Nokia is doing a full rewrite of Maemo for the upteenth time after buying Qt — the software platform is constantly going in different directions. They're so proud of shipping a Mozilla browser, but how the fuck are they going to integrate that with Qt? Don't they also maintain multiple Webkit ports for their other platforms? The mind boggles...
They're so proud of shipping a Mozilla browser, but how the fuck are they going to integrate that with Qt?
I don't see the contradiction there. Mozilla and Qt are at different levels in the GUI stack. (KDE is a Qt-based desktop, yet it runs Firefox just fine.)
You have 256mb of RAM to work with, most of which you would like to use for rendering webpages. Do you really want to blow a huge chunk of it on something that just gets you an inconsistent look-and-feel? A handheld device is the last place you want two completely different file-picker dialogs, and you can't cover that shit up with theming.
Do you really want to be shipping second-party Gecko in the when Webkit is better and you're already paying people to work on it?
A handheld device is the last place you want two completely different file-picker dialogs, and you can't cover that shit up with theming.
What does Mozilla have to do with file picker dialogs? Firefox uses native dialogs on the platforms it runs on, and so does Nokia's Gecko-based browser on Maemo.
Do you really want to be shipping second-party Gecko in the when Webkit is better and you're already paying people to work on it?
What's preventing them from switching to a WebKit-based browser when it's ready for production? Why should they have tried to squeeze that into the Maemo 5 dev cycle, when they already have a fine browser?
I don't understand your argument at all, because OS and device vendors switch browsers all the time as new alternatives become available. Mac OS X 10.2 still shipped with Internet Explorer 5 as the default browser...
Edit: http://gigaom.com/2009/10/19/nokia-n900/ - An early review
Nokia is doing a full rewrite of Maemo for the upteenth time after buying Qt — the software platform is constantly going in different directions. They're so proud of shipping a Mozilla browser, but how the fuck are they going to integrate that with Qt? Don't they also maintain multiple Webkit ports for their other platforms? The mind boggles...