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:Port the IE rendering engine

[mrgreen4242]

I hope you are joking. Why would you want to port a rendering engine that is not standards complient? I hope that someone modifies the Gecko rendering system to something that can be a full replacement for IEs, and you can actually view a page the way its supposed to look while using IE (and all the programs that use IEs rendering engine for inline HTML proccessing).

Re:Port the IE rendering engine

[adamjaskie]

It would be useful for testing web pages when you do not otherwise have access to a Windows machine, like me.

Good news...

[pebs]

This is good news to me. I tried KDE a while back, but wasn't totally satisfied with the Konqueror web browser, which to me was the missing link in all the apps. It lacked type-ahead find, had kinda awkward rendering, and a few other things I didn't like.

Now I will give it another shot once this makes it into a release. I'm a Gnome user, but I'm not married to it, KDE was very nice last time I tried it.

KHTML

[Anonymous Coward]

More choices, I see nothing negative in that.
The one thing I'd actually like to see in my GNOME environment is a KHTML based webbrowser, the html rendering feels much snappier than Gecko/Mozilla browsers.
There must be a reason why Apple desided to go with KHTML for their Safari browser instead of Gecko/Mozilla.

Great, but...

[Money for Nothin']

Can we have the rendering speed of KHTML (Konqueror's rendering engine) and the relatively-small memory footprint of Konqueror with the compatibility of Mozilla?

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...

Re:Java applet support?

[nchip]

Well designed X apps should work under any standards compliant window manager

What if your your window manager isn't standards compliant?

I bet your window manager doesn't support Xembed [freedesktop.org] standard, which happens to be the way konqueror uses to embed java applets to the window.

Re:what the hell is wrong with you people?

[Anonymous Coward]

"hasn't anyone ever tried to write a validated webpage that works in mozilla/firefox? it's nigh impossible, if you expect to use all of the features of html4.01 transitional or css1.0"

Smoke crack much? Writing validated HTML or XML pages in Mozilla is easy as hell. It's getting IE to render em right that is the hard part.

"have a look here: Mozilla's quirks mode. It's actually necessary to trick the browser into getting even somewhat close to standards compliant, and even then the formatting is all screwy by half."

I hope you were trying to be funny. Otherwise you could only be considered a retard. Actually read what the page says.

" Because existing content on the web is not standards-compliant or would appear in unintended ways on a standards-compliant browser, Mozilla handles some content in a backwards compatible way and some content according to standards.

There are three modes used by the layout engine: quirks mode, almost standards mode, and full standards mode. In Quirks mode, layout emulates nonstandard behavior in Navigator 4 and MSIE for Windows that is required not to break existing content on the Web. In full standards mode, the behavior is (hopefully) the behavior described by the HTML and CSS specifications. In almost standards mode, there are only a very small number of quirks implemented: those that break real pages on the web that use the DOCTYPEs that trigger almost standards mode."

Mozilla quirks mode is not about rendering pages in a standards compliant way. It is about rendering broken pages in broken ways to match the rendering of the worlds most popular broken browser Internet Explorer. Which has it's own quirks mode so as to be backwards compatable with it's own broken ancestors.

" No problems in ie 4, 5 or 6. no problems in Opera or with khtml. I have no trouble testing sandards-validated pages QNX browser, mac OS/X, netscape 4 or with any other damn browser. Just the unholy troika of moz-firebrid-netscape. I'm like, wtf?"

And after reading all that the rest of us are all like wtf was he smoking?

Re:4 days?

[leonscape]

The underlying tech between the two is very diffrent. I prefer KHTML since it renders all the sites I visit, and firefox doesn't ( specifically my banks ). The Gecko engine is slightly more standards compliant, but KHTML isn't far behind. Having two gives us options, they'll both improve, Also KHTML can be made to do things for the benefit of KDE where it would be wrong for Gecko to do the same.

Re:what the hell is wrong with you people?

[Stick_Fig]

I just recently designed a compliant site with HTML 4.01 and CSS 2; I had more problems with Safari and IE 5 Mac than I ever did with Firefox. Methinks you're doing something wrong or haven't tried recent versions of Firefox.

Re:what the hell is wrong with you people?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr. Gates, is that you?

Seriously, I'm a professional web designer. I build everything 100% XHTML and CSS standard; my designs usually work immediately without tweaking in Safari and Mozilla/Camino/Firefox. A good 25% of my time, however, is spent fixing the IE 5 and 6 bugs afterwards. That happens *every* time.

Maybe you're just trying to do some things the wrong way. It's possible to write code that is valid but still done the wrong way.

No managers?

[leonbrooks]

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!

Seconded, except that I'd not assert that there are no managers. There are indeed managers, but they aren't ubiquitous and required as they would be in a traditional setting.

Most FOSS managers are as much developers, which helps them to keep a lot more closely in touch with what the code is doing than even a highly talented manager would. There is a place in FOSS for highly talented managers sans coding skills, too - it's just that many (almost certainly most) little tinpot FOSS projects would suffer from having one rather than benefit.

A skilled manager knows when to manage lightly, and FOSS is all about lightly managed massive asynchronous parallelism (no, that's not quite an oxymoron). A deft management touch here and there can help to cut gordian knots without "crushing the butterfly".

Re:what the hell is wrong with you people?

[Jesus_666]

I use HTML 4.01 Transitional and CSS 2. Both validated. Both looking exectly how they should on my Firefox.
IE has big problems because it doesn't really understand CSS 2. Which is pretty annoying.

I should stop feeding trolls.