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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."
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
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
...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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
FWIW, Gecko (Mozilla's HTML layout engine) is supposedly reasonably lean; Mozilla itself is more bloated due to featuritis (although, many of the features are cool, from JavaScript debugger to the whole UI framework that seamlessly ties C, C++ and JavaScript). However that's not so much a side-effect as a design decision; architecture is ambitious and feature list (too?) sizable.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Damn, I would have had first post if I wasn't using Mozilla.
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.
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?
-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.
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.
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....
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.
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....
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Another note is how does it really hurt mozilla.
Good point.... I'd wager that Apple moving away from IE will help push the alternative browsers along. Less people will think "I *have* to use IE to view the web sites I visit" and there will be more people investigating Netscape again, as well as Mozilla, Opera, etc.
I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
<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.
The Mozilla 1.2.1 installer and/or ZIP Win32 download is about 12MB with no option to use a stub installer.
Here's a stub installer for Mozilla 1.2.1 (214 KB).
-jfedor
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."
IE compatibility isn't important. You may not realize this, but the W3C defines web compatibility. As long as Apple implements for the W3C, it doesn't matter who uses their browser.
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?More to the point, why would anyone need to? I do web development. I test against the W3C implementation. I don't care what browser you use. It doesn't matter. All you need is a W3C compliant browser.
You don't know what borwser I use, and you shouldn't care. I may have written my own. But even if I have, you don't have to get a copy of it to make sure that it works. You just have to make sure that you test against the W3C implementation.
Oh yeah, and anyone who tests against a specific browser and not an standard is a loser ;)
-BrentAin't nothing wrong with Chimera. In fact, I have both Safari and Chimera happily sitting side-by-side on my dock, right next to the IE icon.
I've been happily using Chimera since the 0.5 days and it sure has come a long way in that time. Safari pulled off an impressive first appearance and is perfectly functional as-is.
I dumped IE like a hot rock after Chimera 0.6.0 was released, since that was when Chimera hit "good enough" status. Safari also meets the "good enough" threshold in my case and it gets more use than Chimera because it's faster. That's not to say I am not annoyed by Safari (or Chimera) sometimes. Tabbed browsing is neat and all, but I have a dual-headed workstation and have little need for it with my workflow.
There's no reason not to have TWO browsers and be happy. I enjoy watching the incremental development of these things, with Slashdot being a geek site, I would have assumed people here would like it as well. No need for a jihad over which open-source version is better, or which open-source version adoption by a corporation is more "politically correct". Just because MS has a closed-source monopoly on browsers, does not make it right for Mozilla to have an open-source monopoly either.
Use whatever you want and be happy. Browsers aren't fashion statements fer crissakes.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
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.
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.
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 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"
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
Here is his blog which talks about it.
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?
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
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
Yeah, Gecko is big. It has to be, to get all the layouts correct.
Understand, it's designed to lay out and render, correctly, anything
from non-wellformed pre-W3C HTML on the one end of the scale up
through XSLT at the other end, plus XUL. That's a tall order.
Konqueror doesn't handle quite as wide a spectrum.
That said, KHTML handles more of MSIE's proprietary non-W3C extensions
to the DOM than Gecko does, which _may_ be part of why Apple chose it.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
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
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.
That's odd. I read: "We decided it will be easier to make Khtml work right, than to make the Gecko code easier to use/integrate" Which is not a rationalization, but a simple balancing of time/cost factors.
-chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
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
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
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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