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

dammit

[rathehun]

Why the hell can't you post a mirrordot link? Ben's site is regularly slashdotted - he has previously told us not to do this to him. Now stop being click happy and use this

UPDATE: Good thing I hit the preview button. It's a ZDNet site or something like that. http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/This is a link to Bens blog.

Bah.

R.

Re:??? HUH ???

[william.gunn]

sarcasm layered on top of sarcasm...how do you people ever tell what someone's really saying?

Re:Where "free" software fails

[Danuvius]

Subject: Where "free" software fails

Ben Goodger has hit on one of the major ways that "free" software can fail and that is that the people working on the project are doing so out of the goodness of their hearts and for their own reasons. Some developers, like Goodger probably, are writing free software for the kick of having as many people use it as possible. This will make them somewhat use oriented. Others, and the KHTML guys appear to be this, are writing code for the sheer joy of writing code. And it's not fun to write stuff that cuts corners just so you can get it out the door. Of course, you may not be meeting the users' needs. But then, there's no requirement to meet users' needs. It's free - if you don't like it, fix it yourself or don't use it. In this case, Apple chose to fix it themselves. The fact that they diverged from KHTML simply shows that they have different priorities and isn't any different than FreeBSD and NetBSD spliiting.

You're right. I will go back amidst tears to my failure of a system with Linux, X.org, KDE, Firefox, OpenOffice, MPlayer, Evolution, et al.

In fact, I'd like to argue (since you never did) that Apple's uptake of the KHTML codebase is proof-positive of what a huge failure that project specifically is. I mean if it had been any better, obviously Apple would have opted for a more sensible alternative like the likewise failure Firefox or even something written from scratch.

Not meeting your needs != failure.