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Comment by spicyj | Hacker News Reader

And then there were three.

Which will happen first, the death of one of (WebKit, Gecko, Trident) or a new popular rendering engine not related to any of them?

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High hopes for Servo[1], but it'll still be years yet until it's able to challenge any of those three. Webkit2[2] will probably be ready sooner, but it's less of a radical departure than Servo's intended to be.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/servo

[2] http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2

Those project are pretty damn cool. I have a preference for servo just because of it's high coolesness factor. Being in rust and even more modular.

Oh yeah also, while I guess it's missing a lot, the code is actually very, very readable. That's nice.

https://github.com/mozilla/servo/tree/master/src/servo (the actual layout engine part)

WebKit2 is a new API layer on top of WebKit, not a new browser engine. It has been used by Safari since v5.1.

Are you sure about that? When I read quotes like "web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process from the application UI", that conjures images of a rather drastic and fundamental change. I'm not sure how you'd achieve that with just a new API layer.

Yes, I'm sure. The same core rendering engine, known as WebCore, is shared between both WebKit1 and WebKit2 on OS X. WebKit1 is used by most applications that use a WebView to display web content, while WebKit2 is used by Safari. The different API layers set up different delegate callbacks for WebCore so that they can tweak the behavior to fit their architecture (single process vs separate web and UI processes).

Firefox for Android does this, and it's not like the underlying Gecko engine is different.

Firefox for Android no longer does this, and hasn't since the "Native Fennec" launch.

You two should hug this out in #mobile.

Doesn't Safari already use Webkit2?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)#WebKit2

I'd like to see some serious work done on Dillo ( http://www.dillo.org/ ), which is much faster than chrome on low-end boxes and could be really good for developing countries.

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