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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)
> 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.