Why Firefox is not a good choice of browser for a KDE/Plasma-based product

[Kevin Kofler]

Eli Wapniarski wrote:
> there. I miss boasting about the speed and versatility of what was the
> fastest lightest and most versatile browser on the planet until the team
> started to adapt Safari (Mac changes) into Konqueror.

The WebKit fork has indeed made many things worse, especially when it got 
then ported (back) to Qt, absorbing many of the KHTML developers and leading 
to 2 competing HTML engines in KDE. WebKit's code is also much less cleaner 
than KHTML's. But these days, KHTML cannot match WebKit's JavaScript 
performance (on sites massively and unnecessarily abusing JavaScript) nor 
its support for the fancy newfangled HTML 5 "features" websites are 
(ab)using all over the place for no good reason. So we have to work with 
QtWebKit.

And what's worse: now the same thing is happening all over again! Blink has 
been forked from WebKit, it too is getting ported to Qt (QtWebEngine), 
absorbing the QtWebKit developers, and the code is even worse than WebKit's. 
(Sure, they "cleaned up" the #ifdef mess, but they did that by hardcoding 
the worst possible options: FFmpeg (with its patent issues and its 
monolithic structure that doesn't allow easily working around them) for 
multimedia, V8 (which is JIT-only and has no portable interpreter fallback) 
for JavaScript, etc. And they added more bloated mess of their own.)

        Kevin Kofler