Otter's Journal: GNOME Browser Switches to WebKit Rendering

Epiphany, the web browser of the GNOME desktop, announced that future versions will be based solely around WebKit, instead of the current default use of Gecko. Concerns about the release cycle and API changes at Mozilla were blamed. Making this announcement on April 1 caused some confusion, but they seem to be sticking to the story.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[Otter]

There's value to having both available (Firefox and Safari, Firefox and Konqueror) though, so having WebKit, whether as the default choice or an option, is good for GNOME-only users. I don't know how many people use Epiphany as their main browser, though. I never saw any advantage to it, but YMMV.

Re:

[DesScorp]

I've always had a few problems with KHTML and WebKit based browsers not rendering various websites I use properly, usually failing on any interesting JavaScript. I'm sure "the websites" can be blamed in many instances (though I recall early versions of Safari having problems with "JavaScript: top.renderHTML();" type URLs, I don't know if it still has that problem.)

Firefox is popular both because it's a good browser and because it renders almost everything thrown at it - there are probably more sites out there that don't work properly with IE7 than there are that fall over with Firefox. Gecko is responsible for all of that in large part. If they're going to switch Epiphany to WebKit, they'd better understand they will lose some of their existing users.

Yeah, I still have issues with Safari on a lot of sites too. While competition is a good thing, it'd be nice if KHTML/WebKit would actually render some of these problem websites properly. If Firefox can do it, surely all of the brains behind Webkit... the KDE people, Apple, etc, can make a better engine.