WebTools heeft een verhaaltje over Gecko
lees het verhaalhier
After years of tweaking the code that rendered Web pages in its browser, after getting "more useful miles out of those vehicles than anyone rightly expected," according to a key Netscape developer, Netscape has decided to scrap the code in its browser engine and start from scratch. The result: a browser that promises to be 100 percent compliant with Web standards, and is smaller and much less painful to download. Netscape's decision to start from scratch stemmed from the increasingly painful dance Web-page designers must do to make their sites look good on all browsers and all platforms. The transition from the 3.0 browsers to 4.0 browsers has been a "nightmare," said one Web developer, and no one could fault users for being unmotivated to download 12-megabyte and larger files that only seem to increase the number of times a day the browser crashes. Until this fall, it seemed the open source Mozilla browser would deliver more of the same. Netscape was planning on releasing that browser as Communicator 5.0, but with its acquisition by America Online, who knows? While Netscape was winning points for converting to an open source model (in which the source code is published freely and worked on by groups of internal and external developers), the likelihood that the new browser would ship with the same old, standards-flouting layout engine caused developers to cry into their mouse pads. Now everything has changed.
