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."

Comments

Port the IE rendering engine

[ari_j]

I'm waiting for IE's rendering engine to be ported, possibly with some help from Wine.

Re:Port the IE rendering engine

[adamjaskie]

It would be useful for testing web pages when you do not otherwise have access to a Windows machine, like me.

Re:Port the IE rendering engine

[mrgreen4242]

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.

Re:Port the IE rendering engine

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Really? I never read EULAs, but have my dog click the 'agree' button to limit liability. Works for me.

FAQ

[jlp2097]

Also read this blog entry by one of the developers which answers the most common asked questions.

Another possible port?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if only those KDE devs would port the Safari rendering engine us Linux users would be happy.

To those of you crowing about removing KHTML...

[benjamindees]

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.

Re:what the hell is wrong with you people?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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?