Firefox will it switch to WebKit?

After Opera announcing to abandon the Presto rendering engine for WebKit, whether on mobile or desktop, we wonder if Mozilla can also replace Gecko by the rendering engine that is that of Chrome and Safari.

The answer is given on the blog of Brendan Eich (creator of JavaScript for Netscape). No, because Mozilla then would lose the XUL language used to create extensions, one of the major advantages of Firefox. And all extensions at the same time would become incompatible with the new browser.

More again , we can find in news another reason to keep a different technology. It was found that the HTML 5 localStorage property could be exploited by malware and saturate the user's disk. Some even posted a demo script on GitHub, filldisk.js. This undesirable result can be obtained on WebKit browsers and Internet Explorer, but not in Gecko which is smarter.

In fact, if Mozilla want to replace Gecko it would be to the benefit of Servo, a new rendering engine that uses parallel processors better and which will support XUL. The source is available on GitHub and is written in Rust, another production of Mozilla in the goal to facilitate concurrent programming.

Microsoft contributor to Webkit

It is not without a second thought, but Microsoft wants to add support for touch-screen to the rendering engine of Chrome and Safari browsers, a competitor to Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Microsoft actively supports the development of Pointer Events, a library that allows to use either the mouse or the touch depending on the type of computer, desktop or tablet. And since Windows 8 works better with a touch screen, the aim of the firm is that all browsers recognize them!
Firefox should also implement this API provided it has a final definition. A CSS property exists with that name since version 3.6, but it has nothing to do with this very general API.

February 15, 2013.