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

right....

[1evilmonkey]

So he pretty much gave KDE the finger haha

Re:Can't wait...

[paulatz]

It took about 25 seconds here at the university on this old amd-K6 (792.57 bogomips).

Re:Can't wait...

[paulatz]

You are so right that nobody will listen to you (please mod parent up).

Re:Blah...

[loafswell]

Apple's claim to fame is user experience and user interface excellence. They spend a lot of money on designers and UI/UE experts to accomplish this. Apple's motivation is to capture the marketshare that is willing to pay for this. The Open Source KDE folks, and everyone who contributes to open source projects, on the other hand are scratching an itch and engaging in a philanthropic activity. I thing the open source geeks do a damn fine job on their UI work considering that their expertise is centered more in procramming and less in UI and design. This of course will improve as more UI/UE and designers elect to scratch their own itches and pitch in on some open source projects. It would of course be nice if corporations using open source code in their projects would allow the open source guys to leverage some of their UI/UI design work.

Re:In a way I agree

[Paradox]

No - they're purposfully difficult to integrate back into KHTML. The apple patches don't include changelogs, they have too many references to closed-source apple API's and modified QT API's.. they'd fix bugs without consideration on other things it would break (some of which would be things apple didn't use so they simply didn't care.)

You make it sound like fiendish Apple Oompa-Loompas are conspiring to somehow shut KHTML down out of malice. This is not the case. Apple is simply starting to realize what you don't seem to want to realize. WebCore is a fork, and it's diverging from KHTML. Or maybe you do realize it, but just don't like it?

Which aspect? And why arrogant? The KDE devs WROTE the damned thing. It's their baby. They're not going to ditch their project for some bastard-child that Apple has created.

And the Apple devs have done enough work now that, quite frankly, they need KHTML less and less. It's called forking, and when one team works at a much faster pace than the other, the result is inevitable.

People percieve this as arrogant on the KDE team's part because, simply put, Apple has a better rendering engine now. Part of the reasoning behind the lack of kickback is not just the absence of a CVS branch or lack of changelogs, but because the KHTML code is very "clean" and correct. The Apple code suffers from time-to-market-itis. So, the KHTML developers don't want to go through the effort of backporting.

Quite frankly, the KDE folks' mentality is out-of-style in the Agile Development world.

Bullshit! Think about: You're a principal developer in designing a strong HTML renderer. You put a lot of time and effort into it. Along comes some big company that grabs your code, renames it, and puts it into their product publically. They submit some patches. Then, they basically stab you in the back.

Wait, you're implying Apple comes in, does a smash and grab on freely available code, then instead of improving it (which they did), you imply that they slapped a MacOSX front on it, called it their own, then gave you the finger.

That's wrong and you know it's wrong. If they did so little, why can't you backport the changes? Could it be, maybe, because they've made significant changes to the library, relying on their own APIs (just as KDE relies on KDE apis)?

Sounds to me like you had unreasonable expectations.