Epiphany switches to WebKit

  • April 1, 2008
  • Avatar for jacob
    Jacob
    Peddicord

In an announcement email this morning, the developers of the Epiphany web browser have announced that the next release will be based off of WebKit, and only WebKit.

We are a small team, with only one maintainer and a hand-full of
regular contributors. Maintaining the abstraction layer, and the Gecko
back-end require lot of effort and time. Much time alone is spent on
keeping up with Gecko API changes, and we have not had much
contributions to the Gecko back-end in a long time. [...]

This single back-end will be * WebKit *.

This is the first time users will be able to experience WebKit on a GNOME desktop by default. Currently, to use WebKit, users need to download and install Konqueror from the KDE desktop or manually compile WebKit into epiphany.

The WebKit-enabled epiphany will make it into GNOME 2.24 this fall, or GNOME 2.26 next year depending on the development speed.

Avatar for jacob Jacob Peddicord

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