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KDE Gets Gecko/Mozilla Support

Posted by timothy on from the and-you-thought-that-was-impossible dept.

Sivar writes "Ars Technica reports that not only has the Gecko engine been ported to Konqueror, but the developers were able to finish the port in only four days during the week-long Akademy conference. With this port, Konqueror users now have a choice between two mature, powerful rendering engines."

2 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. To those of you crowing about removing KHTML... by benjamindees · · Score: 5, Informative

    At one time, Gecko was the creme de la creme of fast rendering engines. Now it's just the most compatible as well as being damn fast. Look how times have changed.

    The KDE project takes a lot of flack for the way they integrate applications. Most people call it 'bloat'. Some call it 'Microsoftesque'. As the conventional OSS wisdom goes, apps that live outside the KDE project are usually better. But, as we see in the Windows (and Mac) world, integration and consistency is what sells. Fortunately, KPart has emerged as the best of both worlds.

    Thesis: small applications doing specific tasks.
    Antithesis: large applications that do everything.
    Synthesis: apps seamlessly integrated via an open framework.

    For years we witnessed proprietary software get more and more bloated and more and more expensive. That was due in no small part to the monopolies created by proprietary formats and standards. Now, with OSS, we are witnessing capitalism in action. Choice and open standards lead to constant improvement.

    The next time you think about removing choice, think "where would OSS be without this competition?" Would we have KPart if it weren't for Gnome? Would we have great, cross-platform Gnome apps if it weren't for KDE? Many people look at these projects and see redundancy. I look at them and I see innovation.

    The argument that someone needs to "manage developer resources" in OSS is completely bunk. OSS didn't get where it is today by forming a central economy of software projects. OSS is about freedom and fair competition. A defining quality of Open Source has been: there are no managers! The downside is that you may not get to tell a developer what to work on unless you're willing to pay her. The upside, though, is that we all reap the benefits of creative freedom.

    --
    "I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
  2. Re:Port the IE rendering engine by mrgreen4242 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Um, I suggested that someone create a set of what would liekly be .dlls that would accept all the calls from Windows APIs calling for IEs renderer, but would instead render the page with Gecko's engine, and then send the results to whatever program called for them in a manner that was similar enough to the IE subsystem that the calling application wouldn't notice it wasn't from IE.

    Then IE would be standards compliant, and so would all the Windows apps that rely on the IE rendering subsystem for HTML rendering.

    I THOUGHT that it was pretty clear, and other people seem to have got it, but I hope that makes it even more clear for you.