Originally Posted by qole

ARJWright: So you think it would actually be better for Mozilla if the Gecko-based browser in Maemo/MeeGo was replaced with a Webkit one? That's an interesting view.

I can see what you mean, though. By offering the Firefox-branded browser to MeeGo as a separate product, Mozilla can have much more control over the experience.

Originally Posted by daperl

I think Mozilla's significance is more important than it's ever been. IE has been handed its hat on the desktop by a one-two Gecko-Webkit punch, but now all eyes are on handhelds. Webkit branches sharply at the UI level, and thus, so do plenty of features. We're the big winners here so far, and as long Nokia continues to use Mozilla for the flagship browser we'll stay that way. It's a very good, yet bizarre twist of fate with all things considered. Either that, or Nokia is alot smarter than most of us give them credit for.

Originally Posted by ARJWright

At this point, I'm not sure so much that its an issue of being smarter - especially with they have Webkit already in-house and on their other, larger platforms.

Originally Posted by lma

We've had two for quite some time now: gecko for the browser (OK, and maps in Fremantle) and gtkhtml for everything else (email, rss etc). Seems to me like webkit will take the place of the latter as a somewhat lightweight engine embeddable in whatever app needs it.

Originally Posted by qole

I wish they were using something fast and lightweight for rendering the Conversations window. As soon as you start tweaking the CSS of the page (for instance, to make speech bubbles), the rendering grinds to a crawl.

The smart guys over in the Customize N900 Conversations thread say that it is being rendered with a Gecko engine. Makes me wonder about the pervasiveness of the Gecko engine throughout the UI...

Originally Posted by qole

The smart guys over in the Customize N900 Conversations thread say that it is being rendered with a Gecko engine. Makes me wonder about the pervasiveness of the Gecko engine throughout the UI...

Originally Posted by daperl

On the technical side, they probably had to go a route like this because all rows in the standard GTK list widgets have to be the same height. And you nailed it: It's a speed thing. These are inexcusable, but known weaknesses of GTK. But I'm still not sure using the Gecko engine was necessary. Currently, I'm recreating some of the mediaplayer functionalty, and I'm using JSON config files to expose Pango markup that I then use in a kind of variable argument printf statement. Here's a clip:

Code:

"list-store" : [
      {"type":"pixbuf",
       "value":["pixbuf","thumbnail-uri",5]},
      {"type":"text",
       "value":["<span size=\"13200\">%s\n","title",3,
                 "<span foreground=\"#a0a0a0\">%s</span></span>","duration",4]}]

I'm sure I could recreate the Conversations UI using a similar technique combined with GtkTables instead of GtkTreeViews. I also combine those JSON config files with GtkBuilder files. This leaves plenty of room for customization and fast scrolling. And no HTML/CSS overkill.

Originally Posted by qole

Why do I say this? Nokia has clearly stated that they will be supporting the Nokia WRT (Web RunTime) engine based on WebKit in Harmattan forward. Why would they have two big bulky browser engines on a limited-resources device?