Slashdot Mirror
KDE Gets Gecko/Mozilla Support
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."
Also read this blog entry by one of the developers which answers the most common asked questions.
I like Konqueror, and this makes it a million times better, but the interface still sucks. Ctrl-W to close a tab works on all but the last tab. I like the Mozilla way much better. There are other gripes I have with it, but most of them are of similar form: Mozilla does something better.
*Why would you want to port a rendering engine that is not standards complient?*
to view non standard pages? seriously, there would be some use for it.. but not woth the risk in using(the nonstandard stuff that I most often run into are usually spyware anyways and i'd rather not have them run like supposed..)..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Seriously, Mozilla has been touted as a software development platform. What advantages does it present over the .NET platform, or the Java platform? Or is it something completely different?
Perhaps more interesting than porting Gecko to Konqueror is integrating Qt and KDE with Firefox. It sounds like this porting fest has gained a couple of talented developers for the Mozilla project. This is good for both KDE and Mozilla.
"Mozilla still has many outstanding UI bugs that I and others have reported years ago that haven't been squashed."
Could you please be more specific?
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Does this mean java applets will actually appear in the page like they're supposed to instead of popping up in a separate window? I hate it when I go to a (poorly designed) page in Konqueror that uses a bunch of java applets for button rollovers... I end up with a dozen little windows all over my screen. That this still hadn't been fixed by Konqueror 3.3 is what finally got me to switch to Opera.
Actually it ran in X before it ever did in Windows. IE is the browser formerly known as NCSA Mosaic.
Actually, it does run on Linux through Wine. Admittedly, it doesn't work in Konq, but yes, it does run.
Tell the truth and you won't have so much to remember.
The best news here is that Firefox will also now be able to use the native KDE widgets, etc. Sweet.
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
modifies the Gecko rendering system to something that can be a full replacement for IEs
Now wait, let me get this straight: You want someone to port the "non-standards-compliant" part of IE into a standards-compliant browser so it will render non-standards-compliant web pages the same way the much maligned non-standards-compliant browser does? Doesn't this turn the new browser into a non-standards-compliant browser? Or does that only happen if the rendering engine is written that way from scratch?
I understand the motivation to have an "IE Preview" option-- and have cursed the problem of not having that myself at times-- but if that functionality is built into my browser, I don't think I'd be able to call my browser "standards compliant" anymore. I frankly don't have a better solution, but please don't suggest ruining Gecko by making it an IE clone. (And yes, I'm nearly ignorant on the subject of rendering engine internals.)
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
... that we will finally have OK/Cancel buttons in the usual (correct) places in the Qt version of Firefox!
bash: rtfm: command not found
How much is really contributed back, that's how many bugfixes does apple contribute with and how many features?
Or are they simply having their codebase available at the apple developer page, which would take some time for the khtml developer to port back?
I'm not bashing apple but just wondering how much of apples work can be easily integrated.
Read the parent post again. He is proposing a modification to the Gecko engine to make it emulate IE5/6's quirks (as well as the IE4 and below quirks that it already emulates in the aptly-named 'quirks mode') so that you can view the page how it would look in IE without using IE. This would be incredibly useful. It's not a new idea by any means, but it would solve your problem.
It might be a good idea to make khtml as standard compliant as possible and switch to the gecko enigne whenever konqueror detects a page, which has incorrect html.
khtml would be very clean and probably easy to develop and konqueror would still be able to show all pages.
There was a QT port in mozilla.org's CVS in the past, but it got dropped through lack of maintenance. While the four days it took to port the gfx layer is obviously impressive, it is a shame that all of the original work was allowed to bitrot.
- Browser doesn't remember focus when you go back/forward in history. It doesn't remember the scrollbar position occasionally (it's gotten better in the
.9 series but it's still bad compared to other browsers).
- The focus ring that appears when you click is different than when you tab. The click version is a dark ring while the tab version is xored pixels. If the page is on a black background, you can barely see the focus ring when you click.
- There are many issues with iframes in mozilla. It doesn't mouse capture correctly, text selection has issues, scrolling via mouse selections is broken, the middle-click scroll doesn't really work, etc.
Those are my main gripes with the UI in mozilla's html engine. These are very old bugs that still haven't been squashed. I have two gripes with mozilla's rendering engine: the slashdot rendering bug and the max-element-width bug.Nice job! Only in four days! That is great.
However, as good as Gecko is, I find that there are sites that are so Microsoft specific (brain dead developers) that they would not render correctly in FireFox. However, some of those same sites render better in Konquerer than in Gecko.
An example is the Arabic Al Jazeera web site.
If you open in MS IE, all is well, because the developers wrote it with only MS IE in mind. If you try it with Firefox (I am using 0.9), then you get a blank blue space on the right, with no menus in it at all, and no menus on the left side too.
If you open it in Konqueror (the one that ships with Mandrake 10.0 Final), then the menus are visible. There are still some quirks (e.g. just moving the mouse over an article heading will trigger a download dialog), but it is way ahead of KDE's Gecko.
Incidentally, Al Jazeera's English web site is developed by a different company and does not suffer form these problems.
I have seen a few other sites with this problem (incorrect rendering in FireFox), and they are always .asp web pages, pointing to a Microsoft centric mentality of the developers.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I don't care how a page is supposed to look. I want to view pages the way the author intended for them to be viewed. If that's also the way they're supposed to look, fine, if not, too bad.
"I hope that someone modifies the Gecko rendering system to something that can be a full replacement for IEs, and you can actually view a page the way its supposed to look while using IE (and all the programs that use IEs rendering engine for inline HTML proccessing)."
You mean something like
this?
It's the Gecko engine turned in to an ActiveX control that is functionally compatible with the IE control. There is even a tool on the site that can scan and patch programs with IE embedded (such as AOL, Winamp, etc.) to use the Mozilla control.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
No sweat, and I should apologize too. It was me that said "let me get this straight," which is not a normally recognized introduction to a useful exchange of ideas. Sorry. And so far (in case you're not checking) you've got better mods than I do in this exchange anyway. Nice talking with you!
And don't miss the link further down in this thread to the Creating Applications With Mozilla book. All the examples seem to work fine in Firefox, and I'm learning a lot more about rendering!
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
I'd kill for a mozilla-based replacement for IEs rendering engine. Whenever I'm in windows, I have a tendancy to use the tile bar on open explorer windows to get to google(in kde it's not dangerous!!).
It's been a long time.
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.
Indeed. In fact, I'd say that the KPart architecture is actually closer to the Unix philosophy than standalone small apps. KPart reminds me so much of the pipes and output redirection that make Unix shells so good. It's the closest GUI equivalent to the Unix CLI environment that I've seen.
Take Konqueror, for example. By itself, it doesn't do anything--it's just a frame. All the functionality--the file manager, web browser, fish, all the other viewers--are KParts independent of Konqueror. Konqueror is a graphical shell--a frame that holds those KParts, and provides interoperability features.
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