ReactOS Forum

Since the GSOC thread is starting to fill with discussions of Webkit vs. Gecko, I think it's time for a thread just for that.

I've wanted to see Webkit be adapted to use as our MSHTML renderer thing for some time. Yet there are the political implications and the possible attempts at a monopoly.

Maybe adapting Webkit should be its own project and free for download apart from ReactOS. That way, users can get the choice of a faster browsing experience and even certain OS tasks without us supporting any possible monopoly.

You may as well rename this thread as "HTML Renderers", because "Renderers" is too much vague. It may as well mean "Graphics renderers" or whatever else...

Since Mozilla doesn't support embedding Gecko any more, has anyone considered communicating with wine and/or palemoon devs to see if Wine-Goanna is feasible?

Deleted.

Mozilla doesn't have to support it if we have a fork, it should still be in the repository. There was the Mshtml.dll GSOC project to create a wrapper for Gecko...

My point is that the Palemoon developers are already maintaining a fork of Gecko (called Goanna), so an mshtml, or wine-gecko based on Goanna would be basically the same, but will continue to get security updates, and since it would benefit wine too, they may be willing to help develop it, which would probably help a lot, since they already have some experience developing wine-gecko.

That is interesting...thanks.

justincase wrote: ↑Sat Feb 02, 2019 4:00 amSince Mozilla doesn't support embedding Gecko any more, has anyone considered communicating with wine and/or palemoon devs to see if Wine-Goanna is feasible?

Go ahead and ask Wine's team but be aware of this from the Pale Moon team:

http://www.moonchildproductions.info/goanna.shtml wrote:Goanna does not have a stand-alone source, since it can't be used as a stand-alone library. If you want to make use of the engine, you can build your application on the Unified XUL Platform (UXP). The engine is an integral part of that platform, the source of which can be found on GitHub.

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in the topic '[Q]NetSurf instead of Gecko', mrugiero wrote: ↑Wed Aug 28, 2013 7:42 pm...mshtml is mostly done by WINE, IIRC. This means changing it becomes an extra ROS-only task....

This is a powerful objection to all suggestions to move ReactOS off of the Gecko engine. Every extra ROS-only task added to the ReactOS (ROS) codebase dilutes the efforts of the ReactOS developer team (devs).

in the topic '[Q]NetSurf instead of Gecko', Z98 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 28, 2013 9:52 pmWe'll stick with whatever Wine uses for their mshtml implementation. If they stop maintaining it, we'll stick with whatever is the last version until such time as its staleness actually matters in terms of usability. Until them, the issue is very low in terms of priority.

This appears to be the informal policy of the devs to this day.

in the topic '[Q]NetSurf instead of Gecko', Z98 wrote: ↑Sat Sep 14, 2013 5:09 pmThe internal testers have a lot of sway over what gets bundled and what doesn't. They've never really pressed for mshtml to be bundled, so it stands to reason none of the things they've focused on thus far have relied on it.

This explains why Gecko isn't included on ReactOS release or daily build .iso files and must be installed separately. Gecko may be added to ReactOS when ReactOS is installed. However, downloading Gecko from an Internet site is the only option given (at least when I last tested ReactOS, which has been quite a while ago due to my test PC being down). An option to install Gecko from a CD would be very helpful to me. My test PC's network interface circuit (NIC) is an Intel design unsupported by ReactOS's base set of drivers. I haven't been able to get Intel's drivers for their NIC to install on ReactOS. Therefore, ReactOS has no working Internet connection on my test PC. My workaround has been to build ReactOS myself and include Gecko at build time. Most people who cruise by the ReactOS web site and download a copy of ReactOS cannot do that.

Installing Gecko does not give my test PC an Internet connection. It allows me to experiment with WineIE's ability to render .html files that I have loaded onto my PC's disk or CD drives.