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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."
I'm waiting for IE's rendering engine to be ported, possibly with some help from Wine.
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.
Now if only those KDE devs would port the Safari rendering engine us Linux users would be happy.
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!
This is good news to me. I tried KDE a while back, but wasn't totally satisfied with the Konqueror web browser, which to me was the missing link in all the apps. It lacked type-ahead find, had kinda awkward rendering, and a few other things I didn't like.
Now I will give it another shot once this makes it into a release. I'm a Gnome user, but I'm not married to it, KDE was very nice last time I tried it.
#!/
More choices, I see nothing negative in that.
The one thing I'd actually like to see in my GNOME environment is a KHTML based webbrowser, the html rendering feels much snappier than Gecko/Mozilla browsers.
There must be a reason why Apple desided to go with KHTML for their Safari browser instead of Gecko/Mozilla.
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.
Damn, I almost got the first post but I was having trouble getting Gecko to work in Konqueror!
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.*
You don't need QT/KDE to run Firefox.
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
"Just run IE with Wine I guess ... ?"
Waaah! But I don't wanna run IE with Wine.
Anyway this wasn't the same than a KDE port, but given that the Kecko Team have not integrated KIO, KWallet and KCookieJar already, they aren't there either.
... that we will finally have OK/Cancel buttons in the usual (correct) places in the Qt version of Firefox!
bash: rtfm: command not found
Oh come on, that never happens.
Great, now slashdot will look weird in Konqueror as well!!
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"
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.
Zack Rusin, one of the authors of this port, has written some more information about it in his blog.
See his blog
Can we have the rendering speed of KHTML (Konqueror's rendering engine) and the relatively-small memory footprint of Konqueror with the compatibility of Mozilla?
I mean, switching between rendering engines just to access a particular site sounds annoying. Almost as annoying as having to open an IE window for sites that don't work well w/ Mozilla or a Moz. window for sites that don't work in Konqueror...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
While your argument may have merit, I fail to see the connection between the 'Windows Driver Foundation' and getting stoned before browsing Slashdot.
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.
"hasn't anyone ever tried to write a validated webpage that works in mozilla/firefox? it's nigh impossible, if you expect to use all of the features of html4.01 transitional or css1.0"
Smoke crack much? Writing validated HTML or XML pages in Mozilla is easy as hell. It's getting IE to render em right that is the hard part.
"have a look here: Mozilla's quirks mode. It's actually necessary to trick the browser into getting even somewhat close to standards compliant, and even then the formatting is all screwy by half."
I hope you were trying to be funny. Otherwise you could only be considered a retard. Actually read what the page says.
" Because existing content on the web is not standards-compliant or would appear in unintended ways on a standards-compliant browser, Mozilla handles some content in a backwards compatible way and some content according to standards.
There are three modes used by the layout engine: quirks mode, almost standards mode, and full standards mode. In Quirks mode, layout emulates nonstandard behavior in Navigator 4 and MSIE for Windows that is required not to break existing content on the Web. In full standards mode, the behavior is (hopefully) the behavior described by the HTML and CSS specifications. In almost standards mode, there are only a very small number of quirks implemented: those that break real pages on the web that use the DOCTYPEs that trigger almost standards mode."
Mozilla quirks mode is not about rendering pages in a standards compliant way. It is about rendering broken pages in broken ways to match the rendering of the worlds most popular broken browser Internet Explorer. Which has it's own quirks mode so as to be backwards compatable with it's own broken ancestors.
" No problems in ie 4, 5 or 6. no problems in Opera or with khtml. I have no trouble testing sandards-validated pages QNX browser, mac OS/X, netscape 4 or with any other damn browser. Just the unholy troika of moz-firebrid-netscape. I'm like, wtf?"
And after reading all that the rest of us are all like wtf was he smoking?
Be bloody careful if you really do this: make sure the HTML control is sandboxed every bloody way imaginable.
Personally, I'd rather port the viruses directly. It's more honest.
The underlying tech between the two is very diffrent. I prefer KHTML since it renders all the sites I visit, and firefox doesn't ( specifically my banks ). The Gecko engine is slightly more standards compliant, but KHTML isn't far behind. Having two gives us options, they'll both improve, Also KHTML can be made to do things for the benefit of KDE where it would be wrong for Gecko to do the same.
If a first you don't succeed, your a programmer...
I just recently designed a compliant site with HTML 4.01 and CSS 2; I had more problems with Safari and IE 5 Mac than I ever did with Firefox. Methinks you're doing something wrong or haven't tried recent versions of Firefox.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
Mr. Gates, is that you?
Seriously, I'm a professional web designer. I build everything 100% XHTML and CSS standard; my designs usually work immediately without tweaking in Safari and Mozilla/Camino/Firefox. A good 25% of my time, however, is spent fixing the IE 5 and 6 bugs afterwards. That happens *every* time.
Maybe you're just trying to do some things the wrong way. It's possible to write code that is valid but still done the wrong way.
No win at all. QT is, basicly, a widget set. Other widget sets would be GTK, Motif, components of Windows, OS X, etc, etc. The widget set that Mozilla uses is itself, or more accuaratly, XPFE. Using a different widget set would, well, compleatly defeate the goal of cross platform compatability.
Yes. In nautilus, File->Open Location and then put in "sftp://host.domain/path/" Works fine for me, I use that all the time.
501 Not Implemented
The linked article renders so badly in konqueror (KDE 3.2.2, FreeBSD) it wasn't even readable.
I guess that's telling me something.
Command attempted to use minibuffer while in minibuffer
It's the MS replacement for HTTP and HTML, and... oops, it's been cancelled.
Your point was...?
It's to late now, but if you want exact WYSIWYG, use PDF instead of HTML (and be prepared for issues such as A4 vs Letter). HTML was not and is not designed to be a layout language. Any layout you can do with it is a bonus. Get over it.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
So... grandparent poster, while what you said was technically correct, your post was wrong in that you said that the GGP poster was wrong. MSIE is based on SpyGlass Mosaic - but that's in turn based on NCSA Mosaic.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...they'll add a dropdown list of commonly preferred close-the-tab keys and an option to either close the browser with the last tab or leave it open with zero tabs showing.
The whole lot will be accessible from the command line with the right bizarre 90-character invokation.
GNOME will then add similar options, but you'll need to feed their equivalent a 40kB XML file to operate it from the command line.
I can also imagine an MSIE compatibility engine for KDE with settings for what kinds of viruses you want to support. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Most FOSS managers are as much developers, which helps them to keep a lot more closely in touch with what the code is doing than even a highly talented manager would. There is a place in FOSS for highly talented managers sans coding skills, too - it's just that many (almost certainly most) little tinpot FOSS projects would suffer from having one rather than benefit.
A skilled manager knows when to manage lightly, and FOSS is all about lightly managed massive asynchronous parallelism (no, that's not quite an oxymoron). A deft management touch here and there can help to cut gordian knots without "crushing the butterfly".
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
On Linux, you can compile Mozilla (and related products, like Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, etc.) to bind for GTK1 or GTK2 (and now, hopefully, Qt). On Mac and Windows, it binds to the native toolkit.
True, it still uses XPFE, but it uses the other toolkit as a backend and to get certain information (colours, fonts, and dialog widgets if the Moz theme isn't comprehensive).
It's one of Mozilla's greatest strengths--it still has its own theming capability and cross-platform compatibility, but it also integrates with the native desktop. Adding another toolkit (i.e. Qt) to the possible options will only help increase its acceptance, without sacrificing anything.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
[Create a drop-in replacement for MSHTML.dll that uses the Gecko engine.] Then IE would be standards compliant
True, but...
and so would all the Windows apps that rely on the IE rendering subsystem for HTML rendering.
Not necessarily. What happens when one runs IEPatcher on an application that relies on one of Microsoft's proprietary extensions to web technologies, such as VBScript, the IE DOM, or nesting of ActiveX controls? In general, a client-side app will couple itself closer to IE than a public web page will, as 1. fewer people have patched client-side apps to use the Gecko control than have switched to the dino or the panda for web browsing, and 2. the overwhelming majority of such Windows apps' EULAs forbid modification to the binaries such as the use of IEPatcher.
From Zack Rusin's Blog :
Does it mean Firefox will run natively on KDE? Yes, that's essentially exactly what it means. We haven't only ported the Gecko but we wanted to make it as complete as possible. I do want to make Firefox a great browser for KDE users. In the coming weeks I'll be integrating KIO, KWallet and KCookieJar so I'm hoping we'll see more great things soon.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
I use HTML 4.01 Transitional and CSS 2. Both validated. Both looking exectly how they should on my Firefox.
IE has big problems because it doesn't really understand CSS 2. Which is pretty annoying.
I should stop feeding trolls.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)