Konqueror Compiled For Mac OS X; KOffice Next

scishop writes "Benjamin Reed has just compiled Konqueror for Mac OS X after porting the KUniqueApplication class. A screenshot of the running program can be found here. According to Reed's blog, 'next up is KOffice.'"

Comments

Now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we get a KTHML compatible browser compiled for Windows? Konquerer or Safari, anything... make it easier to test web designs.

Re:Now...

[gusnz]

As another poster mentioned, the whole KDE environment has been ported to Cygwin. It works, but it's a pain as it has to run inside a whole X session.

However, I know what you mean... and yes I would love a Windows-native Konqueror port! There's one guy who is (supposedly) starting a port. It looks impressive on the front page, but has been stalled for a year and if you browse through the project forums, the guy admits he isn't really a Windows developer and is still deciding on what compiler to use. So basically, are there any skilled C++ hackers out there who would like to get involved in a KHTML -> Windows port? There's a few good reasons:

1) Choice of browsers on Windows. Even if you just ported KHTML rather than the full Konqueror, the KHTML engine rocks and could make great inroads against IE (compared to Mozilla/MozFirebird, which doesn't seem as fast as IE to load or as responsive on low-end hardware, even though it's a superior browser/renderer engine).

2) Porting all of Konq would rock too, as it offers a lot over plain vanilla EXPLORER.EXE.

3) Development, as the parent pointed out. I'm a XHTML/DHTML/CSS/JavaScript/etc. coder, and would like to certify that my projects work in KHTML. It's damn hard currently. And once Windows developers can get pages working perfectly in KHTML, all Konqueror/Safari users win.

4) Giving average desktop users more exposure to OSS. I'm looking at chucking Linux on this box again (last I tried was Mandrake 6 or 7) and wouldn't mind familiarising myself with its apps on a day-to-day basis first.

5) Why not? It's there ;).

OS X Maximizes browser choice?

[weston]

I wonder if there's a platform on which you get more browser choice than Mac OS X....

'course, the number of Mac/OS X only browsers sortof makes it cheating...

Re:OS X Maximizes browser choice?

[OmniVector]

lets see.
you get:

• gecko
• • mozilla
  • firebird
  • camino
• khtml
• • konqueror
  • omniweb
  • safari
• mac ie
• opera
• icab

that's getting to be quite an impressive list. 4/9 of those are mac only. i doubt you can consider mac ie a separate browser from windows ie, even though they are two totally different rendering engines.

icab is crap, and no one uses it anymore. mac ie still gets used quite a bit soley because it's the default browser shipped with 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2. it's also included in 10.3, and i know some people who are too stubborn to give safari a try. i still consider it crap however. omniweb is safari in drag. and konqueror, although nice it is finally ported, is more or less for proof of concept. opera for mac isn't even up to 7.0 yet if i remember right, with opera being all pissed at apple releasing safari. so that really leaves you with safari, and the mozilla browsers. the only 2 that are mac only in that lot are camino and safari.

i'm dying for a browser as powerful and simple as safari to hit linux. epiphany's not quite there.

The question is..

[subk]

Someone please answer this -- this is not flamebait.

Why bother? I seriously doubt anyone would go full-tilt KDE on an OS X box. Mozilla or Firebird are great browser choices.. Why bother to port Konqueror?

Re:The question is..

[cbreaker]

This still doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. It's free software, and this guy loves his Mac apparently, so why not?

I guess I'm not as cynical as some people.

Re:The question is..

[CAIMLAS]

You sound like a troll (nobody mentioned anything about a full-tilt KDE port on OS X, fool), but...

If you noticed, this makes konq native. I don't know if you've ever used konq before yourself, but let me tell you: it's a very good browser.

I now use it primarily - and occasionally fire up mozilla/galeon/firebird to do various other things. What makes konqueror good?

- it's fast and stable
- all the 'modern' features you'd expect in a browser are available (popup blocking, password manager, thorough history, tabs, etc.)
- it uses little memory
- it doesn't require a very fast machine to run
- it has more/better features than mozilla (fish://, file://, ftp:// smtp://, etc. etc.)
- it has native support for importing and exporting mozilla, IE, opera, netscape, etc. bookmarks.
- it is incredibly configurable in how you are able to arrange your buttons, layout, etc.
- it has a slew of other well-designed features, with modularity in mind
- it was designed from the ground up and is conceptually sound, unlike mozilla which was a hack job on top of netscape's browser
- unlike other browsers (mozilla, IE), it was designed using 'mature' technology (HTML4, CSS, etc.) and does not have nearly as many compatibility woes as IE, nor as many add-on hacks, as the other browsers had, due to changing stnadards over the years (in other words: it's a newer, fresher code base)
- unlike mozilla/firebird, I can use it for hours/days with many pages open (15+) without the entire affair slowing to a crawl and/or dying

The list goes on, but these are the main benefits in my mind of konq over mozilla or firebird. firebird is getting better, but it's still a far cry from konq. There's a reason why safari uses khtml, you know - it's good. (Or didn't you know? khtml is the render engine for konqueror, and it was used by the apple folks to make safari.

Re:The question is..

[fault0]

Which is why, uh, this is not released by Apple. Notice that there are about six web browsers (i.e, IE replacements, now Safari replacements) on OSX, and ten file managers (i.e, Finder replacements) on OSX.

OT, but what about Evolution?

[Phishcast]

Konqueror, okay. But we've got alternatives to that all over the place. The Linux app I really want to see on Mac OS X is Ximian Evolution. I've used Apple's alternative, but I really like the way Evolution ties into Exchange, and soon to be Novell Groupwise.

Is porting Gnome apps that much more difficult? Programming-challenged poster here...

Re:Why isn't X11 running?

[gregfortune]

Qt can run without X. Take a look at Qtopia, for example. There's a Qt/Mac version too so presumably Konqi is running through Qt. Of course, if Konqi was using any pure Xlib calls, then either they are gone or this guy pulled some serious magic stunts :)

safari == konquerer port ?

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm confused between the differences of porting konquerer and khtml. i thought apple essentially ported konquerer by using khtml as safari's back end. here's a link:

apple: webcore

Ouch

[Squozen]

Damn, that's some nasty kerning on that screenshot. Safari doesn't have that problem, I wonder why Konqueror does if it's using the same rendering engine?

To Answer all the "Why Bother?" Posts...

[manly_15]

I've made the transition from Mandrake on a Desktop to OSX on a Powerbook. Surprisingly, KDE has some apps that are very good and designed well enough to compliment an OSX environment.

Example 1: KMail! If you haven't ever tried this email client, try it NOW. It has some of the most killer email filtering speed I have ever seen in an email application. It nicely integrates with GnuPG. It has good keyboard shortcuts. It's set up not to download images from emails. It stores emails with maildir by default. It's pretty. Did I mention that it's fast? Up until 10.3's much improved mail.app, I would have killed to have KMail running naitively on OS X.

Ex 2: KOffice. I've never used it, but it's absolutely essential that OS X has a free naitive-running office package. Unless the OO.org aqua port gets back up, this package will likely be KOffice.

Ex 3: Konqueror is a very good file manager. While the OS X file manager is very good, there are a couple of areas that it misses. For example, I can use konqueror to select all items matching the file pattern '*foo*.bar'. In OS X, I have to drop to a terminal, and loose the trash can functionality, or switch views and sort by type, which takes longer. As another poster said, SMB apparently works better in konqueror than Finder (thanks, I'll have to try that!). If konqueror can run, then so can any other KDE app, especially when you consider that Konqueror is the most (featureful | bloated) app in KDE.

So that's why people bother. Props to them!

Re:To Answer all the "Why Bother?" Posts...

[Just Some Guy]

It has some of the most killer email filtering speed I have ever seen in an email application.

KMail is nice, and I used it for a while when I was trying out various GUI apps. It has some problems, though:

• No IMAP filtering. Really. You can't define filters that move mail between IMAP folders, at least as of the 3.2 beta CVS version I installed a few weeks ago. I use Cyrus IMAP on my home server and do all of my filtering with Sieve on the server, so I don't mind (and don't want) any client filtering there, but I could certainly use it at work.
• No way to hide folders without unread messages. I have about 60 IMAP folders under my inbox (yes, I really am on that many mailing lists, even if I don't always read them). I can subscribe or unsubscribe an individual folder, but that's the only way to control the size of the tree I have to browse when checking my mail.
• No way to hide read messages. Hey, you can't make this stuff up! I'm a packrat and have about 8,000 emails in my inbox, which is not a problem for Gnus, Thunderbird, or Evolution - they cheerfully keep the old stuff out of my sight.
• I'm hooked on Thunderbird's "Junk" button. Not many clients have this, so I don't hold its absence against KMail, but I'd sure like to have it.

Oh well. Thunderbird doesn't have built-in support for mailing lists, and Evolution doesn't seem to grok the concept of per-folder settings (I do personal and business email on the same server, and want a different default GPG key and .signature depending on which folder I'm currently inside). For all the growth in GUI mail apps for Linux, I have yet to find one that holds a candle to Gnus, so I'm sticking with Emacs for the foreseeable future. That doesn't mean that I won't take a few test drives from time to time, though.

Re:A native KHTML browser for OS X?

[gregfortune]

In the Konqi address bar, type

gg:I am not Steve Jobs

And you'll probably find a page about yourself buried somewhere in the labyrinth of Google's cluster.

another cool trick on recent versions is

fish://user@host/

to get basically a sftp GUI :)

I figured this out this a long time ago

[el_munkie]

Check this screengrab of Konq running on OS X out.

I also figured out how to get my favotite Linux game, Enemy Territory, to run on the Mac despite the fact that a Mac version does not exist, screengrabs here and here.

Of course this was cheating since it was over X11. Konq runs acceptably, but got 1-2 fps on ET.

Biting the fodder with KOffice

[theolein]

I see all the "Why bother" posts and have seen only one short paragraph with the obvious answer: KOffice.

The majority of OSX users may not need Konqueror, even though it seems to support many features only available on OSX through payable alternatives (GUI SSH and SFTP support with RBrowser for example), but it is a first step to getting KOffice ported natively to the Mac which could finally help OSX users drop MS software in a large number of cases.

KOffice is not where OpenOffice is but a native Mac port could spur development so that it becomes a first rate alternative to MS' Office X suite, and given that there is no guarantee that MS will ever make a Mac version compatible with it's new so called security features, this is an excellent idea.

What KIOSlaves work?

[GweeDo]

Konq isn't a web browser, or a file manager...it just happens to have KIOslaves that do these things (like KHTML for web browsing). There are other kio slaves I personally use in KDE 3.2 like smb:// fish:// audiocd:// and a few more...how many of them work? They are what makes konq powerful and useful and desired.

From good to troll in 3 bullet points.

[Inoshiro]

"- it was designed from the ground up and is conceptually sound, unlike mozilla which was a hack job on top of netscape's browser"

Nope. They dropped the old code and started from scratch a long, looong time ago.

"- unlike other browsers (mozilla, IE), it was designed using 'mature' technology (HTML4, CSS, etc.) and does not have nearly as many compatibility woes as IE, nor as many add-on hacks, as the other browsers had, due to changing stnadards over the years (in other words: it's a newer, fresher code base)"

Nope. Konq doesn't pass basic CSS tests that I have written. Mozilla does.

"- unlike mozilla/firebird, I can use it for hours/days with many pages open (15+) without the entire affair slowing to a crawl and/or dying"

Nope in my case. I'm not sure your problem, but I have no problem with my 2-3 windows with about 7-15 tabs each, open for the entirety my computer is on. The average between reboots on my workstation is a month. I'll close Mozilla to update to a more recent nightly, but that's about it. My hardware isn't insane either --- XP 1700+ w/ 768mb RAM.

Re:From good to troll in 3 bullet points.

[nitehorse]

Actually....

If you'd bother to use a version that isn't almost a year old (hint: KDE 3.2, we've had alpha and even beta releases out for a few weeks now) you'd know that it does pass. At least, it sure looks like it does to me. Granted, the CSS isn't quite perfect (the floating box in particular looks like its offset from the right edge is incorrect) but Konq is surprisingly good these days. And rendering errors like this one are getting fixed all the time.

-clee

A couple corrections

[gad_zuki!]

> You sound like a troll (nobody mentioned anything about a full-tilt KDE port on OS X, fool)

You call him a troll, yet you're name-calling?

> it has more/better features than mozilla (fish://, file://, ftp:// smtp://, etc. etc.)

Hold on, many people here habitually abuse MS for making the "browser the OS" and certainly can spot feature-creep a mile away, but when it comes to KDE's browser its suddenly okay? I like having a whole seperate browser for web and use Nautilus for file browsing. Keeping WAN and Local/LAN seperate is a big plus in mine, and many other's books.

>unlike other browsers (mozilla, IE), it was designed using 'mature' technology

How isn't Moz 'mature?'

>unlike mozilla which was a hack job on top of netscape's browser

This is just untrue. The Moz team gutten NS to the point where they were writing just about everything from scratch.

>unlike mozilla/firebird, I can use it for hours/days with many pages open (15+)

I can do this easily with Moz/Firebird on both Win and Linux. I average 20 tabs and half of them are auto-refreshing every few minutes and this is far from a top of the line machine.

Re: Apple needs to catch up to Linux in some respe

[diamondsw]

It's early, and I'm going to bed. This post will be semi-disorganized and probably a bit flaming. Sorry, I'm tired. However...

1) Files fragment. It happens in any file system. If your file system is well designed, it undoes this as possible. Panther does this. As a result, no appreciable fragmentation should occur (others can fill in the technical details). So what that article was trying to tell you is the file system is automatically defragmented every time an open() call is made.

2) Yes, there's lots of shareware. And a lot of commercial software. And a whole lot of freeware (check www.macupdate.com). Guess what - Linux has only the freeware category in any significant sense. And OS X can run that exact same free software via X11 in the vast majority of cases, just as you do on Linux today. Not to mention that the vast majority of shareware is $20 or less - only a couple things like GraphicConverter cost more. (Horrors, some people spend years of their life and just *don't* want to give it all away for free. They do exist.) Not to mention that Apple bundles a truckload of free software (as in beer, folks) that quite frankly kicks the butt of any open source software I've seen (I'm thinking iTunes/iPhoto/iMovie/iDVD at the moment, not Mail/Address Book). And if you want any of the other stuff, it's readily installable by fink or by compiling it yourself. I already installed my own customized wget and other things.

3) Lack of choice is deliberate. Yes, occasionally it's annoying, no doubt about it. However, I believe the excesisve choice is a major criticism of Linux (and the associated division of labor and lack of focus/coherence). As many have pointed out, why does KDE include several duplicate programs for each basic function, rather than provide a good default up front. You want choice, you can get it very easily on your own (whether by tweak, compile, or download). There are a lot of simple users out there that really, honestly, don't want choice. They want what's included to work and do what they want to do. Apple does that in spades.

I'm going to bed. grump grump grump...

Your version of Konq has a new bug, too.

[Inoshiro]

My v3.1.4 correctly doesn't let the floatbox overlap the right-hand side border, but yours miscalculates (probably related to the on-going margin bug in Konq that's still there 2 years after I noticed it) and has overlap that shouldn't be there.

A disapointing regression :-/

Re:seems odd...

[msh104]

This IS a very good thing, IF we are ever going to replace X or if you would want to use KDE under your framebuffer you would be able to do this by using a QT version designed for it. so framebuffer qt/kde without X at all isn't that far away, it is also a goal for kde 3.3 to remove all X depenencies in kdelibs and kdebase, if that is archived go can run kde on anything that has a QT port. it is not only cool, it is also a very flexible and orginized way of designing apps. GOOD WORK.

Project page here:

[IceFox]

For those that would like to help out there is a project page (wiki) here: KDE On Darwin

-Benjamin Meyer

KOffice would be great!

[abischof]

Though I'm pleased with the Konqueror port (for the geek value, if nothing else), I'm particularly excited about the intentions to port KOffice as well. I have a 15" PowerBook and I was dismayed to discover that there just isn't much in the way of free office suites for OS X :-/.

Sure, there's OpenOffice.org for OS X, but it feels more like a halway-port since it requires X11 and it's stuck with Unix widgets. Really, I like OpenOffice.org as much as the next guy -- I run it exclusively on my Windows box -- but it just feels halfway-finished on the Mac (and a native OS X port is only coming in 2006 or so).

So, after setting aside OpenOffice.org, I looked to other options.. and it appears that MS Office is just about the only other choice. And that's about $200 (and, no, I'm not going to cheat and buy the academic or government editions). So, a native port of KOffice to OS X would be a real breakthrough.