Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Safari Code Benefiting Open Source Community

Posted by pudge on from the apple-is-wonderful-and-good dept.

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."

14 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. yup... by pb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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. :)

    --
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
    1. Re:yup... by irc.goatse.cx+troll · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
    2. Re:yup... by spectral · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:yup... by 7-Vodka · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:yup... by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 4, Interesting
      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.

      --
      main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
    5. Re:yup... by 0x0d0a · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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
    6. Re:yup... by JimDabell · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  2. Re:Why is this newsworthy? by javaxman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. To be fair to the KDE developers by be-fan · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
  4. shouldn't it be apple's by martinde · · Score: 4, Funny

    kontributions to the open source kommunity?

  5. Re:Why is this newsworthy? by mivok · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

  6. Re:Why is this newsworthy? by Captain+Rotundo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  7. I really hate corporations by LWATCDR · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  8. Re:Why is this newsworthy? by lpontiac · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.