I don’t think it’s true that Mozilla doesn’t care about GNOME/Linux. Any more than it’s true that GNOME doesn’t care about the hardware vendors. They care, it has to be there, but they have to make their stuff work on more than just one platform. (On a different note, GNOME should make more apps work cross-platform as well. The ones we do have don’t always install easily or well on Windows. Gimp is probably the exception.) Mozilla has been a big supporter of GNOME and the GNOME Foundation.

I think Mozilla and GNOME are very aligned in values and if we could align more in the technical space it would only be good for the people of the world that should have a free desktop and access to the internet.

I appreciate your write-up – it helped me understand the GNOME, web, webkit, Firefox space better. I always learn something. :)

“Mozilla and Webkit developers pretty much share their opinion about GNOME: It doesn’t matter. This has two reasons. The first reason is that it doesn’t have a significant enough market share for them to be interesting. … The second and more interesting reason is that the browser development communities think desktops are going to die sooner or later and the browser will be the only application that you run on your computer… ”

I think that’s a little inaccurate as to WebKit. First, WebKit the project itself in a sense doesn’t care about any platform. Or to put it another way, we see the project overall as a technology provider, not a product organization. Thus, we care about any given platform to the extent that contributing individuals or organizations step up to develop and maintain support for it. Our main focus isn’t on market share but rather that the embedders on that platform take responsibility.

Second, WebKit overall doesn’t have an ideological position on the desktop going away. I can’t speak for every contributor. But Apple as a company clearly believes in the power of native software and native applications. Mac OS X and iPhone are both strong platforms for native development, even though the Web experience is a huge and defining part of both. Again, seeing ourselves as a technology provider, we want to enable developers to build more powerful Web applications, but we also want to enable easy use of Web technology in native desktop apps.

I would say that overall WebKit is less ideological, and this could be either a good thing or a bad thing from the GNOME perspective, since GNOME itself has an ideology and shares much of it with Mozilla. WebKit’s project goals have a largely technical focus: http://webkit.org/projects/goals.html . I think these goals mesh fairly well with GNOME’s needs, but it is true that GNOME-focused developers would have to step up to drive and maintain good integration.

And me input methods :]

Jeff is right on on the JS benchmark question. The compiler on windows does a better job of optimization. We’ve spent quite a bit of time optimizing on Linux as well as Windows. we spent a huge amount of time testing a lot of different command line options with gcc and we know which set of optimizations work best on the JS engine. (It actually compiles with a different set of options than the rest of Firefox because we did measurements to figure it out. In the process we also found bugs in various versions of gcc as well.)

If you’re doing tests in the browser the graphical front end does have an impact as well. And GTK+ and X are slower than the win32 graphics system. That’s just how it works out.

Speaking of which, “distros are bad” is a strawman; I’m glad there’s a Fedora so I don’t have to bootstrap a Linux system, install X, GNOME, and so on to get things done. (Frankly, I’m probably incapable of doing it unless I massively lowered how much I value my time.) If you want a politically provocative restatement, how about “distros good, end-users better”? :-)

The benchmarking is primarily a result of Microsoft’s compiler plus profile-guided optimizations being better than gcc, and a few people who’ve done PGO Linux builds report the difference is not significant enough to make up the difference. A more worthwhile comparison might be to do the same comparison using Intel’s C++ compiler, which I hear does a much better job of optimizing some areas of Mozilla than gcc does. It’s not free in either sense, but I’ve heard that you can get a trial license that would at least demonstrate how much difference is due to the compiler.