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- …
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Re: Who bought Opera?
WebKit is an open source engine. So they can still improve it. Fork it and publish the forked code. Or extend with a plug-in archecture and only release the plug-in architecture.
Give them a chance...
Opera did a great job with its browser in the past and always (with a few bumps) delivered pleasant surprises. Lets hope that they'll continue with this, no matter what html engine they use.
too bad the Gecko engine is half-baked bloatware
which can't even render correctly half the pages.
Latest Firefox 18 ? Do a Google search for 'Firefox 18 high cpu usage'.
No wonder Opera switched to WebKit. It wasn't a 'monocultural' decision - whatever that means. It was purely technical.
Re: too bad the Gecko engine is half-baked bloatware
18.0.2 has just come out which fixes JavaScript problems.
Re: too bad the Gecko engine is half-baked bloatware
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.
Re: too bad the Gecko engine is half-baked bloatware
> 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.
Re: too bad the Gecko engine is half-baked bloatware
Thank you for playing. Your opinion is valuable to us for continued improvement.
Kettle, black
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
Re: Kettle, black
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 not 18 years old
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.
pros and cons
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.
What an idiot
"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.
Re: What an idiot -Lazy Developers
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!
Re: What an idiot -Lazy Developers
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.
Good heavens
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".
Re: Good heavens
Exactly the post I was going to put up. Glad I checked the second page of comments after all.
chrome is a dirty word word
Chrome is a dirty word word - but i like it.
i feel like Max Moseley at a Nazi Spankathon.
Allegedly
/filth
Could opensourcing Presto possibly help Opera?
Instead or giving up and going Webkit. What do you think?
Have they opensourced the browser engine? Or are there any plans to opensource it? Would be fun to see new projects based on the software.
Write your own browser...
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.
Other Browsers
If you don't like the mainstream browsers, here's at least one alternative - NetSurf.
Up until recently it had no Javascript support, but the devs are now implementing this.
If you can code, I'm sure the devs would be happy to hear from you.
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