WebKitGTK Moving To Skia For 2D Rendering To Yield Better Performance

[spicfoo]

Because of anti-competitive practices.

There isn't any for the engine itself. Plenty of open source projects continue using it just fine

[discordian]

I don't get it why GNOME keeps pushing it's users just towards WebKit. It sucks in 2024. Why not use Blink (or even Gecko) instead (or simultaneously)?
I understand the ambition behind their browser... but not with that obsolete and slow engine.

The engine comes bundled with Gnome, naturally a Gnome Browser would use it. And its a nice, comparatively slim browser with some useful "single application" mode.

[foolishgrunt]

I don't get it why GNOME keeps pushing it's users just towards WebKit. It sucks in 2024. Why not use Blink (or even Gecko) instead (or simultaneously)?
I understand the ambition behind their browser... but not with that obsolete and slow engine.

GNOME Web is my go-to backup browser. If I find a site that doesn't work properly in Firefox, sure I could use a Blink-based browser since I'm pretty sure it will work, but the thought gnaws at me. I can only think of one time that using Web didn't get me where I needed.

[Quackdoc]

always happy to see work being done with alternative engines, ofc I prefer servo news since webkit is a whole bag of problems, but webkit is still good to hear. Skia is generally a good choice, it would be nice to be able to benchmark gnome web with it .

[s_j_newbury]

I don't get all the hate on WebKit, really. I wish Qt stuck to WebKit over Blink, QtWebEngine is the single longest emerge time of any component on my system. So much bloat. I agree with Quackdoc though, it would be nice to see Servo as an option.

[Quackdoc]

I don't get all the hate on WebKit, really. I wish Qt stuck to WebKit over Blink, QtWebEngine is the single longest emerge time of any component on my system. So much bloat. I agree with Quackdoc though, it would be nice to see Servo as an option.

webkit is fairly buggy compared to blink and gecko when it comes to rendering pages, and it did, now hopefully addressed had bad performance especially with gpu related tasks. This is partially the reason why a lot of people still prefer going electron for everything instead of using system webview on linux. webview, which most often relies on webkitgtk for some reason, typically sucks a lot on linux.

There are other reasons why it's not great, for instance setting a Useragent will work on windows and android, but fail on linux because webkit doesn't like how the UA is set and fails to parse it when chrome and firefox can do it fine.

[hsci]

anyone uses gnome web?

Me

It just become memory hungry with sandboxing. I hope they fix that. Thei biggest issue is lack of developers and users (users mean bug reports, means fixed rendering issues, means pressure on website to get their stuff fixed...). LibWebRTC sadly uses BoringSSL (Thanks Google...) which isn't compatible to GPL. And they should decouple from GNOMEs releasy-cycle, doesn't make sense for a webbrowser.

I don't get it why GNOME keeps pushing it's users just towards WebKit. It sucks in 2024. Why not use Blink (or even Gecko) instead (or simultaneously)?
I understand the ambition behind their browser... but not with that obsolete and slow engine.

Epiphany did used Gecko past, known back then as Galeon. Gecko is and was hard to integrate for projects, memory consuming (much more back then) and cluttered. For this reasons Apple decided to use KHTML and fork it as WebKit and the same reasons did caused Epiphany to use WebKit. WebKit also allows easy embedding.

WebKit is neither obsolete nor slow, it is able to compete but Apple has different priorities than Google. Google forked it to dominate the web entirely (browser and services), which why they pressed so hard on JavaScript. Opera and Microsoft lost the browser war already. Is there even collaboration between Google an the others?

Regarding anti-competitive measures. How about Google? A company controlling the web and the browsers. The people complaining about WebKit are usually people using Chrome and developing for...Chrome. Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft should all get the same treatment - complete control and oversight over any business decision. Not splitting up but controlling AT&T worked back then.