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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."
the KDE developers should follow Apple's lead and focus more on the needs of users, instead of insisting on software perfection.
In a way, I agree. It's comforting to sit down, load an app, and have everything work. Knowing it's not quite perfectly written behind the scenes is a small worry sitting in the back of my mind, but it's smaller than when I have a slightly clumsy app that is otherwise technically correct.
Not that I think Konq is all that far behind in the user side of things.
Now only if Microsoft would insist on software perfection....
root@allevil:~#
...and focus more on the needs of users, instead of insisting on software
Why not try something completely the opposite, like Microsoft, and focus on neither?
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.
So the two are mutually exclusive? We can only have software that is perfectly written or software that addresses the needs of the users?
Can't we figure out what the users need, and then deliver excellently written software to do that?
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
"KDE developers should follow Apple's lead and focus more on the needs of users, instead of insisting on software perfection."
Now I think back to 1995, when IE focused on user needs over software perfection and the following of published specifications. And look what a mess of incompatibility we have today of javascript, css, java VMs, etc. Mainly because M$ focused on 'the needs of users.' No thanks, I'll stick to the specs.
Do we really need to start another flamewar between projects? Who benefits? Perhaps the KDE project and Firefox should *both* keep their collective mouths shut!
bash: rtfm: command not found
I got on the KDE guys for their bit yesterday, so today I'll point out to the Mozilla side that the reason there was a decent browser for Linux in 1999 was that the Konqueror guys satisfied the needs of users while Mozilla went off constructing a whole new software platform...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Why is this necessarily a fight? Why don't the Konquerer developers just say "you're ugly" and proceed to ignore the other guy? He can have his opinion, they can have theirs, and it's completely useless to argue about it. As a general rule, people don't like being told what to do, especially after they've made an informed decision.
Ya know, I can't help but wonder if it's silly little pissing contests like this that, at least in some way, prevents OSS from reaching its full potential.
Here we have several very adept programmers slapping at one another over how their respective web browsers work. Am I the only one out there that finds this kind of bickering trivial and unproductive?
Yes, people will have disagreements, and people will have different ways of doing things. Fine. But why not harness those different perspectives and create something better?
As long as OSS projects are afflicted by this kind of petty squabbling, developers' attention will be diverted from creating quality software. Now knock it off!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Well maybe as a software engineer I should. But does anyone that isn't a software engineer care? Probably not. Case closed.
And guess what KHTML's team is? That's right. Full of software engineers. Which is why they care.
Secondly, developers should prioritise releasing their products on time, even if they "may have to cut corners".
Software developers in the open-source world make software because they love to. They want to make their project (note: not product) the best it can be. Releasing products on time is straight from the Marketing Department.
Goodger has every right to give an opinion, but no right to flame others for caring about their projects, much like Mozilla used to, before they gave up a large part of their community.
Love for a project, not releasing products in a timely fashion is what makes open-source different, and much appreciated.
And this is different from the normal how exactly?
Quite frankly, I'd rather have them arguing - when OSS developers disagree it often highlights issues that people should really be thinking about.
You might like the Solid Wall Of Unity approach but give me chaos any day.
Isn't that exactly what the KDE-developers said?? Sheesh!
I for one think that it's great that there are still people out there with a goal to create perfect code, and not just slap features together. It's interesting that Apple chose KHTML because the code was clean, fast and small. And now this guys suggests that KDE abandons those benefits and moves to Webcore (which has lost most of those benefits due to cutting corners and less than perfect code).
Is that it? Crummy code that is "good enough" is the way to go?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I can't say I feel comfortable hearing that type of reasoning coming from a Lead Engineer of my favourite web browser. I'm not a Microsoft fan but if an IE developer made a comment like that then geeks would be cutting him or her up for that. I might be wrong since I am not a coder but wouldn't keeping software perfection a priority lead to less bugs in the future?
A large part of the reason that Apple is still around with not even 5% of the market is that they do care about the user. With a user base that small for their platform, most vendors would be dead but Apple focuses heavily on the user experience. I don't see a lot of that at all coming from most open source projects.
Here's a little theory of mine: users are more concerned with having a great UI and having apps that work together than raw speed. Open source desktops used to have the speed advantage, but not anymore. Can anyone honestly say that GNOME is faster than Windows XP's desktop these days? Same for KDE and MacOS X.
For all of this bitching about Apple exploiting OSS, I don't see any recognition that the mere fact that OSX's underpinnings are OSS gives OSS a vote of confidence in the corporate world. For one of the two largest platforms in the world to switch to that foundation is a big endoresement and help lend legitimacy to OSS. The funniest part of this is that KDE's developers are finally discovering the fact that forks do happen. Imagine that, Apple actually forked KHTML for their own needs. Why is it OK for X.Org to fork and go off in one direction, but not OK for Apple to do the same thing? They give the patches back and excuse me if I am at a loss as to how a forked code base is going to maintain a lot of similarity with the original when both are going off in separate directions.
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From TFA:
I would not be so sure of that. I seem to recall that the GPL defines source code as the "preferred form" of the program for making modifications of it. If Apple "comments" its patches by referring to numbers in a proprietary bug database to which only they have access, Apple could be accused of intentionally obfuscating its source code, which is a violation of the "preferred form" clause in the GPL. In any case, it's ethically wrong because the free-software concept is meaningless if the provided source code is not realistically usable without having access to essential information about what it does.
Gee, that sounds eerily familiar. Where have I heard it before, that "give Joe Sixpack what he wants and damn software quality" attitude? Marketing fluff at the expense of solidity and security? Oh right, of course, that's the attitude that brought us the virus propagation engine that is Microsoft Internet Explorer. Is it any wonder that Firefox is now on its way along the same route?
Ridiculous. The use of software is demanding less computer literacy by the year -- compare today to the MS-DOS days of twenty years back. But that is in fact a big part of the problem. People should learn to accept that using a computer requires some basic form of clue. If people are not willing to acquire such clue, they should watch TV instead so that they won't harm anybody with the viruses, spam and DDoS attacks perpetrated through their zombified computers.
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.
I'm not 100% surprised, given the degree to which the original post was misrepresented, but given some replies to his blog entry pointed this out and Ben's single response to them has been dismissive, it'd be nice to see a sign of good faith.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
How would you like it if you had a real nice and clean well documented codebase and you gave it to someone for free, the only stipulation - if you make some changes please give them back to us also. The guys you give your code to do make changes and do give them back. Problem is the code they give back is all over the place and badly (if even) commented. Then other people (your users) start complaining "this other guys software is better than yours, but hes using your code. Give us those features NOW." ?
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
Hmm, we work hard with Apple to give them the best possible access to our code. Apple does the minimum it can in giving the code back to us. Slashdotters praise Apple for the work on html, and so we just ask for people not to praise apple so much since they aren't exactly working with us - they don't use any of the resources we set up to try to encourage them to work with us.
And now _we_ are the pain to work with and aren't encouraging participation??
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.
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.
It's actually a known phenomenon that "real nice and clean and well-documented codebase" can in fact be _evil_! Because everyone except really lousy coders are afraid to touch it. "It's so beautiful it's practically dead" one could say.
There is no such thing as real nice clean, well documented codebase, at least not forever.
These attributes naturally go away as you add functionality to any code. That is a fact of software development.
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.
I am sure to be modded OT as this whole thread is, but...
The Agile/XP movement is warped at best. Tests are no substitute for good design and they cannot prove any useful level conformance to a design (except in an extremely trivial application). Tests are useful in many cases, unless they are used to rationalize bad practices based on false notions.
And the more extremists you have trying to force it to be so, the worse the XP/Agile movement is percieved. Sure, they picked up on parts of a number of good practices that good programmers already followed, but when will they stop twisting them and advocating that experienced programmers abandon principles of adequate forward-looking design and methodology and follow the way which is what they ultimately believe to be The Only Right Extreme Way.
They resemble the pointy-haired managers who would like to think they can substitute their process for masterful programming and design.
I was attracted to XP by their advocacy of some of the more-reasonable principles until the fanatics showed why it was really called extreme programming. They need apologists to start really apologizing.
Apple is on record for offering to jointly attempt to make the important parts of WebCore cross-platform, similar to the situation with Gecko.
The KHTML team turned them down. They probably did so because it would shift the focus away from the KHTML they know and love and more towards the more realistic (but messier) WebCore, which they don't seem to want to do.
The KHTML team doesn't even seem to want many of the changes. Apple makes a product, and they don't care if they break small things to make deadlines. KHTML is a product of the opposite school, preferring to make a very small, clean codebase. The price of this is feature deficit.
This isn't about Apple being evil, or KHTML being snobs. It's about a project being forked. As time goes on, Apple has less and less to offer to KHTML. WebCore and KHTML are diverging, and people seem to be upset about this. I can't imagine why, this sort of separation was inevitable. Apple's best interests are served by leveraging their own excellent environment, and every time they do, they further exclude the KDE project.
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But if we hadn't waited on software perfection, we wouldn't all be playing Duke Nukem Forever on top of the GNU Hurd.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Tricky thing, those numbers. Every machine Apple sells comes with OSX, 'for free'. They may not be selling their software, at least from an accounting perspective, but their hardware would be rather worthless if the price didn't include an OS to run on it.
Direct software sales may only be 4%, but software is a much larger part of their business than just the revenue percentages indicate.
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