Re: [dev] [surf] next release

2009/10/24 Uriel <lost.goblin_AT_gmail.com>:
> The chrome folks have managed to build something quite similar to
> this, but they have huge development (and specially testing)
> resources. This is another reason why I still think building surf on
> top of the chromium infrastructure is a much better idea than using
> webkit directly.

I have looked into chromium several times during last months for
reasons that aren't related to suckless.org. I agreed in the beginning
of surf to make it chromium based, but during the time (basically the
more I looked into the chromium source and build system) I more and
more conclude that chromium should be avoided. A recent debug build of
chromium resulted in 10GB (!!!) overhead on my disk with a 450MB (!!!)
chrome executable on Linux (stripped it was about 70MB (!!!)). The
source tarball containing some svn history of chromium is 700MB -- if
you ask me when comparing that to webkitgtk, webkit looks lean. So to
summarise I don't think that making surf based on chromium is a good
idea after all, even if some details and design decisions in chromium
are nice. But it is definately not the suckless way and I also think
we lack enough man power to maintain a rip-off of chromium for surf
and keeping it in sync (esp. because there is no real documented
chromium API, but there is a sort of ok;ish documented webkitgtk API).

Kind regards,
Anselm
Received on Sun Oct 25 2009 - 10:14:47 UTC