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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."
Well I don't follow KDE, so I don't know mmuch about Apple's or anyyone else's involvement. But Novell bought Ximian and pratically before the ink was dry on the deal they had bounties up offering money for people that did arious tasks to improve the desktop experience. Which reminds me Ximian was a company that was directly involved in the desktop, and now thats Novell by extension.
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