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Firefox Lead Engineer Scolds KDE Project
trent42 writes "Firefox lead developer Ben Goodger has had harsh words on his blog for the KDE project, in light of its public tiff with Apple over the KHTML rendering engine. Goodger says 'Safari's renderer is vastly superior to the KHTML used by Konqueror,' and that the KDE developers should follow Apple's lead and focus more on the needs of users, instead of insisting on software perfection."
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/ Who knows why the poster linked to a ZDNet article (Which incidentally can't handle a slashdotting) instead of the original blog.
However, they are angry at something: people like you. Coming here on
KDE-guys did not complain about Apple as such. They even specificly mentioned that Apple is abiding by the license. what they complained about were the USERS who whined when KHTML took time to incorporate improvements made in WebCore!
Do you "get it" now, or do I have to hit you with a clue-by-four?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Submitted by carewolf on Fri, 05/13/2005 - 10:33.
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Safari and KHTML againNotice how there isn?t a vs in the title?
Hyatt and Maciej joined us on IRC yesterday, and we had some really good discussions. I might as well also admit that Maciejs comment was true (but out of context). Please notice that that implies we are discussing solutions and a common future. The idea of a common source tree is pretty much abandoned as we have very different goals and requirements, but we are discussing improved cooperation. With Apple just having released Tiger and us preparing for KDE4 we have a unique opportunity for bringing our source trees closer again.
Since Apple is being a nice guy for the time being, I will let them announce how things will improve once we have a solution, but please, no more ?vs.? stories for the time being, we are working on solving it.
Submitted by carewolf on Sat, 04/30/2005 - 13:22.
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Emphasis added by me...I just wish to weigh in on debacle to clear up some mistakes. First of all I would like to say I agree with Zack. The annoying part is not that Apple don?t cooperate as much as they could. They are actually helpfull in answering questions and _tries_ at least to separate OS X specific features in the code (allthough they fail miserably at it). No, our problem are users who think Apple does more and underestimate the effort it takes for us to implement patches from WebCore. We are doing this for free and for fun, all we really want is appreciation for our effort.
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
The KDE-developers commented about the USERS who whine when Safari-patches don't get merged in to KHTML. They never whined about Apple as such. They even mentioned that Apple is abiding with the license.
How exactly are they "pain to work with"? Apple got a kick-ass HTML-code from them, with NO questions asked, no price being asked and with zero red tape! How exactly does that mean they are "pain to work with"? If anything, this incident shows that COMPANIES are "pain to work with". KDE-developers REALLY wanted to work with Apple, but Apple wasn't interested!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
2- You probably missed all the proprietary MS crap in their implementation of the CSS, such as scollbar shit, that was NOT implemented in a W3C-compliant style (W3C allows proprietary CSS properties, but you HAVE to use precise prefix of type "-name-", which is why you see such things as -moz-outline)
3- CSS in IE6 is not "kinda bad", it's an awful heap of crap and a pain to work with from a dev's point of view
4- And if we extend from W3C's CSS to W3C's everything, MSIE sucks at W3C's HTML (heaps of missing tags, or not completely implemented ones), XHTML (which it doesn't understand at all in fact), W3C DOM/DOM Events and their binding in ECMA-262 (also known as ECMAScript/Javascript), XSL/XSLT...
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
"Software Perfection" isn't the point the KHTML developers were making. They aren't accusing Apple of violating a license (how the hell did that thread get started????).
They are saying that, despite all the media to the contrary, Apple's work is of no use to the KHTML developers. This is because Apple has been providing its changes in huge blobs without providing any clues what those changes are for or how they relate the the rest of the KHTML renderer.
Apple is following the license, which was never in doubt, but is being mean-spirited about it. The KDE devs just want people to stop the nonsensical meme that Apple is somehow helping KHTML development.
As I understand the situation, it is somewhat like an editor of a large book returning to the author only the errors in the book, but without any type of markup or explanation, in no particular order, and in a foreign language the author doesn't know. While the editor was (strictly speaking) doing his job (which is to find the errors in the book), he wasn't being very helpful.
The code could be sorted out, given enough time, but it's just as productive to ignore Apple's changes and do it from scratch.
This has nothing to do with focusing on the needs of the users, and it has nothing to do with software perfection. It is purely an issue of Apple being credited with helping KHTML, when it is doing nothing of the sort.