How will this change take place?
The change will involve a few aspects, some of which may have an impact on e.g. extensions:
- The identifying name of the engine will be changed to "Goanna" throughout the code where applicable.
- The version of the engine will be reset to 1.0 on the first release, and will, from that point forward, carry its own, independent, milestone.major.minor[.point] version independent of the products it is used in (similar to how Mozilla used a non-product-bound version of Gecko in Firefox prior to 4.0).
- The Platform Version will change accordingly. For the sake of compatibility, we are planning to at least keep the original Gecko-equivalent (from an extension point of view) of the platform version present, and expose the Goanna version separately so as to break as little third party software as possible in this transition period.
- Goanna will be put on the fast track for new major improvements and additions to the engine, while the current engine will be deprecated and receive fewer feature updates until the new milestone is ready for release. Of course, security and stability updates will continue to have priority on the current development "trunk"
What will be the impact of this change?
Apart from the freedom to continue to develop in our own direction? Hopefully very little.
As indicated though, there may be some compatibility issues with extensions
if they choose code paths based on platform version, but we plan to at least change the most common code path for checking this version (through the Services module) to return a (frozen) compatibility version for historical reasons. More details about this will be posted on the developer site on palemoon.org in due time.
