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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."
Of course, Apple hasn't really gotten into any significant agreement with the KDE people either. People who have been paying attention may have noticed the KDE developers saying that although Apple hasn't cooperated with them as much as the might have liked, they are within their rights to do that.
For all that has been said about a feud between KDE and Apple, the real feud is between the KDE developers and the users and slashbots who think that any new features in Safari should be in KDE too, and if they aren't it's because the KDE developers are slow, lazy, whatever.
It's worth noting that (from what I've heard, at least) the other open source projects that apple has used code from haven't gotten back much more in the way of useful contributions than the KDE team has.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Other way around, dude. Agile methodologies come from open source ideas, like release often, listening to customer (or other developers).
Remember what it was like before Agile? Companies and consultants would develop big blocks of software, check it in, QA it, and show the customer who'd get pissy because it didn't work the way they expected. Yes, Agile prevents that. But seeing what is happening, I'd say that KDE does is very Agile, unlike what Apple just did.
Oz
Actually KHTML has the biggest security hole of all. It does not follow current standards so there are time when you HAVE to use another browser. So in effect you have any security holes in KHTML and what other browsers you are forced to use.
I actually like the KDE browser better than Firefox. I love the built in spell check and it is fast.
But I can not use it with Google maps or the full version of gmail.
Has Safari introduced any huge security holes? The latest Firefox hole seemed less that huge to me. Yes it could be exploited by a white listed site but the only white listed site I have is Mozilla.org
It was also patched very quickly.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
There are other things marked as recommended (such as OpenGL and OGG Vorbis), and there are others marked as optional (such as LAME).
The problem isn't KDE is bloated, its the way the distros package it (huge monolithic packages that contain a load of different programs), though some distros like Gentoo now provide 1 package per app (which allows you to trim most packages off.
Also comparing KDE to XFCE makes no sense, XFCE is an extremely minimalistic desktop environment (its just a bit more than only a Window Manager). Only comparing KDE to GNOME would make any sense since both are complete desktop environments.