Epiphany, the very excellent Linux web browser for Gnome, will now use WebKit, instead of Gecko, as the layout engine. I’ve used Epiphany extensively in the past when Firefox 2 was terrible on Linux and Epiphany has had the added benefit of native GTK+ widgets and was definitely faster than Firefox 2. WebKit, in parallel, has been benchmarking faster than Gecko (Firefox) and Trident (IE). Though I don’t have many sources to back the speed claim up, WebKit is definitely fast. Combining a fast GUI and fast layout engine should give Linux/Gnome a step up when it comes to web browsers.
I really hope this is not an April Fools. Time will tell.
Development on Firefox 3 (Gecko 1.9) has done a lot to minimize memory usage. One of the biggest draws to Firefox is it’s extensions, but extensions are also one of Firefox’s main slowdowns and therefore drawbacks.
For Gecko 1.9, we’ve implemented an automated cycle collector that can recognize cycles in the in-memory object graph and break them automatically. [...] It is especially significant for extensions, which can often inadvertently introduce cycles without knowing it because they have access to all of Firefox’s internals.
— Stuart Parmenter
Epiphany extensions work a bit differently. Extensions are written in Python and don’t give the developer such unbounded access to the browser internals. This could be viewed as restrictive but seeing that Firefox extensions are such a huge cause of slowdown (enough to implement automated cycle breaking), I see this restriction as necessary and helpful. The Epiphany extensions, as a result, seem more lightweight and robust.
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