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Mozilla Project Hurt by Apple's Decision to use KH
Anonymous Coward writes "I Read this article from ZDNet claiming how some of the Mozilla developers were hurt by Apple's decision to use KHTML over Gecko. I can see both their points. Mozilla was made for cross-platform compatibility, and this probably adds to the bloat, however that's not what they were looking for. They wanted small and fast."
It should be noted that Mike Shaver's (formerly of Netscape, still of Mozilla) comments were, as he points out, taken horribly out of context in the ZDNet article.
Apple hurt Mozilla? The only thing that hurt Mozilla was Mozilla. And for the most part, the Mozilla developers know that already.
"Editors," indeed.
http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6565
Have you been living in a cave for the past few years? They eschew standards? Mac OS X has a windowing system based on PDF, OpenGL integrated at a very low level in the operating system, XML-formatted preferences for every single app and system setting, an ultra-compliant Java2 VM, and an open source foundation with a BSD UNIX personality. It's getting very, very difficult to find new technologies in OS X that are proprietary, and you're complaining that they used one open source rendering engine instead of another? What kind of warped view of the world do you have?
let's take apart your argument, slashdot take-down style:
Apple has never valued cross-platform compatibility except at great urging.
never is a strong word in my books-- what do you call bluetooth, 802.11, firwire, opengl, xml, and usb? refusal to embrace and push for open standards? if anything, apple is the measure of computer industry these days.
From the days of proprietary Apple-only hardware and the squelching of would-be competitors, to the modern day with the refusal to port Aqua and launching the iPod for Macs only.
computers are what apple sells and they stay in business by selling their machines, not other peoples'. the licencing of apple hardware was flawed from the beginning and handcuffed apple into killing the program because of abuse. porting aqua to other platforms would be the end of apple-- remember, they are a hardware complany, not a software company. aqua sells macs, not the other way around. so do ipods. apple builds incentive to buy their hardware, why give those incentives to other platform users?
the integration of an X server in the latest release is definitely the exception to the rule.
pal, you have so missed the boat in your post that i think you should take a step back from this fud. x server is merely the tip of the iceberg of what has been the "exception to the rule". os x is on the cutting edge of the open source / corporate relationship, existing on open standard freebsd and countless other non-proprietary formats. if the other favourite popular target of slashdot could be mentioned this favourably, we wouldn't be here.
just my two cents.
We should be comparing to Chimera, which is the OS X version of the trimmed-down Mozilla-based browser. My copy is about 21M.
Jesus H. Christ! How can anyone claim that khtml ist not crossplatform?
h tml
It can be used without X (kde no X = kdenox, in CVS), without unix even, as Atheos shows.
Nobody remember Konqembedded?
http://www.konqueror.org/embedded.
Also the only slight dependency is qt, which is crossplatform (Windows, Unix, OS X, embedded). As Apple [and Atheos] shows, it is easy to write wrapper to get rid of even that dependency.
Moritz
Here is his blog which talks about it.