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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

I’d love to use Nyxt, but it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because, despite claims to be engine-agnostic, in practice it can only be used with webkitGTK. WebkitGTK displays (CSS and HTML validating) pages with loads of rendering errors. I’ve tried it on pages that look identical and are rendered correctly in Firefox, Chrome (and all Blink browsers), and Safari, but do not render correctly in Nyxt. The incorrect rendering is reproduced exactly with Epiphany, the official Gnome browser that uses the same engine—so I know that the problem is with webkitGTK. If anyone can explain how to unlock the supposed engine-agnosticism of Nyxt so that I can try it with Blink, I would like instructions.

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Thank you for your feedback. You're 100% right. The framework is in place, however the implementation is not! We wanted to get Nyxt to a level of feature sophistication before focusing on supporting (not just prototyping) two renderers as it can slow down progress!

With 3.0.0 on the horizon, now is an ideal time. Once again, sorry about the issues you've had, we're doing our best!

I've been playing a bit with WebkitGTK for my own development and found the same thing—I was learning how to use SVG and was getting really confused about how transform-origin was supposed to work... then I tried the same SVG in Firefox and Chrome and realized that my understanding was correct and it was WebkitGTK that, for whatever reason, didn't handle it correctly. Even over a relatively short time I ran into a number of CSS, SVG and DOM manipulation behavior that WebkitGTK seems to handle incorrectly.

Interesting, why does webkitgtk messes with webkit rendering?

Bummer. I know that WebKitGTK also had problems with playing video on video streaming sites. So hopefully they figure something out with other engines soon.

I'm interested in the History at a tree feature. And if they can get their bookmark tags to extract tag data from blogs and question and answer sites that would be great.

I've also hit this issue. About a year ago I made an effort to use blink, but after a bit of work I recall essentially discovering that any support was effectively abandoned. I wish they would remove the note in the FAQ about supporting multiple engines, as it doesn't seem to be the case.

At most it’s a description of an aspect of the project’s internal architecture. It means absolutely nothing to the end user.

I believe that the Nyxt website should have a big red banner warning people that, because it uses a rendering engine that is not conformant and, I suppose, is a work in progress, it can’t actually serve as a practical web browser. This would save people from wasting time installing it only to find out that it doesn’t work. And remove the misleading comments about it being engine-agnostic. I really don’t understand what they hope to accomplish by forcing people to discover the true nature of their project the hard way, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The same goes for Suckless’ surf browser and others. For their part, the wekitGTK website falsely claims that their engine is “a full-featured port of the WebKit rendering engine”. As mentioned in another comment, these rendering errors do not appear in Safari, which uses WebKit.

How did Tauri (Rust) solves the rendering engine problem? Maybe Nyxt can borrow some of its magic.

I think that it just uses the system webview, whatever that is. I don't think it offers "dynamic" switching between multiple implementations.onnthe same platform.

Did it? Perhaps it's easier to support crossplatform things if you can control which features of all the engines are being used.

Doesn't it use WebkitGTK, at least on Linux? I expect it has the same problems, but it's less of a problem for developing UIs than for browsing to arbitrary web pages—it might get a bit annoying, but you can always work around the inconsistencies or limitations by tweaking your own HTML/CSS/etc.

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