Qt Switching From WebKit To Chromium Engine

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Qt Switching From WebKit To Chromium Engine

Digia developers working on the Qt tool-kit have decided they will switch from using the WebKit browser engine to instead using Google's "Blink" engine fork for Chromium. The new Qt web rendering engine will be called Qt WebEngine...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTQ2MDY

[faildozer]

Can someone explain to me why so many things are using Webkit/Blink for their HTML rendering as opposed to an alternative like Gecko?

[Alexander Kurtakov]

Can someone explain to me why so many things are using Webkit/Blink for their HTML rendering as opposed to an alternative like Gecko?

That's easy. Gecko doesn't really provide a library with any notion of stable ABI so even compiling against it is an adventure not to mention runtime compatibility changes. It's like Firefox internal thing now from third party developers POV (experience based on trying to support Gecko/xulrunner in SWT).

[intellivision]

Can someone explain to me why so many things are using Webkit/Blink for their HTML rendering as opposed to an alternative like Gecko?

Because they removed the ability to embed Gecko around Firefox 4, I think.
But that's not really that important any more, Mozilla is working on their new engine Servo, written in their own language, Rust.
That should be ready in a year or two.

[faildozer]

That's easy. Gecko doesn't really provide a library with any notion of stable ABI so even compiling against it is an adventure not to mention runtime compatibility changes. It's like Firefox internal thing now from third party developers POV (experience based on trying to support Gecko/xulrunner in SWT).

A few years ago I'd say definitely yes to Webkit because it actually had quite the edge, but nowadays their capabilites seem to be about equal with each other, with Gecko even supporting a few things that Webkit doesn't. But yeah, if their ABI isn't even close to being stable, that would kill portability for being used in third party projects.

I was just wondering because I still see something like Wine using a custom version of Gecko, but things like GTK and Qt are using Webkit.

[caryhartline]

Will Come Back To Bite Them

Chromium is of course a great browser and Blink is a very fast-moving engine. Too bad though that Google has decided to use flags that you must select in the browser settings itself instead of using vendor prefixes. It's definitely a step forward for getting rid of the headaches that we web developers have, but what about other browsers? Does every browser have to implement these settings to be useful? Will Chrome/Chromium be the only beta browsers? It seems Google is more concerned with the browser than the engine and third-party browsers. Thankfully, we still have Apple to hold down the fort on something that is much more friendly to other browsers.