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WebKit Gives Konqueror a Speed Boost (Past Firefox)
An anonymous reader writes "We always knew that WebKit is going to make Konqueror fast; but how much faster? Today we test that by putting Konqueror with KHTML through the SunSpider JavaScript Test and the then do the same with WebKit. To get an idea of how fast they are compared to other browsers, we also decided to put Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 through the tests."
It is the default browser in KDE, unless your distro changed it to Firefox. If you use Gnome, or OSX or Windows, you probably won't get to see it.
I know nothing about cars so I can't give you a car analogy, sorry. However, javascript performance isn't very important at all unless "the page" really is a full javascript application ala gmail. The reason for that is that you delay the javascript execution until after the whole page has rendered by hooking up your code with the body onload event. This avoid the page lockups you can encounter on badly coded pages where the browser can't render the page before the javascript has been run to completion.
Of course, the above is only true if all the javascript on the page follows best practices. That is seldom true if the page includes javascript from ad networks which has the bad habit of running document.write calls during the loading of the page. Since document.write can modify anything on the page, when such a function call is executed, the browser has to stop everything else until the javascript is run and then continue rendering. In that scenario, faster javascript execution would definitely lead to much faster page loads.
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The speed changes in webkit are being backported to KHTML.
As to why, its always good to have choices and an alternate source in case someone pulls a Larry Ellison on you.
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It must be noted that the WebKit support in Konqueror is very limited in many ways, and this may matter more to many people than a JavaScript speedboost. It does NOT, for example, allow you to run Java applets. http://websvn.kde.org/*checkout*/trunk/KDE/kdelibs/kdewebkit/ISSUES
My personal opinion is that all other written-for-WebKit browsers are better choices compared to Konqueror+kpart for those who want a browser with WebKit rendering at this point.
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This might be an explanation : http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2010/08/simply-explained-dead-code.html
Everybody is all friendly again, but some have long memories
And some have very faulty memories:
Kong (KHTML) was ripped off by Apple,
KHTML was forked by Apple.
and they began the work on webkit as a closed source project
They worked on it internally, more-or-less secretly until the first version of Safari, when they released their code at the same time they shipped the binaries.
After some serious (legal) prodding,
After a number of KHTML developers bitched publicly.
Apple finally did the right thing and returned their changes to the community
Apple moved development into public svn rather than providing large (and difficult to merge) patch drops with each release. They also began soliciting external contributions from companies like Nokia, Adobe, and so on, as well as from the wider community.
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Chrome uses Webkit!
Apple Safari uses Webkit!
Nokia uses Webkit!
KDE Konqueror uses Webkit, in fact it was invented by them under the name KHTML.
So imagine that KDE's Konqueror will benefit from Webkit progress, now that they support webkit along KHTML
KDE 4.x already available on Windows, and probably on OS X as well (never tried). The first ports of Konqueror were pretty weak, but these days it works nicely enough. I wouldn't call it a must-have program on Windows, but if you like the KDE apps (ark, kate, and amorak are some others that I like) then you can get them from http://windows.kde.org/ (it includes a package manager for updating, which is really nice). It looks like the current version is KDE 4.4.0.
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Recent firefox progress in my machine:
- Firefox 3.6: 1063.0ms +/- 4.9%
- Firefox 4.0b4pre (today's build): 622.6ms +/- 12.0%
These are with the same engine, btw. Jaegermonkey is not in nightly builds yet.
It doesn't take much more to make you bound to DOM operations in normal webapps.
PS: sunspider 0.9.1 is also available
Is work continuing on KHTML...?
It seems so. Check this.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
Only an ignorant (or should that be arrogant and stupid?) dev chooses a language that is strongly typed and requires compilation when a less strict scripting language is the right tool for the job.
cat:
If beta 3 has been out for about a week?
It wasn't. Beta 3 was released on the 11th, the article was published on the 12th.