"The release of Safari has generated some discussion of Gecko's complexity and performance which bear addressing. Gecko is large and complex. We would like Gecko to be smaller and simpler and we're working on it. Elegance, like speed, is sexy. But simple and elegant must be weighed against the need to cope with web content as it exists today. And web content today is not simple, not elegant and not standards compliant. Today's web requires a rendering engine to do gymnastics to understand the wildly varying ways in which websites operate. Gecko performs these gymnastics with exceptional precision.
[...]
What is clear is that both Camino and Safari are wicked fast browsers. This is excellent news. In addition, Safari uses code and ideas from Gecko, and high quality ideas from the KHTML/Safari world will make their way back into Gecko. This brings benefits to both layout engines. The big picture question is the performance of open alternatives compared to that of the dominant Internet Explorer browser, and the open source community can share satisfaction
as the open alternatives continue to improve."
From:
http://www.mozilla.org/browser-innovation.html
(emphasis mine)
"WHAT DOES ALL THS MEAN
[...]
* We are not deprecating XUL in favor of front ends based on native GUI toolkits. Nor are we deprecating Camino, Mozilla's Gecko-based browser that has a native OS X front end. Both approaches have their wins, and their loyal fans.
The Mozilla community has embraced both approaches (even producing a version of Phoenix for OS X that tests well).
[...]
* Several crucial tools integrated with the XPFE-based browser, the DOM inspector and Venkman (the JavaScript Debugger), must be supported in the new, standalone browser, as add-ons.
[...]
APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE
Let's begin the new application architecture proposal by recapitulating the relevant facts and defining some terms.
There are currently two major classes of applications being built using Mozilla's technology. The first class of applications are embedding applications. They use Mozilla's layout engine, but write their own code for user interface features that exists outside of the laid-out HTML or XML document view. The second class of applications are toolkit applications. They are built on top of Mozilla itself and designed to be cross-platform. The user interface elements are defined in XUL and rendered by Gecko itself.
Both classes of applications will be able to make use of the Gecko Runtime Environment (GRE) to enable the sharing of a single installation of Gecko. Applications may even share profiles, although the inter-process communication work to support sharing profiles among applications running in separate processes is not done yet (as of 1.4alpha).
[...]
In addition, we propose that certain toolkit applications should themselves be extensions, meaning that they can be built both as
standalone applications and as add-ons installed into other applications. An example of such an application is Thunderbird, a.k.a. Mozilla Mail, which will be capable of either running as a standalone application or being installed directly into Mozilla Firebird, a.k.a. the Mozilla Browser, as an extension."
From:
http://mozilla.org/roadmap.html
(emphasis mine)
Shelumi`El
Jordan
S.D.G