Apple's Safari. Why not Gecko?
From the KDE mailing list
In short:
The number one goal for developing Safari was to create the fastest web browser on Mac OS X. When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code.
The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus. And the small size of your code is a significant reason for our winning startup performance....
Needless to say, we here at blogzilla are disappointed they Apple chose to use a different rendering engine than Gecko, but they apparently have their reasons.
Comments
I think the focus on startup times is really strange. The most important things are browser speed, compliance and stability!
These days I launch Chimera once, keep it in the background, and I don't need to restart it for *days*.
Too bad they went for the KDE code...
Still it's far better to have open-source people deciding the direction of a rendering engine..at least they know the meaning of the word "standards".
JWZ says at http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=jwz&itemid=132696
'Translated through a de-weaselizer, this says:
"Even though some of us used to work on Mozilla, we have to admit that the Mozilla code is a gigantic, bloated mess, not to mention slow, and with an internal API so flamboyantly baroque that frankly we can't even comprehend where to begin. Also did we mention big and slow and incomprehensible?"'
I guess apple just wanted to have an exclusive browser for their platform.
To tell you the truth I am sure the paymetns made to Microsoft and AOL to put their borwser on the MACOSX desktop had something to do with it as well as the above mentioned posts..
Gecko is still better in standards compliance..
Fred Grott
ShareMe Technologies-The Mobile Future
http://www.freeroller.net/page/shareme/Weblog
"I think the focus on startup times is really strange. The most important things are browser speed, compliance and stability!"
I'll have to disagree with you. Startup times made me switch to IE over Netscape for quite a long time. I don't want to be afraid to close my browser window. Long startup times, splash screens, etc. drive users away from good browsers.
i fully agree with the sentiment on starting times. even on Windows, it's annoying to wait for Mozilla to launch. that this hasn't been addressed is ridiculous.
standards support is all that matters. KHTML and Gecko should learn to share with each other and learn from each other.
There could be a unibrowser. One that used both rendering engines and let the user choose.
I have IE5.2, Safari, and Mozilla 1.21 on my os10. I cant stand using Mozilla because of the startup time AND the page loads. Interface I could use or not.
As far as Safari, It is sweet on startup and page loads. The bookmarking, anti-popup, and overall performance is also apealing, but it crashes and of course is still in beta so a few features are missing (https).
I find myself starting to browse in safari and then after one crash I launch IE. Never Mozilla.
A later beta has been quite good about https for me.
The one thing about Safari that I hope will be worked out in the beta testing is its unstability with CSS's and Java. I went to macrmedia this morning to download the flash install and found that it is listed as incompatible. Apple's website states that Safari is built and optimized for Flash. As a designer I find this very awkward as some of my flash items will not play in safari.
The swiftness of a browser and its pretty interface does not matter if it can not do the basics.
Has anyone found a way around this?
I really like Safari. It is speedy and loads many websites at extremely fast speeds. However, as noted before it does have serious problems with Macromedia's Shockwave format. However, I haven't had a major problem with Macromedia Flash. It is also lacking Windows Media support, and probally will not receive that anytime soon. I appreciate what the Mozilla group is trying to do, but Netscape and the Mozilla browser is lacking in rendering & startup speed :(
I like Safari but it's handled some thing strangely or not at all. I've posted comments on Apple's bbug report but have no acknowledgement that they've ever been acted on. Specifically, Shockwave sites and .swf files don't load correctly or work at all. The maps on weather.com don't animate. Is there a way to fix these flaws?
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