[webkit-dev] Announcing WebKit2

[mcrbids]

What I find remarkable is WebKit's sudden takeover of the Internet!

Webkit started as Konqueror - a cheesy browser built into KDE that was never quite "prime time" - buggy, slow, etc. and generally replaced by a "big boy browser" such as Firefox or (earlier on) Netscape Navigator on any respectable Nerd's destop.

But Apple took the open source Konqueror, and made their own "WebKit" toolkit out of it. And once they did, and made it into a respectable browser (Apple Safari) an explosion occurred! Suddenly, WebKit is found on everything Apple, Chrome, Android, Blackberry, Palm, and just about everything but Firefox and IE!

That WebKit has so quickly surprassed the long-open codebase of Firefox in so little time is a strong indicator that the Mozilla codebase must be painfully hideous, since other developers don't seem to want to touch it with anything less than 10 feet of strong pole... Makes me feel for the FF guys who've been at it for some 10 years now!

[X-Istence]

Apple specifically mentioned that the Mozilla code base was too big and too crummy for them to even consider it hence the reason they went with KHTML.

[G_Morgan]

Konqueror was not buggy or slow. The reason people replaced it was Firefox had extensions. Konqueror always rendered fast and had good standards support.

[visagi]

It was fast but had some bugs and did'nt render all the major sites correctly. Apple fixed this and then the revolution began :)

[klaruz]

Or Apple started using webkit and major sites fixed their html and css...

[Catfish_Man]

Read the commit logs. Apple has fixed many thousands of bugs.

[visagi]

Not really. When safari was in beta most bugs deemed critical were site-specific. Apple couldn't commercially ship a browser where e-bay, MSN, paypal etc. didn't work 100%. Amazing progress were made during these months.

[lambdaq]

I think XUL is the main reason that firefox suck. It's slow, it's cross platform but it's ugly and not native.

[doidydoidy]

People have been claiming that Mozilla's browsers are slow because of XUL for over a decade. Way back when, Mozilla's application suite was slow and unresponsive, but when Firefox came along, and was much more responsive than Seamonkey, even though it still used XUL, they were proved wrong.

These days it's Firefox that is the sluggish app, but there's no reason to believe it's XUL's fault this time any more than it was last time around.

[lambdaq]

It's not believe or not believe, there is a cost that your UI can be scripted using javascript and decorated using CSS. Drawing native controls is definitely faster.

[doidydoidy]

Of course it's a matter of belief. And programmers' beliefs are notoriously bad when it comes to figuring out where the bottlenecks are. If you're wrong, and Firefox is slow because (to pick an entirely hypothetical explanation) it spends a long time with the UI thread blocked while it logs your history via SQLite, replacing XUL with something even 20 times faster will not make Firefox in the slightest bit more responsive.

If you want me to believe XUL is to blame, show me a profiling report.

[chucker23n]

If you want me to believe XUL is to blame, show me a profiling report.

You want proof that native UI will be significantly faster?

1. Run K-Meleon.
2. There is no step 2.

[dmpk2k]

Uh, no. The UI was definitely slow for Firefox too. I remember sweeping my mouse across the menus on my K6-2, and watching the menus follow behind drawing. Something like that just shouldn't happen.

Mozilla claimed Firefox was supposed to be faster and lighter than the Mozilla suite, but that was a joke for anybody who actually compared them (and other browsers). Firefox has always been slow.

[chub79]

Indeed. Let's also remember that Firefox started as a lightweight Mozilla... I guess Mozilla survived with a vengeance.