[trophy]

who made this trophy for micki? © irina slutsky / CC

Despite my snarky comment yesterday, I loves me some PR stunts, and I think Mozilla setting an official world record is a brilliant PR stunt. It’s a great hook to convince journalists to write a story — or even mention it on TV — and that’s one less story they’ll write about shiny proprietary systems. That’s not useless, and it’s not stupid (and it’s most certainly not the stupidest world record ever, a designation for which there is ample competition). Hurrah to the Mozilla marketing genius that thought it up and made it happen.

That said, I’m posting this in the nightly Webkit build for Windows, which is just incredibly, unbelievably, inhumanly fast. One might even call it “world record” fast.

Unofficially, of course.

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Nine comments here (latest comments)

  1. Speed-wise Firefox 3 have given me qualms and I’ve therefore used Epiphany with a WebKit backend lately. Apart for not supporting essential extensions, Epiphany with WebKit is a very nice browser. I’ve also looked into Opera since the 9.5 version seems to support amd64 on Linux. Browser choice seem to be quite open on Linux these days.

    — Eivind Uggedal #

  2. I’m glad to see Epiphany/WebKit coming along so well. They seem to have an active developer community that’s making lots of progress on the integration. And of course, there’s no issues with your OS being treated as a second-class citizen.

    — Mark #

  3. “apt-cache search epiphany webkit” on Ubuntu 8.04 turns up nothing. The nightly build download link you provided only lists binaries for Windows and OS/X.

    I feel like a second-class citizen.

    — Sam Ruby #

  4. Individual ports of webkit are maintained by different port owners and have different levels of maturity. If you want nightly builds for a Linux platform, the webkit project would love to provide them as long as someone from your port maintained them. :)

    — Dude-ee-oh #

  5. Sam Ruby: feature freeze for Ubuntu 8.04 was on Feb 14 2008 and the announcement of Epiphany switching to WebKit as their backend was only on Apr 1 2008 (although judging from subsequent traffic, it doesn’t seem to have been an April Fool’s Day joke).

    Released versions of Ubuntu are good sources of fairly new software, but the Linux distribution release model isn’t much good at providing software new enough to satisfy web browser early adopters: the software you get through Ubuntu is usually going to be three months old at launch and nine by the time of the next release. (Firefox 3 is a planned exception, and that’s because of Ubuntu’s commitment to three years of security updates for desktop 8.04, and Mozilla is rather pugnacious about not providing separate security patches but rather rolling them out with feature releases.)

    Packaging requests for future versions of Ubuntu are at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/epiphany-browser/+bug/131944 and https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/188399

    — Mary #

  6. This is probably a stupid question but how are you running nightlies builds of Webkit for windows on Linux? I presume it’s via vmware or wine. As someone considering the switch to Linux (from Mac) I’d be interested in knowing the nuts-and-bolts.

    — Brian #

  7. Yeah, the discussion kind of veered off in a confusing direction. To clarify: Apple provides nightly builds of Safari (w/WebKit rendering engine) for Mac and Windows. The Epiphany Browser project (part of GNOME) is working on integrating the WebKit rendering engine into Epiphany, which runs on all modern Linux systems (although, as Sam noted, it isn’t conveniently packaged on all distributions yet). I run Debian Unstable at home, which provides epiphany-webkit. That package doesn’t actually work very well yet, but from what I gather, they’re making great strides in upstream development.

    — Mark #

  8. Thanks for the kind words. We’re making good progress with JavaScript performance and performance in general, even as Firefox 3 is being released. I hope you’ll follow that work as it becomes available in nightly builds and point releases (it’s a little spread out right now, one of the downsides of hg/git/etc). That said, I do not think it is fair or thoughtful to treat a decision you disagreed with as a tragic flaw in Mozilla’s value system, while simultaneously claiming that no one uses the mozilla.org linux builds anyway.

    — Robert Sayre #

  9. I’m rather suprised that ubuntu don’t pick up epiphany-webkit from Debian, but I suspect the Debian .debs will install fine on a recent Ubuntu release.

    If I were a windows user, I’d like an epiphany-like UI shell project wrapped around the webkit embed, rather than use Safari (I don’t hate safari, but I’m not fond of winamp-isms)

    — Jon #

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