KDE Gets Gecko/Mozilla Support 279
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."
FAQ (Score:5, Interesting)
Konqueror's UI (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Port the IE rendering engine (Score:4, Interesting)
to view non standard pages? seriously, there would be some use for it.. but not woth the risk in using(the nonstandard stuff that I most often run into are usually spyware anyways and i'd rather not have them run like supposed..)..
Advantages of Mozilla platform?? (Score:2, Interesting)
Firefox/Qt (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:more choice is good (Score:2, Interesting)
Could you please be more specific?
Java applet support? (Score:2, Interesting)
That was done a long time ago. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Port the IE rendering engine (Score:2, Interesting)
Better news.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Advantages of Mozilla platform?? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Port the IE rendering engine (Score:3, Interesting)
modifies the Gecko rendering system to something that can be a full replacement for IEs
Now wait, let me get this straight: You want someone to port the "non-standards-compliant" part of IE into a standards-compliant browser so it will render non-standards-compliant web pages the same way the much maligned non-standards-compliant browser does? Doesn't this turn the new browser into a non-standards-compliant browser? Or does that only happen if the rendering engine is written that way from scratch?
I understand the motivation to have an "IE Preview" option-- and have cursed the problem of not having that myself at times-- but if that functionality is built into my browser, I don't think I'd be able to call my browser "standards compliant" anymore. I frankly don't have a better solution, but please don't suggest ruining Gecko by making it an IE clone. (And yes, I'm nearly ignorant on the subject of rendering engine internals.)
The best part of all is.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Advantages of Mozilla platform?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not everyone needs a fully library supported language like
As long as you can learn JavaScript, you can write mozilla extensions. I'm just wish that the Mozilla folks would make it easier to find info on how to develop the platform as a platform. From what I've read on their site, they target the 'Mozilla as-a platform' over 'Mozilla is-a platform'. They might find that free/comercial entities could find use in their platform and help develop it if they think there's more for them to use from it.
Think of thin-apps niche for a moment:
Java Runtime ~15MB
Mozilla Runtime ~5MB and that includes a browser
If you want to deploy Thin Client App xyz, which one do you choose? You can't assume that your customer has either Java or
Mozilla has less surface area which means there's less functionality built id but its more simple to develop for. The language is JavaScript which is used by throngs of web developers (the target market of this technology). You can look at the debate over web based Application distribution to see where Mozilla fits into things. (The new MS web services model, Java Web Start, Mozilla)
Re:Another possible port? (Score:2, Interesting)
Or are they simply having their codebase available at the apple developer page, which would take some time for the khtml developer to port back?
I'm not bashing apple but just wondering how much of apples work can be easily integrated.
Re:Better news.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Mozilla: Can use KDE or GTK frontend.
Firefox: Can use KDE or GTK frontend.
OpenOffice: Can use KDE or GTK frontend.
Xine/Mplayer: Can use KDE or GTK frontend.
giFT: Can use KDE or GTK frontend.
GIMP: Can use KDE or GTK frontend.
Are we really moving away from the Desktop Environment holy wars, and towards interoperability?
Re:Advantages of Mozilla platform?? (Score:3, Interesting)
While it's not free, Komodo is a slick app. built with the Mozilla framework. I've been meaning to take a look at Creating Applications with Mozilla [oreilly.com] to see whether it's worth considering for my projects.
Re:Port the IE rendering engine (Score:4, Interesting)
konqueror could use them both (Score:3, Interesting)
khtml would be very clean and probably easy to develop and konqueror would still be able to show all pages.
A shame since the port existed before (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:more choice is good (Score:1, Interesting)
Nice job, but ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Nice job! Only in four days! That is great.
However, as good as Gecko is, I find that there are sites that are so Microsoft specific (brain dead developers) that they would not render correctly in FireFox. However, some of those same sites render better in Konquerer than in Gecko.
An example is the Arabic Al Jazeera web site [aljazeera.net].
If you open in MS IE, all is well, because the developers wrote it with only MS IE in mind. If you try it with Firefox (I am using 0.9), then you get a blank blue space on the right, with no menus in it at all, and no menus on the left side too.
If you open it in Konqueror (the one that ships with Mandrake 10.0 Final), then the menus are visible. There are still some quirks (e.g. just moving the mouse over an article heading will trigger a download dialog), but it is way ahead of KDE's Gecko.
Incidentally, Al Jazeera's English web site [aljazeera.net] is developed by a different company and does not suffer form these problems.
I have seen a few other sites with this problem (incorrect rendering in FireFox), and they are always .asp web pages, pointing to a Microsoft centric mentality of the developers.
Re:Port the IE rendering engine (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't care how a page is supposed to look. I want to view pages the way the author intended for them to be viewed. If that's also the way they're supposed to look, fine, if not, too bad.
Re:Better news.. (Score:3, Interesting)
i use firefox on windows and linux daily. the windows version is so much slicker, because it plugs right into the windows widgets. it is consistant with the rest of the ui i'm using. the firefox on my kde desktop has an out of place user interface that makes often makes it a pain to get things done. copy and paste consistancy, dragging things, an address bar edit field that doesn't suck, this would be awesome. i'd also love to see kde's spell-checker-in-every-text-field apply to firefox as well.
Re:Port the IE rendering engine (Score:3, Interesting)
You mean something like
this [www.iol.ie]?
It's the Gecko engine turned in to an ActiveX control that is functionally compatible with the IE control. There is even a tool on the site that can scan and patch programs with IE embedded (such as AOL, Winamp, etc.) to use the Mozilla control.
Re:Port the IE rendering engine (Score:3, Interesting)
No sweat, and I should apologize too. It was me that said "let me get this straight," which is not a normally recognized introduction to a useful exchange of ideas. Sorry. And so far (in case you're not checking) you've got better mods than I do in this exchange anyway. Nice talking with you!
And don't miss the link further down in this thread to the Creating Applications With Mozilla [mozdev.org] book. All the examples seem to work fine in Firefox, and I'm learning a lot more about rendering!
Re:Port the IE rendering engine (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Better news.. (Score:4, Interesting)
You missed nothing=-there's no such thing. There is, however, a GTK2 engine that uses Qt as a drawing backend. It's called the gtk-qt-engine [kde-look.org], and while it's still in the early stages, it's coming along quite nicely. Combine that with some other tweaks like changing your
It's only for GTK2, however--GTK1 apps don't have that, although some GTK1 themes, such as Plastig, use the QtPixmap backend to draw your colours from your KDE settings, so GTK1 is part of the way there.
Re:To those of you crowing about removing KHTML... (Score:5, Interesting)
Thesis: small applications doing specific tasks.
Antithesis: large applications that do everything.
Synthesis: apps seamlessly integrated via an open framework.
Indeed. In fact, I'd say that the KPart architecture is actually closer to the Unix philosophy than standalone small apps. KPart reminds me so much of the pipes and output redirection that make Unix shells so good. It's the closest GUI equivalent to the Unix CLI environment that I've seen.
Take Konqueror, for example. By itself, it doesn't do anything--it's just a frame. All the functionality--the file manager, web browser, fish, all the other viewers--are KParts independent of Konqueror. Konqueror is a graphical shell--a frame that holds those KParts, and provides interoperability features.
Re:Nice job, but ... (Score:3, Interesting)