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A Linux 'Browser War' in the Making?
I learned about the new KDE browser project almost by accident. The concept is only a few months old, and active work on it only started a few days ago. Konqueror - "Konq" for short - is not the spotty KFM utility included in the current KDE release, but a whole new code base.
The people working on Konqueror are worried about getting too many people's hopes up too hard and fast; if they do, and if they run into Mozilla-type slowdowns, they'll end up with plenty of egg on their faces. All they're willing to show the world at this point is this screenshot.
It's amazing how far Konqueror has come in almost no time, especially when you realize that this is a purely volunteer project with just a few members, not a big deal with big money from a big company like AOL/Netscape behind it.
Are there other Linux browsers in the works? Good question; if you know of one, please tell us about it.
Another question: Would more volunteers help Konqueror? Perhaps, perhaps not; the KDE developers aren't sure that more bodies would necessarily help.
Should we all get behind Mozilla and push? Yet another good question - and one that's been hashed to death all over the place but hasn't been fully answered yet.
Whatever the answers, I believe most Slashdot readers agree on one thing: that a better Linux browser would be a Good Thing(tm).
We have a little poll about Linux browsers to the right of this story. And, as always, your thoughts on the subject are more than welcome.
What the browser space really needs is competition, on all fronts. Companies and projects should be competing to make the fastest, most stable, most compliant browser with the best user interface. Mnemonic and several other free browser projects were effectively killed by Mozilla.
We shouldn't have all our browser eggs in one basket, any more than we should all be using the same operating system or text editor. Especially with open source browsers (but even with closed source ones), competition brings about innovation, as well as better code and, in the end, a better browser.
If one browser supports PNG, then they all will feel the need to support PNG. If another one is 100% compliant with the HTML 4.0 spec, then they all will feel the need to be compliatn. This competition is going to be the best thing that's happend to browsers, on any platform.
Personally, I look forward to trying out all the new browsers (konquerer, opera, and mozilla), as well as the old favorites (w3m, lynx, and netscape), and using whatever's best. Especially if it's open source, I'd also look forward to contributing bug fixes and new code. However, this means a relatively small and clean open source project, not that 120MB of C++ monstrosity called Mozilla.
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Is it just me, but the layout engine in Mozilla is pretty damned good by all accounts, it is the stuff surrounding it that cacks up all the time.
So wouldn't it make sense to use the Mozilla layout engine inside of Konqueror, and also to use that layout engine as a standard html widget for all of the different programs that display html to some extent? That way, all (bug hunting and fixing) resources will be focussed of one code base, instead of having loads and loads of different code bases around?
Or maybe it is just me being hopeful!
Just the idea of a standard libhtml widget would be great for Linux and other Unix variants. Why reinvent the wheel indeed!
Oh well... there will always be two or three competing things in the Linux world it seems (gtk vs. qt, KDE vs. Gnome, Mozilla vs. Konqueror, etc)... it is when they are merged that the trouble occurs... look at gcc.
What we need is competition in the browser market to prevent this and to ensure that standards, not companies, rule the internet's content.
This is why we need Mozilla. It is Netscape. People know who Netscape is. Netscape might be in a strange state right now, but they are the underdog and people did use them at one point. Now I'm not bashing KDE or Opera (I use both browsers), but telling web designers that their new IE feature won't work under those browsers probably won't hold much weight (I hope I'm wrong there). Netscape, on the other hand, will get them to think about it.
I guess it comes down to the number of people who use a particular browser. There is still a significant number of people using Netscape, so you can argue that you need to support that browser. I just hope we can see Mozilla in force before its too late.
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Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Maybe you should look at the mozilla code and/or newsgroups before whether you decide if the mozilla team is forward thinking.
Mozilla is a very heavily Object oriented project which is very modularized.
Most people who actually know anything about the Mozilla project look upon 'bloat' differently than idle commentators such as seen often in slashdot.
The fact is that the market requires certain features from their 'internet experience'. This includes mail/news, Postscript output, etc.
Communicator was built as a monolothic application which had all these modules inextricably linked in one binary. In mozilla, these modules are seperated. If you want, you could rip out the mail/news DLL, and you would not have mail support any more.
I don't understand what you consider 'bloat'. You don't like large executables? Fine, we split it up into multiple DLLs. You don't like large download time? Fine, we make the distribution download size a fifth of what is was previously.
Maybe you're just whining that you think we'd get a better product quicker if you had all the mail/news engineers working on core browser stuff? Well, anyone who's done any s/w engineering knows that you can't just throw more engineers at a project to get it done quicker/better.
Mail/news is an application that sits on top of the new mozilla framework. If mozilla was just a browser, it could not compete with IE. The core of Mozilla is a framework for building applications such as a web browser, or mail client.
The importance of an HTML mail client cannot be underestimated in a corporate environment. Many millions of seats of Communicator and outlook have been sold to corporations, and they love and demand HTML mail.
So, we must provide and HTML mail client. Do we make them download it seperately? What do you do about the shared components such as core layout? do we make people download it twice?
Here's some real numbers from a recent mozilla status report:
Footprint
Estimate of compressed total download size on Win32: 1266k
Uncompressed DLL sizes:
Win32: 1174k, Mac: 2382k, Linux: 2331k
Now compare to Microsoft IE 5.
Minimum installation (without Outlook) is about 50MB. With Outlook, you're talking about another 20MB.
THAT'S bloat. We can get mail/news for around (guess) 500kb compressed download.
My main point is that adding these features don't significantly impact the size of the project. If you don't want a feature, remove the DLL. But the mozilla team know what the market demands. Just because you don't want something in the browser doesn't mean nobody else does.