Re:Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer (2003)
by toyg on Friday January 11, 2013 @06:31AM
(#5042250)
> Mozilla turned out fine
Not exactly. There's a reason WebKit saw wild adoption by all sorts of projects, while Gecko adoption stagnated. The Mozilla codebase is still too complicated for most people.
Re:Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer (2003)
by mistercow on Friday January 11, 2013 @01:08PM
(#5044022)
Arguably, though, even if Gecko's code base were taken down to be smaller and easier to use than WebKit (and I have no idea how it actually compares today), it would be at a tremendous disadvantage because so many projects have incorporated WebKit.
If I want to use WebKit in a new project today, I can find a ton of people online who have done so in the past and use their experience to get me through it. If I want to use Gecko in a new project, I will have a considerably smaller amount of outside experience to lean on.
However, I think there was also the psychological factor of Mozilla's reputation at the time as an open-source quagmire. The Netscape 4 code they had inherited was deemed unmaintainable, and so Mozilla started over with a rewrite that many thought was too complex and tried to reinvent everything under the sun (e.g. it contained a version of Microsoft's COM). Mozilla turned out fine eventually, but back in 2002 this wasn't quite so obvious.