KDE Gets Gecko/Mozilla Support

Sivar writes "Ars Technica reports that not only has the Gecko engine been ported to Konqueror, but the developers were able to finish the port in only four days during the week-long Akademy conference. With this port, Konqueror users now have a choice between two mature, powerful rendering engines."

Re:Another possible port?

[Alex Brasetvik]

>Now if only those KDE devs would port the Safari rendering engine us Linux users would be happy.

I see this is a joke, but for those who doesn't know, Apple is indeed contributing their enhancements of KHTML -- on which Safari is based -- back to the KTHML-team.

Re:That was done a long time ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. IE is based on Spyglass Mosaic, which isn't the same codebase.

Re:That was done a long time ago.

[bayerwerke]

"Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign."

Maybe you should tell someone at Microsoft that.

Re:first post?

[cbrocious]

You don't need QT/KDE to run Firefox.

Re:Konqueror's UI

[kundor]

file a request for ctrl-w to close the window if all other tabs are gone, then. They're fairly responsive to that sort of thing.

That probably is in violation of their Interface Guidelines, however, but, you know, they're guidelines, not actual rules.

Old stuff

[Trofonio]

This isn't really new. A qtmozilla was implemented by Trolltech a couple of years ago. Then it became an open source project hosted at http://www.mozilla.org/ports/qtmozilla/.

Anyway this wasn't the same than a KDE port, but given that the Kecko Team have not integrated KIO, KWallet and KCookieJar already, they aren't there either.

Re:Port the IE rendering engine

[Short Circuit]

You shouldn't be surprised to learn that many, many websites focus on compliance with IE only. Especially small-scale businesses and websites that get low maintenance attention.

One useful thing-Virtual post.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome-vfs2

Re:Advantages of Mozilla platform??

[rycamor]

Actually there are many companies and projects using the Mozilla platform these days. I use it every day at my job these days. Some examples out there:

Sunbird -- calendaring system
Nvu -- web authoring system
Oeone -- Linux desktop
Komodo -- programmer's editor/IDE

And tons of other small projects are available as Mozilla or Firefox extensions at www.mozdev.org and other sites.

Re:Advantages of Mozilla platform??

[kerrle]

It's a pretty good book; I was able to do a basic calendar app quite easily. The only problem I had with the book is that it's based on a fairly old copy of Mozilla, but it's still completely useable.

Re:FAQ

[cozziewozzie]

The best thing is that Firefox will have a completely native look and feel. This means that they are making sure the entire Mozilla platform runs as native KDE applications. This is not only Firefox/Gecko, folks, this means Mozilla, Thunderbird, Sunbird and anything based on Mozilla will in the future look and act as a native KDE app.

Awesome!

Re:Better news..

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we really moving away from the Desktop Environment holy wars, and towards interoperability?

Not really. You can draw GTK+2 apps using Qt widgets but that doesn't magically give the applications DCOP interfaces, KIO support, and things like that which really make KDE what it is.

To those of you crowing about removing KHTML...

[benjamindees]

At one time, Gecko was the creme de la creme of fast rendering engines. Now it's just the most compatible as well as being damn fast. Look how times have changed.

The KDE project takes a lot of flack for the way they integrate applications. Most people call it 'bloat'. Some call it 'Microsoftesque'. As the conventional OSS wisdom goes, apps that live outside the KDE project are usually better. But, as we see in the Windows (and Mac) world, integration and consistency is what sells. Fortunately, KPart has emerged as the best of both worlds.

Thesis: small applications doing specific tasks.
Antithesis: large applications that do everything.
Synthesis: apps seamlessly integrated via an open framework.

For years we witnessed proprietary software get more and more bloated and more and more expensive. That was due in no small part to the monopolies created by proprietary formats and standards. Now, with OSS, we are witnessing capitalism in action. Choice and open standards lead to constant improvement.

The next time you think about removing choice, think "where would OSS be without this competition?" Would we have KPart if it weren't for Gnome? Would we have great, cross-platform Gnome apps if it weren't for KDE? Many people look at these projects and see redundancy. I look at them and I see innovation.

The argument that someone needs to "manage developer resources" in OSS is completely bunk. OSS didn't get where it is today by forming a central economy of software projects. OSS is about freedom and fair competition. A defining quality of Open Source has been: there are no managers! The downside is that you may not get to tell a developer what to work on unless you're willing to pay her. The upside, though, is that we all reap the benefits of creative freedom.

Re:Old stuff

[fault0]

AFAIK, this port is completely written from scratch. Since QtMozilla was made, nearly all the ui-dependent parts of Mozilla were rewritten.

Re:Port the IE rendering engine

[mrgreen4242]

Um, I suggested that someone create a set of what would liekly be .dlls that would accept all the calls from Windows APIs calling for IEs renderer, but would instead render the page with Gecko's engine, and then send the results to whatever program called for them in a manner that was similar enough to the IE subsystem that the calling application wouldn't notice it wasn't from IE.

Then IE would be standards compliant, and so would all the Windows apps that rely on the IE rendering subsystem for HTML rendering.

I THOUGHT that it was pretty clear, and other people seem to have got it, but I hope that makes it even more clear for you.

More information

[fault0]

Zack Rusin, one of the authors of this port, has written some more information about it in his blog.

See his blog [kdedevelopers.org]

Re:Advantages of Mozilla platform??

[Scaba]

You also may want to consider Rapid Application Development with Mozilla [informit.com] instead. It's more recent and a better read, I think. You can also download the entire book (PDFs) from the above mentioned link (hint: see Downloads). If you like it, don't forget to buy it.

Re:A shame since the port existed before

[Anonymous Coward]

> it is a shame that all of the original work was allowed to bitrot.

Yeah, indeed. It mostly happened because:

- Corel left the Linux business
- Xandros, which bought Corel Linux, was a startup and didn't have resources to maintain the port
- Netscape wasn't willing to pick up QA of the Mozilla port

If the above had worked out differently, khtml might have become a simple help viewer engine like gtkhtml is instead of a full blown web engine.

Re:Advantages of Mozilla platform??

[Dracos]

The full (updated) text of Creating Applications With Mozilla, along with all the example source, is available for download at http://books.mozdev.org [mozdev.org].

Re:Are you stoned and browsing slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it doesn't happen anymore because M$ turned off the blue screens. Now what happens instead is an automatic reboot. Turn off the reboot and you'll eventually see the blue screen. The broken Windows driver model guarantees a blue screen will eventually happen to you.

Even M$ admits its broken. They've decided to scrap Windows Driver Model (WDM) and replace it with Windows Driver Foundation (WDF) [microsoft.com]. Here's what Redmond has to say about their current driver model: [microsoft.com]

Most drivers that use the WDM and miniport driver models must run in kernel mode. Kernel-mode drivers are treated as part of the operating system and have

access to the system virtual address space. Consequently, errors in kernel-mode drivers can cause the system to crash. (Emphasis added)

But you'll have to wait till the mythical Longhorn comes out before you see the vaporware^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfeature.

Re:Another possible port?

[kundor]

If you look at KDE changelogs, you see "fixed from apple" in there fairly often. Safari work is going upstream.

Re:Great, but...

[pantherace]

I mean, switching between rendering engines just to access a particular site sounds annoying. Almost as annoying as having to open an IE window for sites that don't work well w/ Mozilla or a Moz. window for sites that don't work in Konqueror...

Actually, there is a basis for having this done automatically. Konqueror tends to have domain specific settings, easily changed. (Looking through quickly: plugins, browser identification, java, javascript, and cookies) I don't see why this would be that much of an issue to do.

Honestly, given how much better Konqueror's rendering looks at 1024x768 or above, I'd set gmail to be gecko, and the default to khtml.

Re:Firefox/Qt-A cross, cross.

[T-Ranger]

No win at all. QT is, basicly, a widget set. Other widget sets would be GTK, Motif, components of Windows, OS X, etc, etc. The widget set that Mozilla uses is itself, or more accuaratly, XPFE. Using a different widget set would, well, compleatly defeate the goal of cross platform compatability.

Re:One useful thing ..

[theantix]

Yes. In nautilus, File->Open Location and then put in "sftp://host.domain/path/" Works fine for me, I use that all the time.

Then you should be using Blackbird!

[leonbrooks]

It's the MS replacement for HTTP and HTML [around.com], and... oops, it's been cancelled [virginia.edu].

Your point was...?

It's to late now, but if you want exact WYSIWYG, use PDF instead of HTML (and be prepared for issues such as A4 vs Letter). HTML was not and is not designed to be a layout language [wdvl.com]. Any layout you can do with it is a bonus. Get over it.

I presume you're quoting Help/About?

[leonbrooks]

If so, there's similar text here [microsoft.com]:

Portions of this software are based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic was developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc.

So... grandparent poster, while what you said was technically correct, your post was wrong in that you said that the GGP poster was wrong. MSIE is based on SpyGlass Mosaic - but that's in turn based on NCSA Mosaic.

Re:That was done a long time ago.

[pmsyyz]

Wrong, IE is based on Spyglass Mosaic, which used none of the NCSA Mosaid source code.

From http://www.netvalley.com/archives/mirrors/eric/Eri c_Weblog.htm [netvalley.com]

I ended up as the Project Lead for the browser team. Yes, we licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA (at the University of Illinois), but we never used any of the code. We wrote our browser implementations completely from scratch, on Windows, MacOS, and Unix.

Internet Explorer 2.0 was basically Spyglass Mosaic with not too many changes. IE 3.0 was a major upgrade, but still largely based on our code. IE 4.0 was closer to a rewrite, but our code was still lingering around -- we could tell by the presence of certain esoteric bugs that were specific to our layout engine.

Except that they already use multiple widget sets

[Quattro Vezina]

On Linux, you can compile Mozilla (and related products, like Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, etc.) to bind for GTK1 or GTK2 (and now, hopefully, Qt). On Mac and Windows, it binds to the native toolkit.

True, it still uses XPFE, but it uses the other toolkit as a backend and to get certain information (colours, fonts, and dialog widgets if the Moz theme isn't comprehensive).

It's one of Mozilla's greatest strengths--it still has its own theming capability and cross-platform compatibility, but it also integrates with the native desktop. Adding another toolkit (i.e. Qt) to the possible options will only help increase its acceptance, without sacrificing anything.

Port VBScript, IE DOM, and ActiveSpyware?

[tepples]

[Create a drop-in replacement for MSHTML.dll that uses the Gecko engine.] Then IE would be standards compliant

True [www.iol.ie], but...

and so would all the Windows apps that rely on the IE rendering subsystem for HTML rendering.

Not necessarily. What happens when one runs IEPatcher on an application that relies on one of Microsoft's proprietary extensions to web technologies, such as VBScript, the IE DOM, or nesting of ActiveX controls? In general, a client-side app will couple itself closer to IE than a public web page will, as 1. fewer people have patched client-side apps to use the Gecko control than have switched to the dino or the panda for web browsing, and 2. the overwhelming majority of such Windows apps' EULAs forbid modification to the binaries such as the use of IEPatcher.

From Zack Rusin's Blog

[carlmenezes]

From Zack Rusin's Blog :

Does it mean Firefox will run natively on KDE? Yes, that's essentially exactly what it means. We haven't only ported the Gecko but we wanted to make it as complete as possible. I do want to make Firefox a great browser for KDE users. In the coming weeks I'll be integrating KIO, KWallet and KCookieJar so I'm hoping we'll see more great things soon.

Re:Better news..

[mrroach]

You can draw GTK+2 apps using Qt widgets but that doesn't magically give the applications DCOP interfaces

When D-Bus [freedesktop.org] is adopted in future versions of KDE and Gnome they will. I think there is already a DCOP D-Bus bridge. Merging KIO and Gnome-vfs (not to mention mozilla's necko) is probably a looong way down the road

-Mark