KDE 2.2.1, On Win32/Cygwin

m_ilya writes: "It looks like KDE 2.2.1 has been ported on Cygwin. More than year ago I was forced to use WinNT at work, and I've been missing the Linux desktop a lot. I hope if I will be ever forced to use Windows again I would be able to have more Unix-friendly desktop :). Here's the announcement. Kudos to all the KDE hackers." Check out the posting on the Dot for some more links.

Comments

virtual desktops on win xp

[buzzini]

This is arguably off-topic, but for those of you who've been pining for virtual desktops on Windows, check out the Windows XP Powertoys which includes a virtual desktop tool.

Choice is returning in the browser market

[Eloquence]

After Netscape's failure to come up with immediate usable follow-up releases to Netscape 4.7, the future on the Windows browser market looked bleak: Microsoft had managed, by throwing enough smart people at the problem and leveraging its monopoly position to distribute the result, to entirely dominate the browser platform. In the US, IE is around 90% (strangely, Netscape 4.x still hovers at around 20% in Germany).

But Mozilla is now very fast and stable on Windows, and it is clear that the 1.0 release will be one of the best browsers available (memory usage will likely remain unsatisfying, but memory prices these days are negligible) -- and available on all relevant platforms. Then you have spin-offs like K-Meleon and Galeon which use the Mozilla Gecko engine with smaller general overhead and some new features.

Development of Moz & Co. will not stop with the 1.0 release -- they will continue to improve proportionally to the number of people that use and hack them. The same is true for KDE's Konqueror, which is an excellent, fast browser that just keeps getting better, and has some very nice features, especially on the GUI side. I'm not keeping up with IE, but some of the Mozilla/Konqueror features seem to be unmatched by IE: tabbed browsing (Moz), background loading, very flexible window layout, perfect search engine integration etc. etc. None of them are bundled with any specific vendor-services (except for Netscape's "What's Related" in Mozilla). Wonderful cookie management. No smart tags either.

From what I have heard, IE 6.0 only had marginal improvements, reminiscent of a single milestone in Mozilla. This would not surprise me, given the fact that Microsoft no longer needs to invest in the browser market since they already dominate it pretty safely (or so they think). This is completely different to oss, which keeps getting better until its developers are satisfied.

The KDE port to Windows may eventually give Windows users another mature choice for browsing, besides Opera, Mozilla and K-Meleon, Konqueror. The Qt libraries are cross-platform (though there may be licensing issues), so hopefully eventually we'll see a simple to install binary port of Konqueror.

There's lots to say about why choice in the browser market matters, but I'll save that for another rant. Trust Microsoft: They knew why they had to concentrate all of their resources on killing Netscape 5 years ago. Part of their strategy was OEM licensing, telling PC manufacturers not to include Netscape besides IE, or suffer the consequence of prohibitive Windows prices. From what I have gathered, many of these practices are now forbidden, so OEMs should now be legally able to install another browser besides IE. And the choices for them to do so are growing. This gives PC manufacturers potential revenue streams since they can "customize" these browsers in unprecedented ways.

So this should be a wake-up call to OEMs to install browsers besides IE. The time is now, and liberating the browser is the first step to breaking the MS OS monopoly.

Re:whats the point

[Spy Hunter]

The new IE6 privacy mgr stuff is, imo, just horrendous.

Actually, I prefer it over Konqueror's cookie management (which I also think is very good, don't get me wrong). With IE6, I have separate control over first- and third-party cookies. I can set all cookies to "block" except for harmless and sometimes useful single-session cookies. If I ever want to let one through, I simply click the little icon in the status bar, and it gives me a summary of what it has blocked. BTW, it blocks more than cookies: it's on to some other privacy-invading tricks as well (sometimes it blocks loading of certain apparently invisible .gifs). I can select any one of those blocked items and let it through.

Konqueror doesn't really have anything comparable. The closest you can get is to make it ask you about cookies whenever you visit a new site. That generates lots of questions, which is annoying. You can set it to block always, but when you want to let a cookie through then, you have to go deep into the preferences, which is annoying. Especially because the preferences dialog takes forever to load and forever to go away afterwards. The cookie deleter dialog is nice, but I don't really find myself using it much. I'd like more convenient control over what gets in there in the first place.