So many of these types of browsers use webkit; I'm curious why there aren't more that use gecko. Is it a technical issue or a social one?
I had hoped for Servo to fill that gap at some point, but so far that hasn't happened yet: https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/27579
Another possibility is for Geckoview to be ported to Desktop platforms some day: https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ - something the people behind Tridactyl would like to happen: https://tridactyl.xyz/ideas/#port-geckoview-to-x86_64
This is really sad. IMHO their adoption numbers would not still be plunging if people had a way to insulate themselves from the large, random, and often undesired changes in the UI that are forced upon users with each Firefox security update.
From where I'm standing, they seem to consistently make the poorest decisions.
I also vaguely remember reading somewhere that Gecko is a lot harder to work with for third parties due to unstable APIs and frequent breakage, but don't quote me on on this.
I'd say it's about as pendantic as insisting that Windows 7 is built on top of Vista as opposed to XP. The prior statement is certainly more direct and strictly accurate, but that doesn't mean the latter statement is automatically false.
People will act like the prospect of maintaining private forks of NPM modules is a major crisis, but then convince themselves—or let other people get away with convincing themselves—that 8+ years of diverging development involving two software giants' investments of billions of dollars of engineering resources poured into implementing their vision of what is one of the most complex and complicated undertakings that exists in software development is somehow no big deal.
(And that's not what "pedantic" means. Both this parenthetical and your comment are examples of pedantry.)
Yeah... okay, admittedly it probably doesn't prompt that question because you have better things to be doing, but I have nothing better to do, so I'll explain myself anyway!
The comparison to 7/Vista/XP was not accidental. As you may know, there is an 8 year time gap between the release of 7 and XP. Moreover, Vista was a huge transitional change. Under the hood, 7 and XP are different animals, even if they do share common ancestry and deliver the same baseline functions.
Taking these things into consideration, it's not terribly pedantic to insist that Windows 7 is, in fact, built on top of Vista and not XP. It's still a hair pedantic, but only in the context of this fact being used to correct someone with a less strictly correct (although, I insist, still true) interpretation. That's the feeling I was trying (and failing) to convey with my comparison, which happens to actually be in agreement with your counterpoints.
Which is why the metaphor is off. Safari+WebKit and Chrome+Blink are being developed in parallel and competing with one another. They're not two releases in the same product line where one is the dead forebear and the other a successor.
> it's not terribly pedantic to insist that Windows 7 is, in fact, built on top of Vista and not XP
What? That wasn't the topic. None of this is relevant.
The topic is which engine Chrome is using. Explaining that Chrome doesn't use WebKit isn't pedantic. However, when someone does explain it, for someone else to appear and point out that the engine it uses is forked from WebKit—a nugget of information that changes nothing about the discussion—is pedantic.
I think you're responding at this point for the pleasure of feeling like you're having a conversation, or you're still misinformed about which browsers use which engines. WebKit is not Blink, and Chromium is using the latter, not the former. That's the whole point of this entire digression.
Yes.
> QtWebEngine, or alternatively QtWebKit (5.212) - This is not recommended due to known security issues in QtWebKit, you most likely want to use qutebrowser with the default QtWebEngine backend (based on Chromium) instead. Quoting the QtWebKit releases page: [The latest QtWebKit] release is based on [an] old WebKit revision with known unpatched vulnerabilities. Please use it carefully and avoid visiting untrusted websites and using it for transmission of sensitive data.
To use Geko (or hopefully Quantum) with Qutebrowser you would need a nice QT integration. Poking around a bit, it looks like Mozilla and Nokia did some work on this in 2008, but it doesn’t seem it ever got out of beta:
Another possibility is for Geckoview to be ported to Desktop platforms some day: https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ - something the people behind Tridactyl would like to happen: https://tridactyl.xyz/ideas/#port-geckoview-to-x86_64