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Safari Code Benefiting Open Source Community
saha writes "Thought this article about Apple's Safari contribution back to the open source community may interest some of the readers. KDE adds Safari feel to desktop Linux: The Konqueror Web browser, which shares its basic engine with Apple's Safari, has benefited from Apple's Safari work, KDE said. Konqueror now loads and renders more quickly and has better support for Web standards. One of Apple's major efforts with Safari has been to encourage users to report sites that don't work properly with the browser, in order to improve compatibility."
There are tons of companies that contribute to Free and OS Software.
Lets see Sun, IBM, RedHat, Novell, CodeWeavers, oh and Apple (isn't the underlying OS for MacOS X open source?) not even mentioning the INDIVIDUALS who contribute (who arguably get less out of the deal since there is no direct profit motive)
Oh wait, is this news because you would normally assume Apple to be parasitic and not give back to anyone?
How old is PNG and IE still doesn't support it properly (alpha-transparency specifically)? Age means nothing. What about MNGs? Hell, what about CSS? :) Browsers are a mess of incompatibilities. The web stagnates because of it, and I (like many) blame IE for this, partially. Their lack of adherence to standards is so annoying. They have, however, added things that were working drafts at the time they were added (I seem to remember something about their XSL support being based off of an incomplete spec). I just wish they'd work on getting the current stuff working properly, before fixing it halfway or adding things that aren't 'finalized' yet, and then never fixing their implementation when it is.
Why would they do that?
For now they've WON the browser wars.
They have 95% of the browsers and webpages are coded to whatever crap IE renders whenever necessary. No need to fix anything. No need to add anything new, no need to try to conform to any type of standard at all.
They have a long time before any other browser challenges them, so they might as well put it to good use writing proprietary lock-ins for people to stumble into and never be heard from again.
Liberty.
An example of this pragmatic philosophy is Konqueror's support of the CSS extension that allows you to set scrollbar colors. Mozilla refuses to implement it simply because it's not W3C sanctioned, even though it's a perfectly reasonable CSS extension that is widely used.
I dislike this extension. I have no idea whether this is a Microsoft-introduced extension, but I would strongly suspect so. Microsoft has a general policy of building a browser that trusts remote web sites to do a good job of presenting content and not being malicious, and can make it easy to make poor design decisions. I cannot think of a good reason to change scrollbar colors -- from a HCI perspective, this is an extremely poor idea. The user spends a long time learning to immediately recognize the scrollbars on the system, and this would make scrollbars look different at different sites. Mozilla and most other browsers have taken a much more restrictive approach, not letting remote sites have as much control over a user's computer. This approach is more security-centric, and, I've found, works better.
It's not just this one extension, but a vast number of things -- sites bookmarking themselves, sites popping up windows, and all kind of other nastiness that I boggle at every time I use IE on someone's computer.
May we never see th
I think the main problem is that under american law corporations have the rights of individuals. a huge corporation of hundreds of people is not able to act with the ethics and prudence of a single person, but under the law it does have that right. it does not, however, have the responsibility. if a corporation's product kills someone, the corporation (or not even the business unit) does not "go to jail" or "get executed" in the manner of, say, dissolving its assets, or firing all or significant parts of the management and replacing it. instead it either merely pays damages, or sometimes they find a scapegoat employee to fire and/or send to jail.
:-).
human nature is to live and to be ethical (for the most part) toward others. corporate nature is to make as much money as possible within the system it is working. everything else is, really, not even considered.
i'm not saying the notion of profit corporations is evil, i am saying any collection of hundreds or thousands of people is huge and clumsy, and when it is given too many liberties it will automatically act evil.
that said, i also think apple is amongst the best behaving corporations there are, for its size. having a mostly open source OS and using open standards as often as possible are leaps and bounds ahead of any other profit platform.
i would even go as far as to say that they consistently put powerful tools in the hands of the little people. someone with more domain knowledge correct me if i'm wrong, but aren't final cut express and logic express immensely powerful for their price? i remember when final cut pro 4 (i think) came out (for $1k), people were saying that it offered most of the features of $10k or $20k systems from Avid.
check this site out. you can look up the history of various companies to see if they are evil or nice or somewhere in between (it's usually pretty polar though.. i think the only bad thing on there for apple is it bough steve an 80 million dollar jet
[Microsoft] have 95% of the browsers and webpages are coded to whatever crap IE renders whenever necessary.
You do have to be a bit careful with repeating this sort of claim, because many of the statistics you'll read fall into the "87% of all statistics are just made up" category. It's very easy to interpret web-server logs and sales figures in radically different ways.
Thus, I recently installed the latest Opera on my Powerbook, as part of my collection of browsers for testing web pages. I checked with a nearby server log, and its default id string is:
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Mac_PowerPC) Opera 6.0 [en]"
It's easy for an unscrupulous marketer or a sloppy programmer to interpret this as Mozilla, Netscape, IE or Opera. It can be (and is) counted as any of them, depending on what you want to "prove".
As for sales figures, I like to mention the Dell box sitting in the row of computers on the shelf next to my desk. It's running RH linux 8.0 at the moment. There's no trace of Microsoft software on it. But it was delivered with MS windows, so both Dell and Microsoft count me as a Windows customer. And, since I haven't used their customer support for it, I'm obviously a happy, satisfied customer. This box is, of course, also counted in any industry figures as having an IE browser. Wrong again.
We really don't have any good numbers on the scale of this sort of misrepresentation. Any numbers you see are probably in that 87% of statistics that are just made up.
One of my more fun examples of padded browser statistics: I also have an old W98 box on my shelf. It's used for web testing, of course, and is usually turned off. But when I do use it, one very real problem is that it rarely survives more than a dozen web pages before it hangs and I have to reboot it. When I restart the browser, I usually have to re-fetch a number of the pages that I was working on. Those fetches go into the statistics, of course. I'd claim that counting reloads caused by browser crashes is totally bogus. This is padding your numbers in the worst possible way.
We have no way of knowing how often Windows users have to do this, because there's no reliable way to distinguish such downloads from others in a server log. And it's not just IE; the Firebird browser on my linux and OSX boxes hangs regularly and has to be killed and restarted. Those reloads are also bogus numbers in the statistics.
Any figures you see on this topic are to be taken with a large grain of salt. They are mostly PR, not facts.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.