On 30 Apr 2011, at 9:16 am, errno wrote:
So, shaking this out just a bit further:
(anyone reading, please just ignore this if you find it too long,
and/or too annoying, and/or too naive - or whatever - I'd rather
hear crickets chirping than hecklers carping - thanks)
I hope you won't find this post heckling, although I will admit I
find the temptation to troll almost irresistible when web
"technology" is involved.
Porting Options:
* gecko
Gecko had a reputation for really bad code some years ago. I don't
think this has improved, I think it's got worse considering the devs
would rather write long blog posts whining about exactly how hard it
is to integrate about:blank into Firefox 4 when they could have it
store a zero-length (or a blank html) page internally and display
that with the standard renderer.
Also, if it's any guide to gecko performance, Firefox is !%@%#@ slow!
Firefox 3 manages to make my dual-core 1.8GHz 2GB netbook seem
horribly outdated where Opera runs just fine. I'm not even thinking
about touching Firefox 4.
* webkit
I don't know what the current status is, but it seems to go through
phases of being very unstable. That said, I'm actually half-wishing I
had a stable webkit browser in Linux. Still, it's C++ and I can only
add to what you've heard regarding the difficulties of porting a C++
development environment. ;)
Possibly another option:
* netsurf
I'm reliably informed this is making very good progress. It also
_may_ be possible to build it with a compiler other than gcc. They
recommend gcc now, but not too long ago they supported a range of
compilers. It certainly builds and runs on a much wider range of
systems than either Gecko or Webkit, both of which are tied to one
toolkit.
I think I'd better stop now, before I go into a rant about that "one
toolkit."
