Comments on: UDS, Seed 0.8

By: Ian McKellar

Ian McKellar — Wed, 27 May 2009 16:54:43 +0000

In my experience (of trying to upstream Gecko bug fixes) it’s not that Mozilla is uninterested in Linux (they’ve eagerly taken Gtk specific fixes) but they’re interested in Firefox much much more than anything else (they don’t like taking patches for things that don’t affect the Firefox app).

Apple, or at least the team working on WebKit (which includes a bunch of great ex-GNOME hackers) seem to consider WebKit a separate product in a way that Mozilla don’t seem to treat Gecko as.

Mozilla’s moving towards having comprehensive unit tests like WebKit has which should help them accept patches to the platform that don’t affect Firefox, but I think there’s still a cultural problem. Even the “platform team” at Mozilla effectively works on Firefox as the product, while WebKit is used extensively on different products within Apple so there seems to be less of a one-to-one relationship between browser platform and product.

At least that’s been my experience…

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 27 May 2009 13:46:50 +0000

Great work on seed!

IMHO there are three things left to do now:

a) split out JSCore into a separate lib for use by seed (feels stupid to require a full webkit!)

b) port gnome-shell to seed!

c) port popular epiphany extensions to seed and make it the default extension system for 2.28.

After that I would imagine seed being a 1st class GNOME technology and many more project making use of it. That would certainly rock!

By: Marius Gedminas

Marius Gedminas — Wed, 27 May 2009 12:22:51 +0000

“Mozilla has almost no interest in Linux” is too harsh: you get blog posts about native Gtk+ widgets and Tango icons. “Mozilla cares less about Linux than other platforms” would be more accurate.