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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."
To stop animated .gif's, right click on the page and click "Stop Animations." It'd be nice if there was a one-click way to do that... but as of right now, that's how ya do it.
James Crawford
2. It would be nice if I could put my favorite links on the menu bar, like with Navigator.
Yeah, this works. It even puts the little favicon.ico picture next to them.
You can't drag and drop them there, though. You have to add them as a bookmark, and then go into Edit Bookmarks and move them to the Toolbar folder.
Actually, many KDE programmers are from Trolltech, and support Opensource idealogy.
Trolltech are open out of:
A) some idealogy
B) it pushes Qt, which strngthens their grip in the commercial world, and allows them to 'show off' samples of running code, such as KDE.
Closing Qt in light of the two is unlikely, as most of their profit is from their closed-source buyers, who pay a Single-fee for Qt, with yearly upgrade fees. No need to pay per-sale
(Knowing this, as I worked for a Qt-using propriarity software company).
Unless they whole business model, they would have to sell Qt to the developers, because buyers don't pay for Qt.
Ironically, many of those developers work in Trolltech, and Trolltech know would never pay.
They also know KDE has no chance of succeeding in a closed pay-per-copy license, in the opensource world.
KDE 3.0 is not going to be a major rewrite like when it was moving from KDE 1 -> KDE 2
KDE is now switching to a newer QT (3.0), it will be binary incompatible (because of QT 3.0 and GCC 3.0.1, and the upcoming 3.1) and will have some core functionality improved (like database support etc)...
Hetz (Heunique)
Why do we need another web browser?
Why don't we? The KDE rendering engine exists for a longer time than mozilla, but that's not the issue. I started the rewrite of the rendering engine something like 2 years ago. At that stage mozilla was not useable neither. And gues what? I didn't mind if mozilla existed or not, I just did it for the fun of it. That's what things usually boil down to in the open source community. Doing it for the fun. That's how Linux started aswell. I didn't give a shit if someone thought it's useful or wasted time 2 years ago. And hey, I never believed it would evolve to what it is now, and that we would get there with such a small number of people.
Do you have some problem with Mozilla that we should know about?
I think noone of us has.
I'm sure some asshole will moderate this post troll or flamebait, but I'm 100% in earnest here.
He'd be right.
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.
There are about 5 people that do 95% of the work on the KDE HTML engine. Most of them are not paid to do this work (some have jobs at Linux companies, but do mostly other work there). So this work was to a very big part done by some people in their free time.
AFAIK, there are over 50 full time developers working on mozilla. Do you really think that we five people would have cut development time in half?
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.
You're just forgetting one thing. That we are not working to make a good impression on business community. We're working in our free time one something that is interesting to us. It is a hobby to me. And even though I work for a commercial Linux company now, I still don't care about business when it comes to my hobby.
And btw, this mindless flmaing on /. probably makes a worse impression on all of the business interested in Linux, than 10 duplicated open source projects could ever do.
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.
And you'd be still stuck with using "mail" as a mail client on Linux, because why do you need elm if you have mail? and Why do you meed mutt if you have elm? Why kmail if you have mutt?
Enough written. Back to some fun things. Hacking khtml for example.
Cheers,
Lars (lars at kde org, one of the khtml maintainers)
> What is the motivation?
It's the best development platform available on Linux today (and yes, I've tried Gnome, GnuStep and Tcl/Tk).
> It can't be because the functionality is missing from Linux
Yes it is.
> many of the KDE applications had excellent, free, non-Qt-based equivalents before the KDE project even started.
No (think integration here).
> And many of the KDE applications are easily implemented as little Tk or expect scripts.
Some may be, but far from all (Tcl scales very badly) but think integration again here. And looks too.
> Who actually benefits from this?
Users and application developpers.
> If I wanted a Windows-like environment, why wouldn't I just use Windows?
Openness, reliablity.
> 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?
The cost of a Qt license is negligeable compared to the total cost of development of a typical desktop application. It's less than a month worth of salary for an average engineer.
> And why is KDE embracing an approach, large C++ libraries and dynamic loading of native code, that Microsoft is already beginning to abandon?
Because it works and there currently aren't any better alternatives.