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OSNews Talks With the Konqueror Team
JigSaw writes: "OSNews features an exclusive interview with the Konqueror team, KDE's integrated filemanager, image/document viewer and web browser. Dirk Mueller, Waldo Bastian, Carsten Pfeiffer and Simon Hausmann are answering questions regarding the future of Konqueror, its portability and the integration with KDE3 and QT3. And speaking about KDE3, OSNews is reporting what's new in the new version: KDE 3 will be based on QT 3.0 and will also feature educational and other apps (like Kompare and KWinTV) as part of the default installation, support for extremely large files, new versions for KNode and KMail, email templates in KMail, advanced Web Shortcuts, S/MIME support, plugins for the KMenu, a graphical Regular Expression app (KRegExpEditor) and much more. A (very early) alpha version is already available."
I wonder how they've improved KNotes, I employ that more than anything. : P
And now there's already an alpha of 3.0...
Do you have some problem with Mozilla that we should know about?
I'm sure some asshole will moderate this post troll or flamebait, but I'm 100% in earnest here.
Did you ever wonder why Mozilla is continually falling behind schedule? Because people like the Konqueror team decide to go off on their own instead of working for the good of the community. Mozilla was there first, and it deserves the support of the community.
If the free software community wants to make a good impression on the business world (and it may already be too late), we must, at all costs, avoid splitting into tiny, useless factions working on useless, duplicate projects.
Here's an idea: before starting your new project, check to see if someone is already working on a similar project. Had the Konqueror team observed this little suggestion, the whole Konqueror fiasco could have been avoided.
If you have a problem with my views, REPLY, don't moderate!
maybe mozilla should concentrate on making a faster browser that doesn't crash instead of making the interface look nice. Does IE6 have all these fancy buttons and spinning barber poles to waste resources?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I use Konqueror every day, but there are just a few things I feel are missing. The articles didn't mention these, though.
1. I cannot seem to find any way to stop animated GIFs. Is there some buried command for this, or am I SOL?
2. It would be nice if I could put my favorite links on the menu bar, like with Navigator.
3. The bookmarks menu demands that I hold down the mouse button while swishing through my bookmark folders. If I accidentally let go, I end up with the wrong site, or all too commonly, get the "edit bookmarks" page.
4. There is noooo rule four.
5. Konqueror still croaks on various web sites. I don't know if it is the complexity, or maybe something to do with managing the color palettes. (My xterms are fixed - graphics upgrades are impossible...)
6. They did mention the loading time, but I'll still mention that it is slow. Sure, maybe my P150 was not up to snuff, but an AMD 800 with 256 MB of DDR?
Some things I like about Konqueror:
1. Rendering quality and speed are better than Navigator, in my opinion.
2. The conditional cookie and javascript (by web site) feature is awesome.
3. It's free, and has a long life ahead of it (thanks, guys!)
A dingo ate my sig...
As a coincidence I wanted to use Konquerer today for the very first time but I couldn't because I didn't find out how I can use automatic proxy configuration. Any idea how I can do that? I can only fill in direct proxy settings but my ISP doesn't work like that.
So now I'm using Mozilla...
Greetings and thanks in advance,
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
I see a problem with getting it to be more tightly integrated with the OS, like they mentioned with the filesystem issue. If KDE runs on every distro of Linux and BSD and Solaris, it will be impossible to make it a tighter part of the OS because there are so many possible ways which the filesystem or other parts of the kernel can behave. So they are forced to make it behave in a generic manner to make everyone happy. I don't like this aspect of software portability. I think it's really cool to have a GUI that utilizes the underlying kernel features.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
If KDE got the GNOME programmers to work on KDE then it would quickly become the same putrid shit that GNOME is now.
Why did they have to do an 'exclusive interview'? Couldn't they just do a normal one?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
On a few applications it isn't so bad and helps to keep the enduser aware of the origin of an app. I'm not sure that's worth anything to the enduser, unless he's in the process of expunging all KDE packages from a system. If 'ls
But if it's innoccuous and even "unifying" on the kind of applications you expect to find built-in to a desktop environment like kedit or kpm, when used to prefix dozens of add-on applications the leading "K" becomes rather stupid sounding and I feel sure gives many newcomers an impression that Linux/KDE is bush league & unprofessional. A joKe.
Koffice, Kword, Killustrator --not only are some of these flirting with trademark infringement, they are as names kwite krappy. The hard work going into this software deserves much better.
Imagine yourself doing tech support over the phone and having to put "K" in front of every third word. Kwhat? Many "K" applications begin to confuse the user: is it K-this or k-that? This has already reached the point where it is worse than the legacy of x-this x-that for program names (begun I suppose when it was such a novelty for an application to be written with a xlib GUI that the author just had to insist on the distinction for his program's name -- now it's no distinction at all is it?)
PLease use your imagination when naming your applications, and if you haven't got any, ask a friend. Hopefully there will be 5x the number of kde/qt applications in the near future. Now if they all begin with "K" autocompletion in bash (or Krun) is going to rapidly lose its usefulness for invoking them by name. In other words, NOW is the time to break this bad trend.
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
Hei, people loke to do different thinks, I like to see old movies, you maybe like to see black-and-white movies. Diversity is nice. If they enjoy what they are doing, great. Maybe Konqueror will be better than Mozilla, maybe not. Maybe they grow together. Be happy!!
------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------
There actually is a team worse than the mets. I heard the phillies sucked, but until i saw them battle it out against each other i now understand just how sucky the phillies are. I mean the mets really blow, but the phillies holy shit. Haha watching those two teams play each other is like watching to lussies fight in the computer lab or something haha. Its fun to watch becuase they're evenly matched although it's kinda pathetic. haha.
He's right. Opera is faster. Both IE and Opera are buggy and quirky, however.
Opera crashes when there are more than perhaps 10 windows open. (I know how difficult it is to believe that a Microsoft product could be quirky.)
Opening a new window in Opera is easier and uses less resources. Opera has gesture control: Go back to a previous page by waving the mouse left. When you return to Opera after exiting, it can load all your pages back to where they were before exiting. Opera saves time, lots of it.
Try Opera for Linux. The version with ads is free.
Other versions: BeOS | EPOC | Solaris | Mac | OS/2 | QNX | Windows
Bush's education improvements were
M$ has it's name added to the front of a ton of their apps. This doesn't help make a case in favor of it nor against it, but it does show us one possible way of doing things. Instead of Knotes, why not call it "K" notes, "K" word, "K" calc, "K" mail, etc. That way if you actually _need_ to specify that it's a KDE app, you include the K, and if you don't you just omit the K.
I, and many others here, would agree with that sentiment. Gnome was never a good idea. It grew out of a petty licensing dispute, as far as I know. KDE has been better than Gnome from the start, and that shows no sign of changing.
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What seems to be needed are some regular benchmarks, spanning a whole class of machines (not just your top of the line PIII, or the bottom of the line p-90). There are a lot of different tests that are needed. Some people (like me) don't really care about the load time, since we load it up once and that's it. How about speeds for rendering, accuraccy, conformance to standards, comparison of features, ...
A few weeks back, one such comparison was posted, but was heavily critized by this audence. Perhaps the Mozilla team and KDE can decide on what constitutes a good test, run it will their current releases, and then the users can decide for themselves what is important. This will also let the developers know where their effort is needed.
It's a file manager and a web browser - call the Justice Department!!!!!
Oh wait, nobody uses it, so it's OK to do the same exact thing as someone else. I get it.
.. is why KDE is now so slow, buggly & bloated. To think it used to look so good, but now it makes me actually want to use explorer.exe !
:-(
KDE is taking even more steps to rivaling the UI Microsoft offers than GNOME is. The one thing I think Linux lacks now is interoperability, despite the openness of everything. Hopefully, KDE 3 will be a huge leap to close that gap.
Why do we need another web browser?
What's the difference between this and asking why we need another Operating System when Linus first introduced Linux instead of working on the HURD or why developers should work on mySQL instead of PostgreSQL? If you can answer these questions then you've answered your own question.
Do you have some problem with Mozilla that we should know about?
Mozilla and the Konquerer are slightly similar projects with different goals. Mozilla aims to be a cross platform all-in-one web development/usage platform while Konqueror is part of the KDE component architecture.
Most people with even a passing experience in software know that all software is a combination of various trade-offs and compromises whether performance vs. correctness, space (use lots of mem) vs. time (use lots of CPU) or even ease of use vs. complete control of the system. Thinking that there can be one true product is the kind of fallacy and naivettè that brought us the Man-Month and "OO is a silver bullet".
Did you ever wonder why Mozilla is continually falling behind schedule? Because people like the Konqueror team decide to go off on their own instead of working for the good of the community. Mozilla was there first, and it deserves the support of the community.
This opinion is so wrong headed and biased I'm almost sure that you are trolling. Blaming Konqueror developers for the fact that Mozilla is behind schedule is like blaming dotcomms and software companies for stealing programmers that could have worked at NASA worked on getting people on Mars by now.
If the free software community wants to make a good impression on the business world (and it may already be too late), we must, at all costs, avoid splitting into tiny, useless factions working on useless, duplicate projects.
Seriously, who gives a fuck what the Business World thinks about Free Software? Dotcomm IPOs and get-rich-quick schemes will come and go but Free Software will still be around as long as there are coders with an itch to scratch. Free Software was here before NASDAQ became a topic of breakfast table conversation and it will be here the analysts and MBAs find a new fad to exploit the masses with be it BioTech or Genetic Engineering.
For some reason you are under the impression that Free Software needs big business to survive which is so far from the truth it's almost laughable.
I understand you meant your comment as a joke, but you are actually closer to the point than you think... Indeed, because of his dominant position, a monopolist has actually less rights than minor players. Acts which would be perfectly ok for a vendor which only has 10% market share are no-no for the 500 pound gorilla. The reasoning is that the minor player does not have the power to do real damage anyways (except maybe to himself...), so why restrict him? The bully, on the other hand, has the power to wreck the market-place, and thus has to be closely watched.
*grin* Yes, but you have to move the mouse pointer to the back button before you can click it.
I'm sure you have better things to do than moving a mouse pointer around. Opera eliminates some of that.
The bad part of this, if there is any, is that the back gesture is so intuitive and becomes so habitual, that you try back gestures in other browsers besides Opera.
Bush's education improvements were
These threads carry a strong statement about the true feelings of Slashdot readers. Many of you are quick to bash Microsoft for tying Internet Explorer into every part of Windows, yet you insist that Konquerer is doing something wonderful by doing the same thing. It is the behavior you should be criticizing, not the perpetrator. Microsoft could easily use something like Konquerer to validate their own actions.
The wheel it turns, around and around, with an ancient rumbling sound.
I messed up. Here is the correct link! here
Too bad you're using a troll tone to say something that is actually worth hearing. I agree with you but I don't share your anger. Also, I didn't experience this attitude on the KDE side.
thanks for the tip. man, the ACs here are nicer than the editors. thanks dude.
losers
MOM
"KDE 3 will be based on QT 3.0 and will also feature educational and other apps (like Kompare and KWinTV)"
'Kompare'? Can't somebody please think of the newcomers for a change? Pun names are hard to remember, impede usability, and contribute to the image of Linux as an unwelcoming club centred around cryptic commands, insider jokes and strange language like "grokking the gimp."
It's not like it's funny any more - just tired and lame. Like a marketing gimmick that's past its use-by date.
Mozilla is extremely fast in actually loading pages, although not in loading the program, or in creating new windows. Mozilla is very stable, it hasn't crashed for me, where Netscape would crash if I opened more than 4 windows, and where IE would crash just...for no reason at all.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
I've been running the final Win Xp for a week or so now, and it smokes any of these silly open source desktops. Sure it's not so great as a server, but as far as the cdesktop goes it makes these open source things look like the crude hacks that they are.
Actually, Lars, given the rate at which khtml and Konqueror have gone from zero to my browser of choice, it's not so far-fetched that you could have.
And that's not even mentioning the 100+ employees and $13 million Eazel needed to come up with an unfinished file browser that piggybacks on Gecko!
Konqueror is integrated with KDE, not the OS. KDE runs completely in userspace, and you can run linux or *BSD just fine without Konqueror. MSIE runs in the windows kernel, which is the major problem. Also, you don't have to use Konqueror, nothing in KDE prevents you from using Netscape or Opera. In Windows, M$ will often cause other browsers or email clients to break. Not so in KDE, you can use Netscape, Opera, or any other X based email client, and they won't crash any more often than if you were using any other window manager.
But, think of all the work!! You have to lift your left hand. You have to think where the backspace key is. You have to position your finger on the key. Then you have to put your hand back in a comfortable place.
Ohhhh... I'm tired just thinking about it...
Bush's education improvements were
It seems that most small software projects (like KDE, Microsoft, and Gnome) become large enough to start spawning other useful ideas, they integrate them very tightly into their core concepts and therefore limit the usability of any other vendor's solution. Why don't these companies stick to defining *good* and *restrictive* guidelines? If this had been done decades ago, there would be books detailing how software should work together, and concepts such as BIOS, OLE, COM (KOM?!), and ActiveX would be so damn vague. (And the awesome folks at Wine would not have to work so hard!)
one, two, one two like a duck
What you should try to keep the loading time to a minimum is 'objprelink'. Compile QT and KDE with objprelink and nice optimizations and drop debug-info. The speedup was incredible on my machine (dual pII400 w/384MB). KDE is no longer slow :)
Even mozilla is responsive now. The 0.9.3 build that I'm using is incredible. It might have something to do with me compiling everything from scratch, but compiling just QT and KDE should do a major difference :)
Objprelink can be found here: http://www.research.att.com/~leonb/objprelink/
by your own argument why does GNOME exist? It was to replace KDE by its original goals.
Mozilla really doesn't do it for me. There were lots of browsers out there before Mozilla..
I think you need a sanity check... Open source is all about duplication of effort. Linux shouldn't even exist by your argument since 386BSD predated it.. Everyone should work on the one that was there first... hmmm
On the other hand, I think it would be great if they could put a good interface on it! I could see it being useful for someone who can never remember the specifics of regex syntax depending on what language he's using(like me)and great for people who would otherwise be forced to comb through documents word-by-word to fix - or tag - certain classes of mistakes (like my girlfriend, who will likely be a professional editor in a few years).
Is anyone out there in slashdotland better acquainted with kregexpeditor?
You're a suburbanite.
Tell that to my SGI on a R15000.
try it on a modem it seems way faster
Got friends?
KDE seems to be all about redoing everything within a single framework and toolkit to give users a Windows-like experience and to compete with Windows. To quote from the KDE web site: KDE seeks to fill the need for an easy to use desktop for Unix workstations, similar to the desktop environments found under the MacOS or Window95/NT.
But why? Who actually benefits from this? What is the point of creating a Windows-like environment for non-expert users on top of Linux? If I wanted a Windows-like environment, why wouldn't I just use Windows? And if KDE goes through all this trouble, why pick a toolkit that makes it more expensive for commercial entities to develop for KDE than it is to develop for Windows? And why is KDE embracing an approach, large C++ libraries and dynamic loading of native code, that Microsoft is already beginning to abandon?
The KDE desktop is impressive looking, but I just can't figure out the motivation for working on it or for using it. After giving it a try for about a year (mostly because Konqueror was the best open source browser around until Mozilla0.9.3/Galeon came along), I'm back to using a simple window manager and a desktop menu.
It's a post about web browsers to a story about a web browser.
This is not offtopic. A troll perhaps, but not offtopic.
To whoever moderated that: get a clue.
Stupid IE tricks:
Use shift+click to open a link in a new window, without using the context menu.
Another one that many people aren't aware of:
Hold ctrl (I think) while spinning the mouse wheel to resize fonts quickly.
The fact is that nobody cares about your private little GNOME vs KDE war. It doesn't even exist, and is only made up by trolls like you. The GNOME and KDE guys are actually working together, leaving you and your ignorance behind in the "all-software-war-world". Bye now!
The fact is that nobody cares about your private little GNOME vs KDE war. It doesn't even exist, and is only made up by trolls like you. The GNOME and KDE guys are actually working together, leaving you and your ignorance behind in the "all-software-war-world". Bye now!
Who cares about what you care?
After reading that Mozilla/Konqueror-thread...
What is it with some people? KDE is an excellent desktop that progresses FAST (same thing can't be said for the "other" desktop). They have also created excellent multipurpose application that is the Konqueror. And still some people despise them!
Why? Folks at KDE have done a HUGE service for the Linux-community! They do it for free, they create GPL'ed Open-Source software that surpasses many comercial counterparts. And still there are people who complain! Even RMS got involved with his "You must beg for forgiveness" Bullshit!
You know what? RMS and other complainers can suck it. Suck it long, and suck it hard!
If you hate KDE, then use the Officially-sanctioned-by-FSF-but-progressing-slowl y-Gnome with it's 20 million dollar POS filemanager. After doing that, just SHUT UP! Make KDE a non-issue in your life.
As for me... I'll be using KDE, thank you very much. And no, I'm not going to beg for forgiveness from anyone! Not even from RMS!
Phew! Feels good to get that off my chest. Just use the desktop that you like the best, and let others use what they like
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Does the KDE interface play flash files? Anybody? Anybody care?
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Mozilla lets someone develop a custom application without writing C++.
So, I now understand why it has taken them so long.
OTOH, Konqueror is pretty good at what it does as well. But, it's not really close to being the same thing. Konqueror is a web browser/file manager/embedding frame.
Sounds like you live in a very interesting parallel universe.
Last I looked, Konqueror was the very nice central piece to the KDE desktop. I use and enjoy it every day, as do many others.
There are things that I hope will improve, but nothing about Konqueror -- and certainly nothing about its developers or development -- is a fiasco.
As to Mozilla, the original "but wait, you can't really pass judgment until you try the nightlies" software, now THERE is a fiasco.
Talk about ignoring the needs of the community! While people were crying for a decent browser (not so much crying now), the Mozilla team went happily about making their cross platform development environment or whatever they're calling it today.
While they fiddled, no IE browser share burned away. Given that most development was done by Netscape people on salary, not by volunteers, this is just plain inexcusable.
Konqueror fiasco, indeed!
I'm truly glad that the KDE team, at least, had someone who gave a damn about what the community needed and placed that over their "ain't that swell" hacker ego.
a catchy subject, but just think that with the QtMozEmbed plugin (or anything like this), you just need a menu switch to drop KHTML (slow, buggy as hell, bloat beacuse C++, ...) to gecko (fast, C, RMS blessed, cures headaches and . Yeah, right. I don't think it would be much different at all.
And, although gecko isn't moz, it's just to say that this argument Konq vs Moz is complete BS.
That's what kinit is for. It's just a process to load libs and forks out kde applications so that load times aren't so harsh. The real problem though is how ld loads c++ generated binaries. That's why kde-2.2. has an obj-prelink tool
...because even with the QT libraries and kdeinit having to load that first time it's still up faster than Mozilla. Then it runs using about half the RAM Mozilla does.
Add Nautilus to the mix and I start wishing KDE had better keyboard shortcuts so I could start using it fulltime.
Mozilla is written in C++. C++ is good.
C may be the best for OS's, but C++ makes writing easy to debug programs easier.