Saturday, September 13th, 2008, 1245 days ago

Mozilla explains why WebKit isn’t the future of Firefox

We asked Mike Shaver, who is now Mozilla’s VP of engineering, to comment on how he views the Gecko/WebKit dichotomy today and why he believes Gecko is still important.

“I have a lot of respect for the WebKit guys, and for the work they’ve done,” he told us in an e-mail. “The web is better because they’re around and pushing hard, and Mozilla itself is better from the competitive push as well as cooperation ranging from new web standards to plugin interfaces to the nerdiest of implementation discussions.”

Although he respects the technical achievements of WebKit, he believes that the WebKit development model and fragmentation in the WebKit ecosystem would create serious challenges that make it unsuitable for Firefox.

“We’re getting a ton of value out of a unified engine for all our projects, from desktop to device and xulrunner to Thunderbird. If you look at the WebKit landscape right now, you see a lot of different projects there and it’s not clear how or if they’ll converge,” he wrote. “We’d obviously need to hack WebKit pretty hard to adapt it to our needs, and it’s not likely that adding another fast-moving variant to that mix would be helpful to anyone, least of all WebKit! We learned about fork maintenance and integration the hard way (and had to learn it a couple of times, to be honest), so that’s not trouble that we want to borrow.”

The WebKit governance model and Apple’s general lack of transparency are also issues that would negatively impact Mozilla if Firefox adopted WebKit.

“I think we would have a hard time maintaining our momentum and depth of community empowerment in the WebKit setting. The level of visibility around patches and review is a lot higher in our world, as one example, and we don’t have bugs disappearing into an Apple-only bug system,” he told us. “For us to come into WebKit’s world and insist on that additional transparency would be unfair and counterproductive, but to live without it wouldn’t be an option for Mozilla. Our system works for us, and their system works for them (and is in many ways less noisy), but I don’t think that any one system could work very well for both of us.”

Conclusion

My hope is that this detailed examination of Gecko’s strengths, and the effort that Mozilla has invested in overcoming its weaknesses, will help illuminate the continuing relevance of Gecko in the Mozilla ecosystem and finally put to rest dubious speculation about the possibility of WebKit adoption for Firefox.

The technical advantages of Gecko are evident when viewed objectively, and the amount of effort that would be required to make WebKit fit into the Firefox stack would far outweigh the technical benefits. As we have noted in the past, there are also reasons why the choice and diversity inherent in having multiple competing implementations is valuable, too.

There are many things the Gecko and WebKit developer communities can learn from each other, but replacing Gecko would not serve any justifiable purpose. In closing, I’ll leave you with one more thought from Mike Shaver:

“We follow WebKit as closely as anyone in the world, and we cast as critical an eye towards our technology stack as anyone in the world,” he told us. “But a brain transplant is neither practical nor likely to be useful.”

[This topic is from http://arstechnica.com, all rights reserved by original author.]