KDE 3.1 Beta Released

shadow303 writes "KDE 3.1 beta has been released. There are numerous improvements, including tabbed browsing with Konqueror." I still can't say I care for tabbed browsing, but a lot of people swear by it. The new style/theme looks quite excellent, as do the various improved dialog boxes.

Comments

Re:Tabbed browsing

[Dopefish_1]

I despise switching to the tab then closing or having to right click on the tab to get the context menu.
So middle-click on the tab instead.

Re:okay...

[LunarOne]

Well, you know what tabs are (eg. right click on "My Computer" on Windows and the tabs at the top are General, Device Manager, Hardware Profiles, Performance).

Well, in Mozilla, you can set it up so that you can:
a) right-click on a link and instead of open the page in another window, you can open it in another tab.
b) middle click on a link and it will open up the additional page in a tab.
c) type a url in the address bar and instead of pressing ENTER, press CTRL-ENTER and the page will be opened in a tab.

Thus, you have one copy of Mozilla running, but within the browser, a tab for each page that you want to view. No more billions of sessions open in the task bar at the bottom of your UI.

Best of all, you can set your preferences so that Mozilla loads the tabs in the background. A great application of this is: open the Slashdot page. Middle-click on all the "Read more..." links of stories you are interested in. You will have, within your browser, tabs with headings that you can look at, one at a time. Then, you can read each story, close the tab and look at the next and so on.

If you haven't or won't use this feature, force yourself to. You'll never go back.

Re:Transparency?

[madstork2000]

I don't know much about the fundemental architecture, but the transparency I get is from mosfets liquid theme.

http://www.mosfet.org/liquid.html

According to his site his theme uses custom QT widgets. But it is easy to install and not special tweaks were needed to the X server.

I really don't know squat about how it all works, I just thought I would point out this one particular way transparency is handled. Hope it helps get you started.

MS2k

Re:Tabbed browsing

[Teancom]

Actually, they were almost completely implemented by somebody that is not a "hardcore" konq/khtml developer. I.e., somebody decided they really wanted them, wrote them up, and then several other people helped with the debugging and configuration. I really wish I remembered the guy's name, but it's actually been a few months, and my memory is poor :-P But here, like in all other open source projects, the stuff gets done that people want. If the vocal minority includes somebody with the talent to implement tabs, then, guess what, here you go :-) And enough different people have piped up about loving tabs, that I think it is more than just a matter of "not knowing how to use their window manager".

All that said, I dislike tabs, tried them, and haven't used them since B-)

Re:Have they fixed C++ binary symbol preloading ye

[Anonymous Coward]

The objprelink change made it into binutils one year ago.
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/binutils/2001-0 8/msg0 0311.html
Question - does this still do a jmp to a jmp for virtual functions?

Re:still ugly

[nikal]

Yes you are spoiled.

1) click on one of the links from www.kde-look.org
2) read the 4 line instructions on how to install your newly downloaded theme
3)install it

Whoops, now your KDE is purty.

Re:Tabbed browsing

[Masem]

While I can't argue with the concept of more work to get to given tabbed page from outside the application, the use of tabs currently solves a problem that until recently most GUI elements has with task switching, in that every instance of a SDI (single document interface) application would be listed in the task bar-like area. Thus, if you had multiple browser windows open, your task bar would be swamped with each window's title, and given all the other likely stuff you'd be running it would be difficult to determine the distinction of the different windows without some other mechanism or checking each one separately. Even without the task bar, using some application switcher may generate an overly long list, which could be hard to navigate or slower to use than normal tab switching. Newer GUIs (including XP and KDE2/3) are more intelligent now and will group multiple instances of the same application into the same task 'button', providing a popup menu to select the specific instance of that application. But when Opera and Mozilla were being developed into their current reincarnations, this wasn't a feature, and given that most developers or users will have several browser windows open at a time, compared to any other SDI-type application besides editors, it's not a suprise this feature was added. (And even in the case of editors, I noticed that a lot of the windows shareware and commercial packages have had the options of tabs to switch between open files, showing the same problem as multiple browser windows.)

Now, I dont' have Moz handy currently, but I do know that Opera allows you to place the tabs at the bottom of the page; I want to say Moz does too. Thus, in your case, you could jump to the Opera app from the bottom task bar, then use bottom tabs to find the right tab; mouse movement is limited, and locating the right page should be faster. Tab location (above, below, off) has almost always been an option in any program that I've seen them used effectively.

The other consideration is that maybe, there needs to be a way for apps to communicate to the task-bar/applications list as to describe all the current instances that are open. Thus, regardless if the program is tabbed or not, clicking on the task bar button for that program would should all instances of it, and selecting the appropriate instance would either go to that window, or bring the right tab forward. This, of course, is not trivial to work back into most GUI frameworks currently.

But, most important, tabs should be optional: some people love multiple windows, some don't. Appropriately written, the additional feature of tabs should be very light weight and ignorable when not used.

Re:Have they fixed C++ binary symbol preloading ye

[twener]

Your answer is wrong, objprelink is obsolete. See http://objprelink.sourceforge.net/.