Re: [MiNT] www-browser engines (was: This must be an gcc / ld error!)

[Eero Tamminen <oak@helsinkinet.fi>]

Hi,

On Saturday 29 May 2010, Paul Wratt wrote:
> I have investigated Origyn. It is a really good option especially now
> that webkit is going through size an speed enhancements, both will
> increase its usability on low spec machines.
>
> For the future of Atari Web Browsing, webkit holds the most promise.
> FF is about to get a "kick in the pants" in the speed and size
> department, but it is not known for its small foot print, or its
> usability on mobile devices.

You cannot compare FF and Webkit.  Webkit is just a HTML rendering engine
whereas FF is a complete browser.  One that is implemented in JavaScript
using XUL on top of the native Gecko rendering egine.

Native UIs build on top of Gecko were e.g. Gnome Epiphany and the Maemo
Browser.


I'm not so too convinced that there's such a huge difference between
Gecko and WebKit speed.  Sure, WebKit JIT looks really good on synthetic
benchmarks and it is faster than Gecko one, but I doubt the difference
is in real www-pages so large.  And you need to take into account that JIT
can take a lot of additional memory[1] and if if you don't have enough
memory (PCs have GBs of RAM), things are going to be _a lot_ slower.


	- Eero

[1] Btw, there are www-pages out there which content alone can take
hundred(s) of MBs of RAM due to huge pictures they have (as background or
scaled down with image tag width/height) and on some pages JS itself
can also use huge amount of memory.  Happily we don't have Flash. :-)