazy developers only test IE/Chrome and FF.
Me, I can't wait to see Opera ICE browser next week, and when Opera release a webkit based desktop browser with all the features of Opera, AND all the benefits of sharing a common engine with Chrome and Safari, it will surely shut alot of idiots up.
It's nothing to do with Lazy... development time has to be PAID for and companies all over the world are having to pay huge amounts every day just to cope with the crap pushed on them by the browser makers and the W3C.
It's all good money for web devs but the situation is appalling for the actual customers who have to pay for their services.
If we hadn't spent all those years arguing about interop and the interpretation of poorly specified standards, just think, we might even have a rich-text input box in HTML that included the ability to inline paste pictures and all that other stuff THAT HAS BEEN COMMON IN OTHER PROGS FOR DECADES!
I'm SO with you man! Couldn't have put it better - anyone would think this debate is about saving peace, freedom, democracy and the galaxy - I just want to lay some boxes out on a screen FFS!
I'm all for the lofty ideals but I hate to break to the idealists, they've failed.
Is Firefox still around? I remember a small, fast, effective browser of that name many years ago, but then it was replaced by a bloated, slow, memory-leaking monstrosity whose developers seemed to be more concerned about grandiose road maps and ten year plans than about "actually getting the fucking thing to work".
Every programmer should write their own browser, with it's own layout code, rendering engine, JS interpretter etc. It's not going to work very well - unless you're really talented and really persistent. But it will give you something to do do witter away those long winter nights.
Grab a copy of the RFCs, your favourite C compiler and get pushing those pixels!
That's really the point of this discussion. WIthout good standards there's no way to do this. And with a single reference implementation (Webkit) the standards could deteriorate until it becomes 'the standard is what the code does'. At least it's open source.
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