In my experience Webkit (specifically Google Chrome) has been a pleasure to work with.

The Trident rendering engine (IE's engine) has some weird "quirks" that were present until recently (with IE9 things have certainly changed for the better).
The Trident engine is also better at showing errors -- I've witnessed other browsers ignoring / hiding errors while IE would report them immediately.

The Gecko rendering engine (Firefox) is light-weight but AFAIK this also goes at the cost of Javascript processing. Apparently they don't even process half of the Javascript on some sites.

The Webkit rendering engine (referring to the one used by Chrome which includes the V8 engine) produces fast Javascript and a quick rendering engine. It also adheres to standards much better IMO.

I don't know which one would the best choice for BYOND, however I think it may be worth a shot to check out Webkit.

Lummox JR wrote:

JBoer wrote:

The Trident rendering engine (IE's engine) has some weird "quirks" that were present until recently (with IE9 things have certainly changed for the better).
The Trident engine is also better at showing errors -- I've witnessed other browsers ignoring / hiding errors while IE would report them immediately.
That's a polite way of saying Trident has really poor fault-tolerance. And quirks are a polite way of saying it sucks.

IMO it doesn't have poor fault tolerance as it actually shows you every error that occurs which would make your application more stable.

The engine has a 'quirks mode' which exists because at the time there were few (if any) standards and something had to be created. Outside of quirks mode the browser behaves much better.

I will say that from IE7 on, it's been getting better, but IE will forever suck.

I'm inclined to agree, however I think this it's more likely that the browser will continue to disappoint because of the lack of a multi-platform solution and community-based add-ons than the engine itself.

Microsoft focuses a lot on backwards compatibility to make sure their products still work with older versions, which is why IE has had so much trouble fitting in with the W3C standards. Open-source products such as Firefox and Chrome tend to cut corners by changing things without providing developers with something to fall back on. This ends up causing more work later when websites need to be updated to work with new versions.

The Gecko rendering engine (Firefox) is light-weight but AFAIK this also goes at the cost of Javascript processing. Apparently they don't even process half of the Javascript on some sites.
This is incorrect. Firefox's memory woes come mostly from JavaScript, which is why the Memshrink project has been focusing on that so heavily. Firefox processes all the JS it runs across; it just doesn't have good memory management of them in some cases and certain add-ons exacerbate this.

I've heard that in one project half of the code wasn't even being run, but I may have misinterpreted it (the project in question was IE-oriented for a long time).

I've heard that from a lot of Webkit fans, but while it may get a better score on some Acid tests, in my experience Webkit's rendering prowess is largely a myth. In practical terms I've found it more prone to screw up (though it doesn't do this frequently by any means). Its JavaScript handling is pretty dreadful as I had the delight of discovering recently, and it's saddled with some old Safari bugs related to events that make it a pain to work with.

AFAIK the only bad part about the way Javascript code is being handled by it is that it's more restrictive in regards to reserved variables. I haven't witnessed the issues you mentioned relating to events first-hand but if you're right I'm sure I will...

I don't know which one would the best choice for BYOND, however I think it may be worth a shot to check out Webkit.
In spite of the fact that I really don't think it's the end-all, it would surely be nice to replace the embedded IE if this was practical.

I don't really have a preference on which engine is used, though an open-source engine is naturally preferred since it would make it easier to port BYOND to other platforms.

I did a quick search and while it may not have been as thorough as the one you may have done at one point it does present an interesting option.

The Qt framework would apparently allow an UI to be created which would work on multiple platforms. The QtWebkit module could then be used to embed the Webkit rendering engine into BYOND.

I'm not sure what the viability of this solution is, but AFAIK the current way skins are being handled is likely very Windows-specific.