Hacker News Reader

Comment by babypuncher | Hacker News Reader

Apple should ditch WebKit and adopt Gecko. Mozilla could use the funding. and the two organizations share similar philosophies on user privacy. It would also deal a significant blow to the growing Blink monoculture.

View on HN

According to the book “Creative Selection” (by one of the original Safari devs). They tried with Gecko first, but the POC didn’t went far: the build system at that time was messy and they couldn’t get it work. So they switched to KHTML, because of the nice code base. That internal fork evolved to WebKit.

I remember peeking around the Gecko codebase when Firefox got popular - and yeah, it was pretty gnarly. I remember seeing related .cpp files in the same directory using different naming conventions, for example.

I’m told Gecko is a lot better now though.

By that logic Firefox should drop gecko and adopt WebKit. It’s already maintained by a megacorp and isn’t blink.

WebKit is close enough to Blink that this move would be bad for the ecosystem as a whole. More variety in web technology implementations makes it harder for any one approach to dictate the standards going forwards.

So glad you agree that having both WebKit and gecko remain active is a positive.

Why should they? WebKit was developed by Apple, and is deeply integrated in the OS.

It was originally developed as part of KDE (KHTML), although Apple have obviously done a lot with it since.

Yup, it’s a fork of KHTML, much like Blink is a fork of Webkit.

One thing that WebKit does better than other browsers on OSX is hooking into the native rendering APIs. That’s something that Firefox does a shoddy job at.

Apple probably has no interest in throwing good money after bad, with regards to security work involved in making that feasible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com