Slashdot Mirror
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."
I don't think the Mozilla guys should take Apple's decision as anything more than Apple trying to do what's best for Apple. We users may have the luxury of using political motives in determing which software to use, but corporations have to answer to shareholders. If Apple sincerely believes they made the best choice for them, then I hope it works out well for them.
I'll continue to use Mozilla, if it makes the developers happy!
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Mozilla supports many more standards/protocols than Safari As Safari reaches this level of functionality it will get bigger and bigger.
At the end of the day though, who cares if they use Mozilla or not?
What's important is that they're dumping IE, thus freeing themselves from a dependence on Microsoft.
PS: "Bloated" or not, Mozilla runs just fine on my PC.
Would the khtml people be "hurt" if apple had used Gecho? Maybe if the Mozilla people are so injured they should look at why KHTML was chosen over Gecho and take steps to improve. Such is the beauty of competition. Maybe the mozilla people aren't aiming for what the Safari people were looking for... Maybe portablility wasn't important as size and speed to the Safari people. Apple adopting an open source browser is ultimately a very good thing, whether it be Gecho, Khtml, or some other open sourch engine.
Apple's R&D people are some of the best and their research showed which path was 'best' based on some checklist spawned from some meetings somewhere in the depths of Apple. Would we have a similar story if the KHTML kids were hurt because Apple went the other way? No. Their project is seen as less-significant. Do they have their own icon on /.? Similarly, no. For the same reason.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
And guess what, Intel was hurt by Apple's decision to use the PPC and Microsoft was hurt by Apple not licensing the NT kernel. They're a fucking business, not a charity.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
At one point, it's necessary to stop and redo everything from scratch.
I mean, if the Apple folks were able to port KHTML to OpenStep^WMac OS X from that whole Linux-QT-KDE mess, it can't be that bad, can it?
Let's call it like it is -- Gecko, while a noble effort, is really a failure. It was YEARS late, and completely missed its goal (a lightweight, fast. cross-platform rendering engine). One bit of that (cross-platform) does not a success make.
I have to say, I'm absolutely impressed with Apple's Safari. It's FAST as all getout, and it's the first browser that really makes me think twice about having paid for OmniWeb. I've been using Safari daily since release and while, yes, it has some bugs, it's still better than Chimera, OW, & Mozilla combined. IE also has its rendering issues, and I detest lots of other things about it.
Safari's what a browser should be -- small, lightweight, and out of my face. The interface is slim & sleek, and, like the rest of Apple's software, lets me focus on the CONTENT rather than the delivery.
I really think that's why OSX is so wonderful -- it just stays out of my way and lets me do what I gotta do. And I have to admit, running a DVD authoring program alongside several terminal windows on a Mac (!) is still impressive to me.
Apple didn't buy NeXT. NeXT swallowed Apple whole.'
--NBVB
it might just slim down and get lighter and faster! what would they add, other than tabs, that would cause major bloat? that is the problem with the full mozilla--many features. i shouldn't say "problem" though, since i feel that it is an advantage in cases.
...and if Apple had chosen Mozilla's engine, the KHTML developers would have been "hurt." KHTML is a compact code by comparison - far easier for Apple to take and modify. What happened to the idea that choice is good? Apple is helping to turn KHTML into a more viable choice (I used Mozilla exclusively before Safari was release- I had never touched KHTML). Now there are a whole bunch of viable browsers out there. Chris
I mean come on, look at Apple's choices,
1) Use this extremely bloated, unoptimized browser or
2) Use this smaller engine that can be optimized with little effort to run like a top on our operating system.
I'm sorry but Apple is doing what any good business would do, its looking out for its own interests. But I fail to see how this hurts Mozilla. So what mac users can use another browser. COMPETITION IS GOOD. maybe this will get those Mozilla monks in gear and start making their browser SMALLER instead of adding X more features that I don't need.
Now if all the browsers would just use the same plugin models....
"If I were bound by all laws everywhere I'm sure I would have committed a capital crime somewhere."
Competition in the Open Source world? Microsoft gripes about not owning 100% of the market, too, guys. Competing projects are good. They promote diversity, and since we're all Open Source people, and we all use the same open protocols, its all interoperable.
Good to see KHTML in the commercial spotlight, and not just Mozilla. I'm typing this in Mozilla, which I sear by and tell all my friends about, but KHTML is good, too.
Bah, what do I know. i'm just a user
Theonlyuse of monkeys is to testthings onthem.Some peoplemay say"Hey That'scruel!"and myresponse is"I don't like monkeys
I understand that mozilla might have some hurt feelings, but lets focus. Apple had specific needs and they chose what they thought was the best solution. Mozilla is doing something a bit different (multiplatform).
In the end this is a bit of a win for Mozilla and all open source software.
1. It is a high profile (if low distribution) browser based on an open source core. This is a good thing for open source projects in general.
2. Competition in the open source browser arena is not a bad thing. I predict that both browsers will get better as a result or some good natured competition.
3. Apple is not anti-Mozilla, they just decided to use a different rending engine for Safari.
4. Chimera (Mozilla based) is still a better browser than Safari on MacOS X.
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.
I question not so much the free software crowd's love of Mozilla, as the hate for KHTML. Why hate this _other_ free and excellent library for web rendering?
Apple made a perfectly valid choice, and contributed their changes back to the free software community. Yet another great free software project now benefits from Apple, at IE/Microsoft's expense of market share on Mac desktops.
Don't draw any conclusions you don't have to. I love Mozilla, too, but Apple made a decision, and one which even most Mozilla developers feel was a valid technical choice, even if it wasn't the one they themselves would have made.
What exactly did Apple do wrong again?
---
Drew Streib, dtype.org
Safari weighs in at 7.2 megs, Mozilla is 38.3 megs.
Safari has a ton of room to grow before it achieves Mozilla's mammoth size.
Regardless of this, Safari is far more than halfway done.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
They don't care about portability, since they are a single platform. Thus, Gecko's advantages there offered nothing. They explained their choice in terms of speed and the size and structure of the code. Probably part of the issue was whether they felt they could dive in and code away immediately. Mozilla, arguably, is a little large for that.
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.
Isn't IBM pushing for a Java UI approach that uses of *native* GUI widgets if available? (I don't remember the acronym off hand.) There have been many complaints about emulated widgets, including speed and not fitting "local" OS customs.
It seems that this is yet anothre push to use native widgets rather than emulations. Perhaps emulated widgets is a dying idea (or hardware has not caught up yet).
Table-ized A.I.
I'm sorry, but there's a reason why I personally stick with Opera and IE (IE for IE "only" pages, and for /. just for the irony) and why I'm willing to _pay_ for well made software. Mozilla hurt Mozilla by being too little (or too much when viewing the codebase!) too late. Mozilla based browsers have improved dramatically, but IMHO they are still sub-par. Although Safari has some missing features, for an initial release it looks very promising. From what I've seen, if I ever get a Mac I may be very tempted to use Safari over Opera. Of course, Opera should then sue Apple for levereging their monopoly on PowerPC desktops and pushing Opera out of their market :-).
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
.. is that you get to choose which product best suits your needs. Unfortunately, that also means that someone doesn't get picked. Get over it, and make a better product. Maybe you'll get picked the next time around.
Uhm, the iPod is available for PC, and not because of great urging, but because it was a good business decision.
...you got the title wrong. It should read:
"ZDNet trolls for more page hits yet again - film at 11."
Apple hurt Mozilla? The only thing that hurt Mozilla was Mozilla. And for the most part, the Mozilla developers know that already.
"Editors," indeed.
I was a bit surprised Apple developed a browser, and with Open Source code, but when I read it wasn't using Gecko I was even more surprised.
However, seems like the KDE folks have done a great job here, so congrats to them. The Mozilla folks shouldn't feel "hurt", this should motivate them to improve what is already a really good browser.
The competition is not only IE, but more stuff is showing up all the time. That's great, competition in the browser arena is back. For a moment I tought we'd be stuck with IE forever!
- sigs are for wimps.
http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6565
Apple was probably enticed by the fact that it is a smaller codebase, and thus giving Apple more "ownership" (in the creative sense) of the project.
Mozilla is a lot more mature, feature-wise, and Apple was probably looking for a clean slate. They just want a stripped-down rendering engine, and the interface is all theirs.
Q: You said this was designed to be cross-platform. Where's the mac version?
A: Designed to be cross-platform doesn't mean we offer a build on every platform, it just means the code itself works anywhere. We don't officially offer Phoenix for Mac, but some people have already begun experimenting with mac versions (see this page). We may consider officially releasing Phoenix for Mac in the future, but we want to focus on Windows and Linux for now.
I seriously dig the Phoenix project. Mozilla is way too big and way more than I would ever use. Phoenix is just right (and getting better with every release).
Unfortunately for Mozilla, Phoenix isn't mature enough yet to be Mac's choice of browser. Give it a year or so and we'll probably see a Mac version of Phoenix which will rival Safari in speed and size.
Much as I admire the Mozilla project, the guys behind Konqueror deserve much more recognition than they seem to recieve (at least on /., where it's all Mozilla,Mozilla,Mozilla). They're a much smaller group of developers who have put together a great browser for KDE, so why the hell shouldn't they have a success story of their own?!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Damn, I would have had first post if I wasn't using Mozilla.
Mozilla is great, but the kHTML project is also good and definitely worthy competition to Gecko. The competition, and even a rivalry to some extent, will cause make developers for both projects work harder to maintain "an edge." Just as the competition between KDE and Gnome promotes a better windowing environment, hopefully this competition will improve the rendering capabilities of open-source browsers.
Um, these goals aren't necessarily mutually exclusive (*cough* Opera *cough*). Perhaps, KHTML is simply better designed and better written. Personally, I think the KHTML team did the right thing by adding layers of functionality in each release rather than trying to get everything in there at once.
Do one thing and do it well. Then add features, if you must. =/
I doubt that I've ever had anything good to say about Apple before, but good for them for this move, and I think in the long run it will be the best thing for Mozilla too. By bringing another browser to the arena, and one that seriously challanges IE even more than Mozilla, it can only help Mozilla by reducing IE's monopoly hold. And giving Mozilla some performance targets to shoot for will not be a bad thing either.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
So Mac users are especially prone to want tabbed browsing, as Mozilla products offer.
I started using Chimera a few days before Safari beta was released. I really like Safari, but in just those few days I was utterly hooked by the tabs of Chimera.
Until Safari supports tabs, I'm sticking with Chimera. I doubt I'm alone.
One thing to note, though... ALL Mac browsers now kick Microsoft's ass. Bye, bye IE-piece-of-crap. In any event, it is an awesome twist to see the Mac browser market so vitalized.
Oh well. At least I'll have something to gripe about when I'm an old man. "Back in my day..."
Nothing is so smiple that it can't get screwed up.
Ziff Davis wants you to jump on this -- and visit thier site. DON'T DO IT!
That said, Apple and Apple's staff can choose what they wish or what fits the task. If they decide later to use Gecko for something else, ZD will no doubt run a "Apple uses Mozilla -- KDE developers miffed!" or some such garbage.
The important thing is that open source is becoming more and more important on the user end -- not just on the server side.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
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?
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
-jfedor
Other Lizard Wranglers that deserve a voice in this. To be honest these guys are the ones I listen to when it comes to Mozilla.
alsa
Blizzard
mpt
Why should JWZ be quoted about a project he bailed on years ago? jwz is entertaining when he whines, it's the only reason I can think of.
"think of it as evolution in action"
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.
Free Software has again helpped a proprietary company. But maybe this will be good for Freedom, ultimately, as more companies realize that they can benefit when "their" software is Free.
The fact that KHTML is Free software let Apple quickly and easily break free from a hold that MS had them in. They tried bundling the OmniWeb browser, but that was clearly inferior to MS IE...
Right now Apple is tripping over themselves to get AppleWorks good enough to replace the need for MS Office. Maybe Open Office will soon help here (Apple has focused on making X11 apps more seemlessly integrated with OSX).
If Apple, Dell, HP, etc, collaborated with Free Software projects more, they could remove the need for users to get certain software from MS. That, in turn, would allow them to chart their own paths in terms of their wares and give them the opportunity to team up with others who are threatened by MS.
Soon, Apple will turn to FreeSoftware for Ogg code.
Apple's costs for distributing their free (beer) value-add-software packages are making them consider (and actually) charge for their "i" crap. (see http://www.thinksecret.com/news/freeiapps.html) FreeNet would go a long way to help them spread out their bandwidth. If only they gave us the right to redistribute their code. And hell, why not let us improve the code too, and give it away for free.
"Translated through a de-weaselizer, (Melton's e-mail) says: 'Even though some of us used to work on Mozilla, we have to admit that the Mozilla code is a gigantic, bloated mess, not to mention slow, and with an internal API so flamboyantly baroque that frankly we can't even comprehend where to begin,'" Zawinski wrote.
Well, no offense, but is Melton wrong?
I mean, download the source for both and look at the difference. The sheer volume of Mozilla is overwhelming even for the experienced programmers.
There has been an enormous effort gone into Mozilla and it shows, but I think it still has a way to go.
And I love this quote:
"Gecko is already embedded and distributed in real-world applications from Red Hat, IBM, OEone, Netscape and CompuServe, and we look forward to the upcoming releases of Gecko-based products that are currently in development."
Yes, and of course KHTML is not used in the "real" world.
There has been a lengthy discussion on MozillaZine here
It seems that Apple's problem was more that there was more stripping that needed to be done with Gecko before they got down to the foundation and could start building their own browser. This seems to be a common concern, that Mozilla includes too much stuff to be very useful as a working base, and thus the popularity of things such as Phoenix, whose sole goal is to remove features from Mozilla.
If this is indeed the case, perhaps Gecko would benefit from being packaged and maintained separately from Mozilla, as a rendering engine but not a browser. In other words, something only useful for application developers. Even conceptually, rendering HTML != browser. Suppose you're rendering to postscript, for example? This might even benefit Mozilla, buy keeping the project more modular. (Although it's pretty modular already, but not down to the core.)
The above is spoken with next to no knowledge of the intricacies of the Mozilla codebase, so flame gently.
I personally don't see Apple supporting Khtml that detrimental to Mozilla. Maybe a little disheartening but not detrimental. . .
I think another viable browser that is W3C compliant (like the Khtml) gaurantees that more web sites follow W3C standards rather than IE's. That's good for all browsers(except IE).
The payoff for pushing for standards is that *everyone* benefits as long as they stick to said standards, and Mozilla's efforts seem to be working in that regard.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
Look at it another way... Apple may benefit simply by virtue of having multiple browsers on the market.
For the longest time, Netscape owned the browser market, and set the standards. That was OK for Apple, except that the Mac version of Navigator lagged behind the Windows version, particularly with Java implementation. Then MS came along, and there was a "standards battle" between IE and Navigator; MS was so determined to win that they even wrote a better version of IE for Mac than for Windows. IE has emerged on top and, true to form, MS is now trying to move the standards to favor IE on Windows with things like ActiveX controls. Netscape/Mozilla has been and continues to be holding their own, without assistance from Apple. Apple's support of KHTML instantly puts a new rendering engine on millions of computers and lessens MS's grip on the web (albeit slightly), because IE for Mac will not be the default browser anymore on Macs (I'm assuming).
The best thing that could happen right now in the browser wars is not for Apple to jump into the IE/Mozilla fray, but to stir a rivalry between two open source browsers, KHTML and Mozilla. Get these to browsers to compete on features, and put MS back into the position of being a follower rather than a leader.
It is a toss up between him and MozillaQuest for who can spout the biggest load of bullshit about the browser. Personally I wonder what the hell Mozilla or Netscape did to these guys in the first place that they've carried such a chip on their shoulder about the project ever since.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Apple had better take extraordinary effort to make their new browser IE compatible. Like it or not most people use IE and most web sites are optimized for it. While many web developers will be willing to test their pages on IE/Mozilla/Opera how many are going to be willing to get a Mac to test this new browser?
I was a switcher before switching was cool. I have used Mozilla since somewhere in the .9 range. I have used Opera for Windows for a few years. I have used OmniWeb and iCab on Mac.
My honest opinion is that Chimera is better than the other Mac browsers - but will have stiff competition from Safari.
There are things that I like from Safari that I would like to see in Chimera. Like some of the interface elements - like the progress bar or snap back... And there are things from Chimera that I would like to see in Safari - like tabs and better cookie management and popup management. I would like both to offer flash filtering the same as chimera/mozilla do image filtering.
All in all I think the other browsers can learn from Safari - and Apple can learn from the success of the open source Chimera. Currently - I still prefer Chimera, the latest builds have so far been extremely stable, fast, and usable. Thank you Chimera Dev....
If I am not mistaken, KHTML now runs on Linux, Atheos and now Mac OS X. That's not bad for code that is supposedly "not portable".
It was Trolltech who ported QT to MacOSX [trolltech.com]. In my opinion, Apple's work is trivial and we'll probably be seeing more KDE apps being released by Apple.
Safari does not use QT for MacOS X.
I meant I'm using Konqueror as my browser, not pure KHTML. :/
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Why are we using xpcom considering the huge bloat/threading issues on non-win32?
Why do the signatures on our api make almost no sense to outsiders?
Why do we compare our performance almost exclusively to IE?
If Apple wont use our code because it's too big, do we have any real chance of being used on small devices?
Why are we still using xul now that we ifdef out platform-specific ui code?
I'm sure there are more questions that someone more knowledgable than I am can come up with, but these are questions that haven't been taken very seriously up to now, because there has not been a high-profile alternative to gecko.
I've been using mozilla/phoenix for several years (I've even submitted a few patches), and I think it's an absolutely amazing peice of software, but it *is* huge and hard to understand. It is hard to recognize the size and complexity for what it is without a highly visible comparison like khtml.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
Exactly. Everybody here seems to be using the excuse that mozilla is cross-platform, and can expect to be bloated. Well khtml works across unix/x, linux/framebuffer, and now osx as well. it's based on qt, which works on windows just fine. The Safari developers even noted how easy it was to port (all they basically did was sit it on top of a small framework that was a substitute for the kde-specific bits).
The QT toolkit is one of the reasons this can be done in an efficient, easily understandable way. It's a great toolkit, and it's a shame the mozilla project decided to ignore it in favour of gtk/xul/javascript/etc.
I wouldn't go that far. It's a very useful, very standards-compliant, cross-platform rendering engine. The fact that somewhere along the line the project fell prey to creeping featuritis doesn't change this.
On the other hand, this usenet post sums up how I feel about the whole thing.
4. Chimera (Mozilla based) is still a better browser than Safari on MacOS X.
I've been using Chimera nearly exclusively for months. The Dec. 20 release (vers. 0.6 + a few features) is the nicest so far. What a development curve in the past year compared to the much older Opera and iCab!
I think it's interesting that Chimera is related to NS and Mozilla (Gecko) yet is soooo much cleaner and faster. Unfortunately it gets tarred with the same brush by people who haven't used it much.
Chimera's a lot more Aqua than Safari, too! I think Safari is stunningly ugly for an Apple product.
I agree and don't see why both open source projects can't continue. Competition is not just healthier than bloated monopoly, it's essential when we don't even know precisely what we're after. And our shared mission must be to kill IE, or at least beat it back....
Why did they not talk (assuming they did not) with Opera to use their tech for the web browser? It rocks, its TINY and v.7 is standards compliant and its fast. I use it daily and it has some great features for web developers.
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
I wrote to Darin Adler, BTW, and he says (my paraphrase!) that the infection of Qt MOC keywords in the Safari code is well contained. They don't use Qt underneath.
And just how is the community supposed to exclude Apple? Open source software is open for anyone to use, including any company. Besides Apple has contributed code back to the KHTML project. Just what will it take to please you whinny ungrateful open sourcers?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
here
Snippets:
Jobs said the browser was "based on standards", "works with any Web site", has much-improved performance over IE (page-loading speed is "three times faster", JavaScript performs twice as fast and it launches "40% faster" - comparisons to Netscape 7.0 shows similar performance gains on the Macintosh platform)
Apple [...] has today sent all changes, along with a detailed changelog, to the KHTML developers.
Also:
Mail from Safari team to KHTML devs
and Dirk Muellers response
-- With more than 200 comments this is apparently a big thing to the KDE community
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
I agree, but I think we can extend that to say "multiple Open Source browsers on the market." I think Apple adopting and improving on KHTML helps the KHTML guys, which makes them a better competitor to Mozilla. The same way a M$ monopoly is harmful to the industry, a monopoly by one Open Source browser, IMHO, is also not a good thing. So at the end, I think this will help everybody, not just Apple.
---
Open Source Shirts
It took like a year to release, and before then you had to use 3rd party hacks to get it to work.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
They eschew standards much better than they used to but many of features in the iApps (iDisk, iCal, iTunes etc.) and .mac initiative still smack of proprietary lock-in in one form or another.
Chimera 0.6 (Navigator)
21.4 MB (21,743,324 bytes) Dec 20,2002.
Safari
7.2 MB (6,928,478 bytes) Jan 11, 2003
Chimera is ONLY the browser and bug feedback.
I'm typing this in Mozilla, which I sear by...
Must be on a Titanium Powerbook.
The way I see it. The more browsers out there the better. The battle is not what engine gets used, but rather, having enough browsers out there that *aren't* IE so that the stupid web designers would get off their lazy asses and author HTML properly (ie. follow the W3C recommendations? Duh? Isn't that what they're there for?) So that EVERYONE! can view their pages! No more 'IE only' crappy pages. That's my hope anyways.
:)
PS Yeah, I know. Long run-on sentance. What can you do?
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
What could possibly be wrong with Chimera?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Apple didn't use QT in Safari. They used KWQ (Quack). That's a wrapper layer, that passes QT stuff onto the ObjC/Cocoa layer. So while Apple may indeed use other KDE stuff (though I don't know what else they would want), it won't be a boon to Trolltech, as they don't have to pay the trolls a dime.
Mozilla has become the poster child of open source development for reasons I can't understand. The progress has been horribly slow, the code has gotten a reputation for being unweildy, the UI has spawned more examples of things not to do than good features (except using window tabs, like the majority of text editors under Windows), and in the end it's not even turning out to be that great of a browser. None of this is surprising, and criticisms of the project are easy to find, so no one needs any more from me.
What I don't understand is why Mozilla is viciously defended as some kind of open source sacred cow. It's just like discussions about the X Window System, which are usually split between people who think it's a steaming pile and people who insist that it's been around for so long that we can't get rid of it (and they almost always use the "you can run it over a network" argument as a basis for why X needs to stay).
Genuine question: what is ^W?
On my system, ^H is backspace.
Follow me
man ... Not a single comment here is seeing the alternative side of things -- it may be too bad for Mozilla, but way to go KHTML! I mean, the fact is, Apple could have just as easily allocated resources to develop their own proprietary software, but they're choosing the KDE guys' stuff.
That's pretty significant, and deserves a pat on the back -- not a bunch of whining about why another group was turned away.
Wow, you really have no idea what the hell you're talking about, do you? Many Mac users abandoned IE years before Safari. I personally think Safari has already caught up and surpassed IE in terms of usablility. It's quick, it's light and it's really quick! It's also still beta and will likely mature at an exponentially greater rate than IE ever hoped to.
If we all thought alike, would any of us be thinking?
/me raises hand.
I'm just asking because I did not, in any way, get that Mozilla was hurt by a new browser that didn't use their engine. What the hell? The mozilla developers don't seem to care at all. Why should they? Competition is good.
I actually got a totally different spin out of the article. What I read several times in there amounted to "we don't care that KHTML doesn't always work right, because it was easy to use". Not exactly the sort of rationalization that I go in for.
I'm using Mozilla to post this and I find it a wonderful standards compliant browser.
However, I've tried on occasion to download the source distribution and frankly I find it far too heavy (abstract, complex) for casual development. Guerilla development won't work for Mozilla; it has degenerated into long term trench warfare for anyone with the stamina for it. I applaud you Mozilla developers, but am not made of the same stuff.
I remember once coming across some C++ portability standards made up by the Mozilla team about 5 years ago. They were relevant to portability back then, but I think things have progressed some over the years. Many of those problems with different platforms have disappeared with release of the ANSI/ISO C++ standard and the work that's gone into modern compilers.
Personally, I think the Mozilla team ought to be unleased to begin Mozilla 2.0 from scratch, based on everything they know so far, and not be shackled to weird platforms from the early 1990s. Let the Moz 1.* tree address the needs of those using old platforms - the standards compliance should keep them humming for years to come.
The Moz 1.* development has progressed admirably, especially if, like me, you've worked in baroque plumbing factories of code, then you can doubly appreciate the accomplishments of the Moz developers.
But it's high time for them to start from a clean slate, just as the Safari folks have.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
OK! Gecko supports more standards! Gecko is fast (enough)! Gecko is portable!
So... make a Gecko based webcore replacement. Apple has given us a slick framework to implement in order to drive Safari's backend. We can already patch and update our KHTML based webcore... if Gecko would be better, use it. You still get the slick Apple GUI. Right?
I think (WARNING: dumbass user demanding major architectural changes) Chimera should make their Gecko variety use the WebCore framework design, so that their backend would be pluggable with Apple's. Then we could end this argument. There'd be no argument.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
We should be comparing to Chimera, which is the OS X version of the trimmed-down Mozilla-based browser. My copy is about 21M.
I think apple made their decision to use the khtml engine primarily based on what they thought the mac user base would benefit the most from. Mac users already have a kick-ass browser based on gecko -- chimera. To make another gecko based browser for the Mac would have been (-1 Redundant). To take chimera and work to improve it would have been an option, but I think apple knows that Chimera has gotten this good without their help, and will continue to get better without them. The work that apple has done has given the users a second kick-ass browser that is based on a completely different rendering engine. This has the welcome side-effect of encouraging website developers to code to the standards, and not one particular implementation. I think it was a really smart move on apple's part (and I was a bit surprised when Jobs announced what they based it on) but as a Mac user, I couldn't be happier with the way the browser situation has been shaping up lately.
It's fair to say apple has a long history of bucking trends and using non-standard technologies. This is not to say that they always adopted closed tech, but shouldn't thinking different mean being different?
In the last 5 years however, apple has made the switch to nearly all standard and open tech, even the stuff that they develop in-house. Note firewire, darwin & rendezvous.
I'd imagine that for apple ( besides lean & mean) a big selling point for KHTML over Mozilla is that mozilla makes a point of being "omniplatform", while KDE stuff is really designed for unix. They get to be open and standard, but still keep their work from benefiting windows. It's the smarter move.
Its worth noting that when Atheos (nifty OS, not a unix clone, dead now) needed a browser the author evaluated KHTML and Mozilla and decided KHTML was far easier to port, then proceeded to do it in a week or so.
The crude abstract of this article implies KHTML is not cross platform. History says otherwise.
<soapbox> - you do not need to agree
Personally, I think Mozilla has set free software back about two years. Alternative browser development came to a standstill when netscape released the code. After all, we were all going to have a fast, lean, free, standards compliant browser as soon as they got it compiled. Then came the slips, the rewrites, the bloat, and the delusions of grandeur.
Ok, I had to respond to this and say "Whaaaaa?!?!?"
So I buy an iPod. I get Windows software for it. Now I buy a Mac, and for whatever reason decide to use the Windows version of the software on a platform that supports it natively...
I guess what they say about Mac users is, erm, true. ;)
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
<sarcasm>Yep, that sure does "smack of proprietary lock-in".</sarcasm>
There are no tiger attacks in my area and it's all because this rock I'm holding keeps the tigers away.
bottom line is more choices. That benefits all customers...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Does OSX have a usenet news client? Are their 3rd party news clients?
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Mozilla has been my browser of choice for about a year now. On Linux, and on Mac OS X.
On my Powerbook G4 550Mhz (whoo hoo, speed demon, I know numbers are subjective) Mozilla takes a good 15-30 seconds to load. Some days, that's too frickin long. I don't need Mozilla's mail/news reader because I like Mail and I don't like the news reader (too slow for me, I do miss Outlook Express)
Safari has a window up and is downloading a page in less than a few seconds.
If I could get two features out of mozilla and on Safri I'd be set.
I want:
1) Master Password feature. That has to be one of the best things I've seen in a browser for some time.
2) Tabbed Browsing.
Other than that, I use safari for everything at the moment. It's a lean mean browser.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
This is really, really interesting to see this though. 2 years ago some people were getting worried that alternative OS users would be unable to browse the web by this time, but today we've got 2 OS standards compliant rendering that beat the pants off IE in speed, correctness, and to top it off, cost.
And despite the technical problems with Mozilla, people are still able to crank out excellent, lean, fast browsers such as Chimera and Phoenix, and other applications for embedded devices, etc.
Mozilla has become a platform, and KHTML has become the lean, fast rendering engine Mozilla was originally going to be.
Cheers
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Yes, this will be flamebait. Mod me down, I don't care. I'm at the bottom of the rung anyway.
QUIT YER WHINING!! Stop crying foul, and focus on your project! So Apple decided to use kHTML as the rendering engine instead of Gecko. So what? How does that impact the Mozilla project? Make it better than Safari! I'm sorry that the decision injured your geek pride, but if you cry foul every time a company doesn't use your sacred works, then you get destracted from the mission of finishing the product.
Short version: FOCUS ON THE JOB!!
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
Erase last word
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
Not sure how Apple's decision to release a KHTML browser really hurts Mozilla. Especially when you consider the default browser in Mac OS X has been Internet Explorer so far (hopefully to change when Safari gets out of beta?). If anything, it should serve as incentive to improve Mozilla.
Personally, I still prefer Mozilla on Mac OS X to Safari, but as Safari becomes more full featured, we'll see how they compare. There's one particularly annoying problem with Mozilla on Mac OS X (acknowledged in the release notes, but I don't think yet, as a "bug"):
I do use Mozilla on Mac OS X fairly regularly, but until this problem is fixed, Chimera is my favorite browser. Runs on a UFS volume, cocoa, decidedly un-bloated.
Your post becomes even more relevant when you consider the fact that so many web-developers, particularly the 'artistic' kind use Macs. Not that I'm a Mac zealot, far from it, but I'm just stating facts. So many web designers switching to $NOT_IE will really help kill IEs total dominance. If not in numbers, in the hearts and minds of developers.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I think people here should remember that Apple was looking at pre-Mozilla 1.0 when they first evaluated Mozilla. Since then, the Phoenix team has proven that you can strip out some of the bloat of Mozilla to get a fast and lightweight browser (3MB for Safari vs 5-6MB for Phoenix).
Mozilla was intended to be able to render itself (XUL) as well as be a mail reader, online chat tool, and web page composer. It was also intended to be a cross platform web browser and GUI development tool. Of course it is not small - that was not entirely the goal (OEOne and other application developers would have no use for Mozilla if it only rendered web pages).
Had Phoenix been around when Apple was looking at browsers, they may well have just made a Phoenix based browser for OS X branded by Apple. But at the time Apple was looking at OSS HTML engines, it was unclear how much work it would take to get Gecko/Mozilla down to the size Phoenix has now gotten it to now (due to the complexity of Mozilla's code, you can't just take a quick glance and see what needs to be done). It was also very clear that KDE already had a nice little rendering engine, even if it wasn't quite as far along.
So Apple's decision to use KHTML isn't a surprise given their goals and the circumstances at the time. What is nice about all of this is that we'll end up with two very nice rendering engines and browsers out of the deal - Apple will make improvements to KHTMLs rendering of real web pages, and Phoenix will continue to give us a lightweight Gecko browser (which already renders very nicely). Everyone but Microsoft wins. How can Slashdot not love that!?
Safari weighs in at 7.2 megs, Mozilla is 38.3 megs.
Safari has a ton of room to grow before it achieves Mozilla's mammoth size.
But how big is Phoenix? 8 megs. Phoenix supports soo much more than Safari, and it's not much larger.
The issue is the gecko engine, not Mozilla.
You know, I think this is going to be like the "X is slow" argument - utterly full of it, but never goes away.
OS X is chocka with proprietary tech. Oh and no, using XML for preferences doesn't make it suddenly not proprietary, the next version of IIS uses XML config files too. Is IIS not a proprietary web server?
Anyway, if it's so hard to find proprietary stuff, where can I find the implementations of Carbon and Cocoa (the bulk of the platform). Yes, I know about GNUstep. What about the artwork?
If MacOS isn't proprietary, where is the PC port?
Why do Apple insist on STILL using Sorensen for all the videos on their website? And considering it's being given away for free anyway, what did they have to lose by making Safari free software?
The "MacOS is open" line is really getting quite old.
Then what's the phoenix-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz file doing up there?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
In fact, the college I go to uses, for its on-line registration, such a site; this site refuses to allow me to sign on for on-line classes in Mozilla. However, Konqueror can render the page well enough so that I don't have to get on the phone to add classes or view my schedule.
As an aside, the team which designed the web page were very incompetent (to give credit where credit is due, Unisys was one of the companies doing the contracting; other parties responsible for this fiasco will not be named because no one else responsible has attacked the free software movement). These same people also destroyed the computer database of students who were to receive financial aid when transferring it to the new system, forcing each and every student who wanted finanacial aid to completely resubmit any and all paperwork.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Let me start by saying that I greatly admire the Mozilla project, in fact I am typing this message from Phoenix.
Now, KHTML was chosen over Gecko for purely practical reasons. It was smaller, faster and easier to integrate with OS X. As posters have already mentioned, Safari is not a cross-platform project, so it does not need all the extra code that guarantees Gecko works on every OS under the sun.
I would guess that the Mozilla project would have had an uneasy relationship with Safari should they have chosen the Gecko renderer. Look at the mozilla website. It says, "Mozilla is an open-source web browser and toolkit." Note "and toolkit". Mozilla's ambitions are far beyond a simple web browser. Mozilla is aiming for a complete web-based cross platform environment, "the web is the OS". This would all be extra baggage for the web browser. KHTML is just a web-rendering component of a conventional GUI (KDE) and thus fits in better with the ethos of the apple desktop environment.
and KHTML is part of KDE.
God, why I am I saying this? Is it that important to my life to spend time typing out inconsiquential facts for random people over the internet? I need a life...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Alternative browser development came to a standstill when netscape released the code.
Years from now, when documentaries are written and case studies developed I think we will see many eyes looking at that moment. It didn't come to a standstill, it took off very quickly and then something wierd happened. I remember it well...
Netscape opens the code, and in the Gtk v KDE flame wars two teams take to porting the code to their framework. the problem? It was built off of Motif, a non-free gui toolkit.
With the swiftness of the Open Source community, all of a sudden we had three "almost there" choices for a completely free Netscape. Seemingly just as quickly all were abandoned by the freedom offered by this software movement.
QT-Mozilla and the subsequent KMozilla (if I remember right) was finished in a month by porting it to the QT toolkit of the day. Not to be outdone GTK-Mozilla announced that whatever they could do, we could do better and a sole programmer began the effort, with a few joining later.
Back at the ranch, JWZ felt that it would have be far easier to pound out the last few details in "Lesstif" and link off of that. The Lesstif people were very close to binary compatibility with version 1 of Motif.
Then for all the work going on it then it seems to have run out of steam. As far as I know (someone please correct me if I'm wrong), lesstif still can't dynamically link to netscape, GTK was abandoned, and the KDE people abandoned Netscape code entirely.
So why it those three easiest paths were abandoned so quickly is the stuff that PBS is made of, and I'll probably never know until someone takes it up.
I've been using Thoth ever since it came out, and there are also: Tin (a few different ones or compile your own), NewsWatcher X, MT-Newswatcher, Hogwasher, MacSOUP and Halime.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I dumped Mozilla on OSX for Chimera, and I was happy. Last week, I dumped Chimera for Safari, and I'm happier.
I only use one platform at a time. While I'm waiting for Mozilla to do something, should I find solace in its cross-platform abilities?
Cross-platform code maymake life simpler for coders, but what does it bring to the user?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
...While we're talking about Mozilla, are there any experts out there who knows how to fool a web server into thinking I'm using MSIE or something else? There is a web site I'm required to use that only uses Netscape or MSIE with 128bit encryption... the problem is that even when I got Netscape installed, it didn't work. I need to fool this site into thinking I'm using MSIE as it appears to be the only browser it supports.
It's actually quite important for Apple to have a browser that's small and fast. One of the primary complaints about OS X (and MacOS 9 for that matter) is that the speed of all the web browsers is terrible. On OS X, this has quite a bit to do with the Aqua windowing engine: it's pretty and technically amazing, but it's pretty slow a lot of the time.
:)
The previous "most-native" OS X browser, OmniWeb, was no speed demon. Safari, on first public release, creams just about everything at page rendering speed while at the same time offering all the Quartz goodies and feeling "light" to the user.
I see great things for Safari, based on a few days' using it. Sure, it's a bit unstable and is incomplete, but I was saying the same thing about Mozilla back in the day!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Actually its goal was to be useful and powerful. The fact that they thought they could also be fast and light is a common mistake amongst coders, the two arne't necessarily mutually exclusive but often are in real life.
Gecko is standards compliant, fast (no, really), supports many standards and is extremely powerful. So, it's larger than KHTML. Most importantly, it actually renders the vast majority of the web.
Apple have a problem - their machines are slow. I compiled GNOME2.2 with Galeon today, and the speed blew me away. I have never used such a fast browser. Tabs opened and rendered near instantly (I was using the paint-delay trick) and I never found myself waiting for the browser, it was just there. I'm sure other people who've used Galeon2 can corroberate this. This is not a particlarly fast machine, an Athlon 1400 I think, and Gecko hasn't been optimized for Linux as much as it has for Windows (on which it's also very fast), so this Gecko is slow BS seems to be more a Mac problem than anyhting else.
I mean, if the Galeon team can produce an insanely fast browser out of Gecko, what's stopping Apple?
Safari's what a browser should be -- small, lightweight, and out of my face. The interface is slim & sleek, and, like the rest of Apple's software, lets me focus on the CONTENT rather than the delivery.
Oh boy, that's funny. So that's why it has a textured window (that cannot be themed to something less distracting), along with all the rest of the usual Apple eyecandy - but no tabs?
Apple is all about presentation. See how all the talk here is of speed, not accuracy in actually rendering the contet? I really think that's why OSX is so wonderful -- it just stays out of my way and lets me do what I gotta do. And I have to admit, running a DVD authoring program alongside several terminal windows on a Mac (!) is still impressive to me.
Wake up mods, that's a -1 Offtopic comment.
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
Opera is cross-platform and it's tiny. Using cross-platform as an excuse for Mozilla's bloat makes no sense. It's the general programming approach that was taken with Mozilla that is flawed.
Here is his blog which talks about it.
It is only feelings of some of the programmers that were hurt. The actual Mozilla project is not affected by this. It's time to rename the article.
Now, back to your regularly scheduled program.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
apple's goal was to have the fastest browsing experience and they chose the rendering engine with that in mind. as noted, mozilla has a far larger code base, and i have heard plenty of grousing from the Chimera team about mozilla to mac issues. lastly, i have never gotten chimera to work in a stable fashion on my desktop, even though it is quite fast.
ok, really lastly, Mozilla already has one large corporate sponsor, apple didn't want to tangle with them either. aol and apple have an enemy of my enemy is my friend status right now.
who benefits?? definately Linux and mac users. mac users get a really nice fast browser (and no more of those apple slow on the web /. sour grapes posts from win users). linux users get added adoption and support, plus development improvements for KDE.
good for everyone.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think that the only thing that happen was that the Mozilla people are mad that Apple is building their own castle in the sandbox. Get over it, improve whatever you have instead.
Not that I would ever want a whole extra GUI just because it is "platform independant". I don't buy into that whole ideal. I prefer IE or Konqi.
Apple DOES contribute code back. Even to BSD. What are you complaining about exactly? Are you even on the free-bsd mailing lists?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Safari renders using the WebCore framework. The WebCore framework wrapps kHTML. So, if you really want Safari to use Gecko, then you can make your own version of WebCore that wraps Gecko, and exports the same functions. In theory, then you can use Gecko in Safari. You can already replace IE with Gecko on Windows.
I'm sure Apple is hedging its bets as well as just being modular for all the good engineering reasons, so the Gecko door may not be entirely closed.
(this was all culled from various blogs in my memory, check the technotes for details).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Apple's website has a section for all the open source programs they're contributing back to the community. The url is at http://developer.apple.com/darwin/ and by my count they're hosting about a dozen different projects. Perhaps you might take a look before you comment further. The stuff that's interesting to me is OpenPlay (which challenges the DirectX franchise), Darwin Streaming Server, Rendezvous, and Webcore but your mileage may vary and you might find their contributions to CUPS to be more of interest.
It isn't like this stuff is very hidden. When they published Safari, they immediately dumped back their code changes to the kde team. Look it up if you don't believe me.
Users are hurt that Mozilla is bloated and slow-loading.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
This is not a particlarly fast machine, an Athlon 1400 I think,...
*sigh*
I must be getting old; until I read your comment, it didn't occur to me that my Pentium-III 550, a scant four years old (was not willing to spring for the 650) was anything less than blinding in its speed (hey, after a 486-66, it is!). So, just how often am I supposed to replace my machine to keep it reasonable?
that's precisely what they did with their darwin operating system, available here
if you poke around a bit, you'll also find rendezvous and quicktime streaming server available for download, as well as the significant changes made to khtml and kjs (called "webcore" and "javascriptcore" on apple's site) ? this all rather puts the lie to your statement that apple doesn't give back to the community
note that apple was not compelled to release any of this, but rather, they chose to do so
i thought, therefore i was...
Actually, I'm surprised we haven't heard from the KDE team; after all, Apple is distributing a desktop which doesn't have Konq, KMail, and KOffice as the default applications, and probably even removed the "About KDE" box -- those were mortal sins last time I checked, and I fully expect Mosfet and others to publish ringing denunciations of how Apple has broken KDE.
This is a bogus test (moderate me down as you want you fuckers) but Safari has not yet fully implemented all the features that are in KHTML especially as related to XML.
This is because KHTML uses the Qt XML API and safari does not.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
I don't understand the negative spin of the article. KHTML is just as deserving of support as Gecko... and we should all be cheering this as a boost to free software in general. If we can have two strong rendering engines, that's far better than one -- and this decision can only help to drive KHTML forward. Gecko, for its part, already has plenty of momentum behind it without Apple.
I've always been impressed with Konqueror. It was my main browser for a long time -- after Netscape 4.7, and before Mozilla 1.0. I moved on to Mozilla for a variety of reasons -- but if Konqueror keeps progressing like this, who knows what I'll use in the future? I like having a choice, anyway.
I was particularly impressed when I saw KHTML ported to AtheOS (which is a lot lighter than KDE).
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Now Apple has a reason to push the HTML tool vendors into being more standards-compliant. The IE-specific crap has got to go.
One browser is tyranny. Two browsers is war. Many browsers are freedom
Maybe this is dumb to say, since I can probably run something similar under KDE, but is it expected that someone will pump out a version of Safari to run on my Red Hat box? Then I could compare it. I can't afford a Mac. ;-)
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Those aren't Aqua widgets you're looking at in Chimera. Those are Mozilla's own widgets merely themed to look like Aqua. Chimera may be faster than IE, but the widget's it uses are still slower than native Aqua widgets (and they don't support all the cool things that good Cocoa widgets support, like spell checking).
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
You can easily change the Safari theme from brushed metal Aqua to standard Aqua with a couple of clicks in Interface Builder. You could also use one of the Unsanity haxies.
Come on now... it works for something like iTunes, but for god's sake, a browser!?!?!?
I can't be the only one thinking this can I ?? probably... good thing I have my flame retardant vest on.
I run the computers of a Mac-based company. We use Microsoft Explorer, Entourage, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
The great majority of our support resources go to dealing with endless stream of problems caused by crappy Microsoft programming.
As our company moves to OS X, we're investigating the possibility of completely freeing ourselves of all Microsoft products.
Apple has already obviated the need for Entourage (with iCal, Mail (which still needs a bit of help) and Addressbook). They've now made something that kicks IE's butt. And lest ye forget, they also made Keynote, which kicks PowerPoint's ass.
So that just leaves Word and Excel. There are now several offerings in the wings that may replace these. The best hope is OpenOffice, but unfortunately the OS X project is going a little slowly. But word is that Apple is working on a complete re-work of AppleWorks. Then there's also Thinkfree Office, Mariner, and RagTime. But I'm hoping that Apple will provide the whole solution.
It could be that Apple is trying to kill off all dependence on MS crap. Oh, how wonderful that would be.
Then consider that they're also replacing expensive MS-based servers with very inexpensive OS X Server (unlimited users, and it's free with purchase of Xserve, or free as open-source Darwin code), which has very robust unix services combined with easy-to-use admin tools.
Apple is challenging MS on ALL fronts. Won't that be a surprise when major enterprises realize that they can save millions of dollars every year by using a single-source hardware vendor. Afterall, MS is a singlesource software vendor. Better to SS the hardware, where Apple makes top-rated products, and use open-source softweare.
POAD, Microsoft!!!!
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
Hopefully Help Viewer will be one of the first apps to embed WebCore; it's truly amazing how long it can take to render all-text HTML 3.0 pages; with WebCore help viewing should be near instantaneous :)
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
mods this is -1, Flamebait. Based on Unix as if Unix was ever OSS, taking developers as if David Hyatt wasn't working on Chimera and Safari and Sherlock3 all at the same time, and finally talk about proprietary systems as if Apple still used ADB. All in all, no factual information was presented and all attempts at debasing Apple were due to common trolls regarding the system.
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
Current releases of Mozilla use GTK, IIRC.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
That would of been Kurt. Anyway, the browser in question is ABrowse of which I'm now the maintainer and lead developer (found here). We've evaluated gecko verse khtml and everyone wants gecko. It renders more pages correctly. However as a lazy, ;), developer I'm sticking with khtml for now. It just makes more sense for syllable/atheos which is also c++. Our port of KHTML is rather crufty but still ingenious. Kurt remapped qt widgets to our native kit, set the appropriate browser callbacks and somehow got everything up and running. I took over about a month ago and have only gone through about 10% of the actual khtml code (although we do now have tabbed browsing :). I think the thing for Apple was the just the plain size of such a porting job to a non already ported platform. From my work on ABrowse I couldn't possibly imagine porting gecko, especially since we do not rely on an X, gtk or any of that stuff gecko wants to compile.
Just thought I'd chime in...
- Shawn
ps - Atheos is not quite dead. If interested check out Syllable at the link above. Syllable is very much so alive and progress has speeded up over the atheos days.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
The whole point of the article, by those M$ whores at ZDnet, is to say that Mozilla sucks. What total crap. Mozilla rocks. Tabbs, anti-popup, and yes it is fast, generally quicker than IE on Windoze 2000 because it does not have to handle so much advert garbage and spyware. Konquror is nice too and I'm happy that Apple is going to use their work.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
We have no plans to port gecko anytime soon. In fact I'm getting ready to start the much needed update to our khtml engine.
- Shawn
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
Phoenix, which is based on stripped Mozilla code, is only 6 or 8 MB (larger uncompressed though). This is for the Windows and Linux versions respectively. It looks nice too.
People over-exagerate Mozilla's size. Yes, it's big. That's why I don't use it. I use Phoenix instead. By 1.0, I'm willing to bet that Phoenix is the size of Safari. It's still only halfway there.
Apparently the fact that Paul Festa linked here from his CNET article is going to reduce my Livejournal to the unadulterated depths of uselessness that the Slashdot forums have pioneered, so I guess I'll just turn off comments until the newbie shitstorm blows on by.
I'm not interested in your opinion. I'm not interested in explaining to you how you've completely missed the point of my post. I just don't care.
Thank you, drive through.
Someone else must have written that, as it looks like the kind of thing Slashdot trolls write, you know, "Slazdot sucks!" and it makes him look like an arogent shit. That's not the way I imagine someone who could found a huge project like Mozilla and organize all of the people who worked on it. If Mozilla is not targeted at "newbies", who is it for?
Wait a minute, I think I see it - the same people dumping troll posts on Slashdot also work for ZDnet. M$ whoring does not get lower than that - abuse of all possible contenders. Note that the article does not say anything good about Safari or KDE, it just heaps abuse on Mozilla. Up yours, ZDnet, Mozilla rocks so hard it even makes your site bearble by turning off all the adverts and pop ups.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Not yet but see this thread where someone has started porting the Webcore to Windows.
-chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
This may get modded down. But here is my observation during last 5 yrs of Linux / Opensource world.
./LinuxLover
*gnome + mozilla crowd craves attention*
Cases in point.
- I remember when Gnome started there was constant gloating about how it is 'free all the way' as oppossed to KDE based on QT. KDE worked silently to form QT-Foundation which guranteed QT's availablilty.
Also when KDE released 2.0 Gnome was under pressure to rush to 1.2(was it?) release, if I remember correctly.
- mozilla was very vocal about how their 'super' browser will end the dominant IE and provide a viable browser on all platforms. (In my opinion they are there feature wise, but performance/looks is another issue).
While KDE group said 'we are working on a simple File Manager + Browser'. And when Konq came out, wham, it was so awesome (and worked!) evey one liked it.
Don't get me wrong. I use Konq and Mozilla. Konq still chokes on some sites. But for most of the sites I visit work fine and that is good enough for me.
I also use Evolution as my email client and I also like Gnome.
So at the end, in my opinion KDE stands out as a 'silent winner' while Mozilla crowd is screaming, 'we are cool'.
I know I am stearotyping a lot of developers in all the projects I mentioned here. But that is my observation.
Gecko is small and fast
Small? Not really.
Fast? Yes, but KHTML is faster.
The Safari team were well aware of Chimera, and set out to top it. KHTML was chosen both for its performance, and its noticeably clean architecture (which promises continued high performance.)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
In my opinion, completeness and correctness are more important goals for a rendering module than size and speed.
.cgi pulling from a local database running off the local apache. Now imagine you are using finder and 6 of the folders are really HTML; the browser has instantely render the 6 .gifs, and then when the person clicks instantly render an entire page of HTML. Once you cut the download part out speed of the engine will make a big difference.
I think you may be thinking too small in terms of 1-2 browsers looking at webpages having access to tons of memory and processing speed. What about something like Active Desktop where (in theory) you might icons pulling from browsers; text being displayed using a real time
I think Active Desktop is a great idea. I'd love to have different types of folders on my system which display information in different ways. Have text editable fields where I could leave various sticky notes. Have virtual files (which are CGI links...). I guess it is probably possible but under the current version of Windows its too much of a pain to set this up. OTOH Apple's speciality is making things that are cool but a pain into things that are cool and easy.
Consider Apple's direction:
a) A very fast 3D engine
b) A very fast display system that can support complex video and sound
c) A fast browser
That sounding to me like the building blocks for active desktop done right.
Yes, it had been for years.
Yes, again, for years.
Check it out yourself.
I believe it was available under the QPL and the GPL. Whilst the GPL is fine for Mozilla (you can dual-license easily), Netscape would have had to purchase QT licenses to release Netscape as closed-source. That's hardly a big deal compared with the developer costs associated with doing it yourself.
Chastise? Read my post again. I said it was a shame they didn't use something that was already available, cheap, and proven.
They chose to use it. One of their stated goals was to have a cross-platform browser. GTK wasn't very cross-platform at the time, it was quite unstable on Windows, and I don't even know if it supported the Mac back then. It was definitely inferior to the job at the time, and many people would argue it still is.
Javascript, in combination with XUL, is used to build the Mozilla application. They eschewed traditional toolkits, and developed a user interface based around xml and javascript. To say that Javascript is unrelated to their decision to not use QT is ill-informed at best.
The point is, Gecko doesn't do what they want. Hyatt basically said the following "We had a choice, a bulky hard to hack Gecko that was standards compliant, that we would have to make smaller, or a thin well engineered KHTML that we would have to make more standards compliant. We chose KHTML because it would be much easier to go that route." (misquoted, he appears to have removed that entry from his blog)
Thats basically what it boils down to.
I live in a giant bucket.
Actually, I'm surprised we haven't heard from the KDE team; after all, Apple is distributing a desktop which doesn't have Konq, KMail, and KOffice as the default applications, and probably even removed the "About KDE" box -- those were mortal sins last time I checked, and I fully expect Mosfet and others to publish ringing denunciations of how Apple has broken KDE.
First of all, most of the vocal complaints were confined to a very small subset of the KDE developers. Second of all, the complaints were focused on the fact that the user is presented with "KDE", but in such a way that some of KDE's key advantages don't come into play, which supposedly (I haven't seen Redhat's KDE myself) made KDE look worse than it is. This is the exact opposite: No one is in any way thinking that the Mac desktop is representative of KDE, and Apple made it very clear that the heart of their browser is from KDE, but not e.g. the GUI.
-chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
Please explain. What part of KDE is not (F|f)ree?
Lets see:
Chimera: A fantastic, impracticable plan or desire: bubble, castle in the air, dream, fantasy, illusion, pipe dream, rainbow.
Dave Hyatt (for I think it was he, forgive me if I am wrong) said that Chimera was named thus because of the the UNHOLY alliance between the gecko codebase, and Mac OS Xs' Cocoa, object frameworks.
The fact is, and the Mozilla team will agree, that Gecko is a hopelessly over-engineered piece of technology (a little like Quartz). It wasn't built to be 'cross-platform', it was built to be THE platform and with this in mind the engineers of it have turned it into an overcomplicated device.
This does not deny that geko is a fine machine, it is complete, fast and effective.. BUT it is fat, and messy.
When OmniGroup decided to adopt the JS engine from the Mozilla project, they found they had bit off an awful lot to chew.. saying that great areas of it were un-threadsafe and integrating it with OSXs' object frameworks was a nightmare.
Contrast with KHTML.. it is extremely lightweight (if far less complete than Gecko) is more modular and it's hooks outward to the host are more prevelant (Gecko wants to BE the platform remember)
I had no Idea Apple would do this, and was suprised when they used KHTML, but that is probably because I knew little of it.. in fact talk of Apple working on a browser worried me.. because I assumed they would try to use Gecko.. it would have been like banging a square peg into a round hole had they tried to do it.
I'm not taking away from Chimera, they gave the Mac community something great, but look at it.. it's integration with Aqua is roughshod and bizarre, it never 'feels' right.. now look at what Apple have done with KHTML.. it is natural, looks right (like OmniWeb) and works like a dream.
Safari has a -long- way to go, and the bloat will occur (that last 20% of standards to support will add another 50% of code, I'll bet) but now It is, far and away the benchmark in OSX browsing, and I feel it will be for some time.
The crude abstract of this article implies KHTML is not cross platform. History says otherwise.
I don't know why people keep saying KHTML isn't cross platform. It runs on 18 different platforms that I am aware of. Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX, OS/2, etc., and i386, m68, Sparc, Alpha, etc. And don't forget the embedded palmtops! It's underlying Qt library is the world's premier crossplatform GUI library.
But frankly, Apple isn't in the business of supplying browsers for the Windows platform, so who cares?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Last time I checked, GUIs were already available for the masses.
Yes, and why should it have been a project that was originally slated to be a browser suite? Why should it have been a project where a long time out of the market was liable to kill it?
There's nothing particularly revolutionary about xul, it's handy, and it leverages existing technologies fairly well. Virtually killing mozilla to get it doesn't seem worth it.
As I said, it's a shame they didn't use something that was already available, cheap, and proven.
It is important to consider when they had to decide which codebase to choose. Over a year ago means mozilla version less than .9.8, and while that version was already usable it was very obvious that it still needed a lot of work. I don't know the state KHTML was in at that time, but its main advantage is the smaller codebase. It's a very sound decision to keep the project overseeable and manageable. Had they used the mozilla-code they'd had to invest much more into the development, they might still depend on (parts of) the mozilla development, and it'd probably have taken much longer. The benefits of using the mozilla-codebase don't outweigh these costs considering that all apple wanted was a standalone-browser.
Over all the ruckus about HTML vs. mozilla aparently nobody noticed that Apple based their browser on an open source project and decided against doing it closed-source on their own. I think that's great news.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Good point, but at least anyone can implement an XUL engine if they really want to. It's much harder to implement the complete Win32/x86 API than XUL.
What happened at that point is that the code base was abandoned, which allowed the Mozilla project to start in earnest. Of course, completely rewriting Netscape with a new license is not a trivial task. People were bemoaning Mozilla for taking so long to write their code as IE became the dominant browser.
What people do not realize is that free software devlopment takes time; people often times aren't getting paid to do the work and there is a strong attitude it is better to do it right slowly than to do it wrong quickly. As long as the software project is not abadoned, the software will eventually have a 1.0 release. It took Mozilla about four years to come out with a 1.0 release; this is remarkably fast in the free software world. As just one comparison, the GNU project was started in 1983; there was not a usable Unix system using 100% free software until about 1992 or so. Technically, the GNU project is still not complete after 20 years.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Thanks Chris,
:)
thats means that it is looong time ahead when we will have kPhoenix on Win32. Well, I can wait
> I think you may have a point there: (referenced from http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=jw z&itemid=138051
)
KHTML:
virtual void layout();
Gecko:
NS_IMETHOD Reflow(nsIPresContext* aPresContext, nsHTMLReflowMetrics& aMetrics, const nsHTMLReflowState& aReflowState, nsReflowStatus& aStatus);
Just change your preferences for text/html in the file associations and put your favorite browser on top of the list. Then kmail will open the links in your emails with that browser.
Moritz
May I quote him too?:
Update:, Jan 14: Apparently the fact that Paul Festa linked here from his CNET article is going to reduce my Livejournal to the unadulterated depths of uselessness that the Slashdot forums have pioneered, so I guess I'll just turn off comments until the newbie shitstorm blows on by.
I'm not interested in your opinion. I'm not interested in explaining to you how you've completely missed the point of my post. I just don't care.
Thank you, drive through.
____
Registered Opera 7 user, k-lined from irc.mozilla.org with some fake reason.
I'd say, burn my karma too, mozilla fanatics, I just don't fucking care too...
Ilgaz
Well, there is a big difference in this case... Netscape's programmers were getting paid to work on Mozilla full-time.
Personally, I believe it was mostly because of feature bloat. It seems that they stuffed in every feature under the sun, then it took them a long time to get all those features working well, with each other, and so on.
Even in the opinion of the Mozilla developer in the article, only now are they starting to go back to get Mozilla cleaned-up, up to speed, and bug-free
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Really, I was honestly wondering what the poster of the parent to my post thought was wrong with Chimera.
Damn, I've gotta say, it sure is a good time to be a non-MS operating system user. Whatever else is still lacking(on OS X, I can't think of anything), we've got the web browser covered. ;-)
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Funny enough, it's not! There's a separate 'acknowledgements' sub-menu.
Lars Knoll, et al. ( khtml ) Copyright © 1997 Martin Jones ; Copyright © 1998, 1999 Torben Weis ; Copyright © 1998, 1999, 2002 Waldo Bastian ; Copyright © 1998-2000 Lars Knoll ; Copyright © 1999, 2001 Antti Koivisto ; Copyright © 1999-2001 Harri Porten ; Copyright © 2000 Simon Hausmann ; Copyright © 2000, 2001 Dirk Mueller ; Copyright © 2000, 2001 Peter Kelly ; Copyright © 2000 Daniel Molkentin ; Copyright © 2000 Stefan Schimanski
Then follows a copy of the GPL & the Harri Porten & Univ. of Cambridge acknowledgements. It really doesn't get much better. And remember - since Steve returned to Apple, *no* internal developers are allowed put their names to any application.
(Disclaimer: I'm a developer @ Apple but I'm speaking just for myself)
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Let me get this right ... you think Apple is turning away
from open source because they picked one open source
rendering engine over another? I don't get it.
Or are you mad because the UI isn't open source? In that
sense, Safari is shaped the same way Mac OS X is. So it
should at least be no surprise.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Psst, people, we're talking about Gecko vs. khtml here,
not Mozilla vs. Konqueror.
Gecko *is* bloated, but when you think of "Mozilla features",
you're probably not thinking about the factors that made
Gecko bloated.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
I wasn't talking about bloat really... Rather, I was talking about the unessential crap they were wasting their time on.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
If anyone is able to "milk" the system, then the people who designed the system, the OSS community has no one to blame but themselves. Thats kinda what happens when you give stuff away for free you know. And the BSD license is notorious for allowing just such a thing to happen.
The APSL allows you to take the code and modify it. You can't sell it without permission from Apple though. You can distribute it for free however. This is all perfectly allowed under the BSD license that coverst the code that Apple borrowed from the community. If you don't like it, take it up wtih the BSD guys.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Every three years is pretty standard. The usual progression is: the first year is wonderful; the second usable; the third painful. Anything past three years old is masochism IMHO. Technology simply moves too fast, and bloat continues.
Note, though, that you needn't replace your box; simply upgrade the motherboard and/or CPU. As you get the money, install more RAM or another hard drive. A computer should be an organism, not something plucked off of a shelf.
Another note: if you're using a Unix box, this is less important, esp. if you limit yourself to more traditional applications such as emacs, mutt, slrn, nethack &c. Any modern machine is more than fast enough to run them. It's stuff like GNOME and KDE which eat resources--but even they seem to be slimming of late.