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."

Comments

Ben Goodger's blog URL

[Manip]

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.

Re:KDE should be grateful.

[10Ghz]

Apple went with KHTML instead of Mozilla. Instead of gratitude, the KDE devs are angry that Apple isn't tailoring their patches for them?

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?

Safari and KHTML

[danalien]

Safari and KHTML
Submitted by carewolf on Fri, 05/13/2005 - 10:33.

• Notice 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.

Safari and KHTML again
Submitted by carewolf on Sat, 04/30/2005 - 13:22.

• 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.

Emphasis added by me...

Re:Blah...

[10Ghz]

The KHTML guys are really shooting themselves in the foot with this. They certainly aren't encouraging companies to participate with open source projects. The only thing they're doing is reinforcing an existing conception about open source developers -- that they're a pain to work with.

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!

Re:User Needs vs Software Perfection

[masklinn]

I don't know why anyone informed would say this. The CSS in IE6 is kinda bad, but it's clearly supposed to be W3C CSS and not something proprietary.

1- It's not "supposed to be the W3C CSS", of the few properties that are implemented (CSS1, CSS2 is barely scratched) many are wrongly implemented [box model, only fixed in Strict mode IE6] and half the implementation is heavily bug ridden
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...