On Sat, 2015-08-29 at 17:12 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote: > If it weren't for the developer emphasis of Workstation, I'd be a > little more ambivalent about Web by default. And also what's the > future of WebKit2 with Web? It seems like Blink is more relevant > going > forward. Well it depends on what you want to do. If you're a user and want a web browser, pick whichever you like. I say use Epiphany for the GNOME integration, or Chromium for the great security. I don't really see much advantage to Firefox sans the GNOME 3 theme, other than that Mozilla is a much nicer upstream than Google, but it's a good choice too. The argument for Firefox becomes much stronger if you take Chromium out of the picture; say, because it's banned in Fedora, or because you'd have to remove all the ffmpeg support to get it past the RH lawyers, and be left with no video support. ;) So for the question of what makes a good default browser, Chromium is not really an option. Unless gstreamer support gets merged upstream (which might actually happen, but I wouldn't hold your breath, because I hear Google is hostile to it), or we carry that patchset in Fedora (also a valid option). You also have to get it past the FPC. I will stay out of the politics of this :) but the odds seem slim to me. Now, if you want to build an application, you want WebKit, because WebKit has a great API. Nobody is ever going to use Blink directly to build a browser; the API is too low-level. They will either use Chromium, which has a higher-level API, or maybe CEF, even higher level. But WebKit wins here hands-down, unless you place a very high weight on new HTML 5 features that few sites use. Now, if you want to build a GTK+ or Qt application, then what's interesting to you are WebKitGTK+, and possibly in the future QtWebEngine, as it matures and if the Qt folks can manage to get an exception from FPC for bundling Chromium (tbh, I am not expecting this to happen). You would be pretty crazy to consider anything else. If other GTK+ or Qt wrappers for Chromium come into existence in the future, those would also be interesting for Fedora. I don't see any room for another GTK+ browser engine (it would take many years to get one up to the quality of WebKitGTK+), but QtWebEngine is new and vulnerable due to bundling (it has little chance of appearing in Debian or Fedora anytime soon) and LGPLv3+ (many companies want nothing to do with the 3). Anyway, your high-level comparison is that Chromium indeed has newer HTML 5 features than WebKit, and also faster graphics processing, and is lol way more secure than either Firefox or WebKit (probably the most important criterion, tbh), but Chromium has higher memory requirements, and it's banned from Fedora. ;) What matters by far the most to app developers, though, is API, and WebKit wins there with no signs of that changing, which is why WebKit isn't going anywhere. But for the discussion of what browser to use by default, that doesn't matter one bit! Michael -- desktop mailing list desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
