Why does Firefox not use the WebKit kernel?

Last week, opera officially announced that it will gradually replace its presto engine with the WebKit kernel. the $5.5 billion acquisition of skyfire Labs, the maker of the mobile browser skyfire, sparked speculation that the WebKit kernel is expected to consolidate. As one of the four engines with a huge market share, Mozilla's CTO makes it clear that Mozilla will not switch to WebKit.

Unlike several other vendors, Mozilla is a non-profit organization, so it has different goals than others. In an article titled why Mozilla matters, Mozilla CTO Brendan eich provides several reasons for failing to switch to WebKit:

1. eich acknowledges that if Mozilla is a more traditional business service, Mozilla may have to switch to WebKit as opera does. "Because we are not just a commercial business, and our market share on the desktop seems strong and may continue to grow," eich said. "This is partly due to what we did based on gecko."

2. if the strong momentum of WebKit continues to grow, the browser market will become more and more dominant in chrome around WebKit. This single state is not good for the whole Web, this is also one reason why Mozilla needs to continue to invest in Firefox, as does Microsoft's IE browser. Eich also pointed out that there is currently not only one WebKit, but also eight systems built around WebKit and a large number of forks (such as V8 and Apple's nitro), as well as a variety of graphic backend. By processing android2.3, Web developers have discovered that this is not that simple.

3. technically, for Mozilla, the cost of switching to WebKit is much higher than that of opera. Because opera has a low market share on the desktop end, the cost of conversion is much lower, but it is still not simple. Mozilla has already invested heavily in XUL. If it switches to WebKit, its XML-based user interfaces will be lost with this switch, at the same time, the most important thing is to lose the rich Firefox plug-in ecosystem.

4. it has its own independent engine, which means Firefox can continue to do projects similar to Firefox for Firefox OS and Android. eich also emphasizes Mozilla's next-generation engine servo, he said that servo has better performance in supporting multi-core CPUs and large-scale parallel GPUs, and is already ahead of Apple and Google browsers in terms of processing multithreading services.

For Web developers, the conversion of opera may not be very huge, because its market share is not large, and most websites do not need to be individually optimized. However, Mozilla's persistence may also be very valuable. After all, an ecosystem with a variety of browsers can better promote the development of Web, the era in which IE has monopolized the market for a long time already demonstrates this point, but this persistence may also hurt Mozilla itself.