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."

Comments

KDE 3.2

[Kethinov]

I recently installed KDE 3.2 in my Gentoo box and I have found that Konqueror was one of the greatest improvements done to KDE compared to 3.1.x. I really hate corporations and Apple is indeed a corporation. But as far as corporations go, I've always said that Apple is the corporation I hate the least. :)

They made tons of changes

[Anonymous Coward]

And added quite a bit of code to KHTML.

Now it's definitely a worthy adversary of Mozilla and IE.

Re:on the other hand

[mattgreen]

Don't be ridiculous. Did MS make those themes for Mozilla? Of course not. You are completely missing the point. Then again they are infamous for not reading the articles at Neowin as well.

Why is this newsworthy?

[Captain Rotundo]

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?

Re:Why is this newsworthy?

[javaxman]

It may be newsworthy because this time the contribution is squarely in the Application space, and is high-quality and very easily usable, impacting the actual end-user application/desktop experience. It's also newsworthy because so many people were initially skeptical that Apple would give anything back.

To my ( somewhat limited ) knowledge, most of the effort companies you've listed have put in show up only for administrators and developers, not desktop users. Arguably because that's where effort has been needed most ( maybe up until now ), but still...

OpenOffice is equally newsworthy, but maybe not exactly as easily usable and feature-complete, though I'd argue that's mainly due to it's larger feature set as compared to the KHTML engine. I think it'd be interesting to know how many resources Apple has thrown at KHTML compared to the resources Sun has thrown at OpenOffice, for example. If the manhours are comprable, shame on Sun. I personally feel that OpenOffice may be the single most important open source project right now. If I didn't spend all of my spare time surfing /. and raising my two-year-old, I'd contribute...

Of course, I'd like to see Apple pick up and work on OpenOffice as an AppleWorks replacement ( they need one ) but there are so very, very many reasons I can't expect that to happen.

Re:Why is this newsworthy?

[mivok]

Perhaps apple would be more likely to contribute to koffice instead, continuing what they started?

Re:Why is this newsworthy?

[Captain Rotundo]

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.

Re:Why is this newsworthy?

[lpontiac]

Of course, I'd like to see Apple pick up and work on OpenOffice as an AppleWorks replacement ( they need one )

Following the release of Safari, MS dropped support for IE on Mac, directly citing the existence of Safari as the reason.

Apple need Microsoft Office, so I can't see them daring to touch an actually competitive office suite.

Re:Why is this newsworthy?

[dafz1]

Hmmm...actually, Apple is taking on M$'s Power Point, part of the Office suite. Apple released Keynote, XML based presentation software that is, in many ways superior to Power Point(ex. slide changes, image rendering, etc.).

The key to this is compatibility with Office for Windows. As much as we hate to admit it, it is the standard by which all others is judged. Any suite that wants to replace Office, or at least become a major player in the office suite arena, has to be fully compatible with M$ Office. OpenOffice is close, koffice needs work, and Apple has yet to show a word processing app capable of Word's abilities(note: even Office v.X[for OS X] isn't 100% compatible). Make no mistake, Apple is working on it(that's why TextEdit can edit Word docs.).

yup...

[pb]

I'm no KDE fan, but I actually have KDE 3.2 on my box just so I can run Konqueror... it really has come a long way, it's very snappy, and renders pages quite well.

Of course it isn't entirely stable yet, I do get the occasional SEGFAULT, but I've seen that happen even with browsers that theoretically *are* stable. :)

Re:yup...

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Still doesn't support XSL, as shown on http://semi.getanotherfuckingisp.com.
key:
mozil la: perfectly rendered
IE: supports the xsl but not the css
konq/opera: doesnt support the xsl.

Considering XSL is an old(5 or so years) spec needed for the web to develope further, especially in a way the OSS community would prefer, its pathetic that some browsers still just don't render it at all.

Re:yup...

[spectral]

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.

Re:yup...

[7-Vodka]

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.

Re:yup...

[Spy Hunter]

The reason Konqueror doesn't support XSL is that KDE development is pragmatic. KDE developers focus their effort on things that will actually make the browsing experience better today, not complex standards few people like. 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.

KHTML doesn't implement XSL because practically nobody uses XSL. Personally, I doubt it will ever catch on; it's just too complex and the syntax is way too ugly. I haven't seen any compelling reason to use it. If it does catch on, though, you can bet the next release of Konqueror will support it. KHTML developers just don't see the need to waste their time implementing complex standards that nobody wants to use in real webpages. Besides, it's not like KHTML supporting XSL will catapult it into wide acceptance or anything, because KHTML is in a different position than Gecko or IE.

If you want to talk about pathetic, just consider that Mozilla still doesn't support SVG. KDE 3.2 ships with native SVG support. SVG is a well-liked, widely supported standard that is getting a lot of attention and has the potential to change the browsing experience for the better, today. KDE developers realize this, and that's why Konqueror now supports SVG.

Re:yup...

[0x0d0a]

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.

Re:yup...

[JimDabell]

Scrollbars are easy to recognize no matter what color they are.

As far as I can tell, the overwhelming majority of people who try and change scrollbar colours do so to make them blend in with the colour scheme used on their website. This usually makes them far less obvious.

They are always in exactly the same place

No they aren't. Scrollbars can appear in frames, iframes, <object> elements, textarea fields and elements with overflow: scroll set. It's very easy to miss them in a large number of cases, even if you are an experienced surfer.

In any case, anybody who dislikes this misfeature should vote for the bug.

Re:yup...

[jc42]

[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.

To be fair to the KDE developers

[be-fan]

A lot of the improvements in 3.2 were *not* because of the contributed Apple code. Some significant parts went in, but other major parts are going into 3.3. Its great that Apple is helping, and I don't want to minimize their contribution, but I'd like to see credit given where credit is due.

shouldn't it be apple's

[martinde]

kontributions to the open source kommunity?

I really hate corporations

[LWATCDR]

That is not very logical or kind. Many individuals incorporate to protect there home and family from law suites. Many charities that do good work are also corperations. I find it odd that a person would say they "hate corpations" yet own a computer with an AMD or Intel CPU, drive a car, and watch cable TV.
Odds are what you mean is that you do not like the actions of iirresponsible people.

Re:I really hate corporations

[johnjosephbachir]

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 :-).