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Mozilla The Internet GUI KDE

KDE Gets Gecko/Mozilla Support 279

Posted by timothy from the and-you-thought-that-was-impossible dept.
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."
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KDE Gets Gecko/Mozilla Support More

KDE Gets Gecko/Mozilla Support

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  • Port the IE rendering engine (Score:5, Funny)

    by ari_j ( 90255 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @04:30PM (#10222675)
    I'm waiting for IE's rendering engine to be ported, possibly with some help from Wine.
    • That would actually not be a bad idea as many would think.

      In fact, many pages on the internet are made with all the quirks of IE in mind, having access to a browser you can use in certain situations is never wrong, and it blending in with the rest of the desktop is nice. Especially nice is adding tabs and other nice features.

      Well, it's not like you can't do it now anyway, Wine is pretty powerful.
    • Actually it ran in X before it ever did in Windows. IE is the browser formerly known as NCSA Mosaic.
      • Actually it ran in X before it ever did in Windows. IE is the browser formerly known as NCSA Mosaic.

        Yeah, but who would seriously want to run Mosaic nowadays? It's got crap support for modern standards, piss-poor rendering, no working PNG support, broken CSS, and with no chance of it being updated it's, erm... Well...

        ... Kind of like its descendant, Internet Explorer. ;-)

      • Re:That was done a long time ago. (Score:4, Informative)

        by pmsyyz ( 23514 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @07:59PM (#10223936) Homepage Journal
        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.
    • Actually, it does run on Linux through Wine. Admittedly, it doesn't work in Konq, but yes, it does run.

    • Re:Port the IE rendering engine (Score:5, Funny)

      by xutopia ( 469129 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @04:50PM (#10222805) Homepage
      help from Wine? I think you mean with some help from Crack?
    • That would be Microsoft's best tactic to bring the security of Windows to Linux.

  • FAQ (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jlp2097 ( 223651 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @04:31PM (#10222680) Homepage Journal
    Also read this blog entry [kdedevelopers.org] by one of the developers which answers the most common asked questions.

    • Re:FAQ (Score:5, Informative)

      by cozziewozzie ( 344246 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @05:15PM (#10222939)
      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!

  • Konqueror's UI (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ari_j ( 90255 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @04:32PM (#10222684)
    I like Konqueror, and this makes it a million times better, but the interface still sucks. Ctrl-W to close a tab works on all but the last tab. I like the Mozilla way much better. There are other gripes I have with it, but most of them are of similar form: Mozilla does something better.

    • Re:Konqueror's UI (Score:3, Informative)

      by kundor ( 757951 )
      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.

      • It's KDE! They'll just add a checkbox to the Prefs dialog.
        • ...they'll add a dropdown list of commonly preferred close-the-tab keys and an option to either close the browser with the last tab or leave it open with zero tabs showing.

          The whole lot will be accessible from the command line with the right bizarre 90-character invokation.

          GNOME will then add similar options, but you'll need to feed their equivalent a 40kB XML file to operate it from the command line.

          I can also imagine an MSIE compatibility engine for KDE with settings for what kinds of viruses you want
    • > Ctrl-W to close a tab works on all but the last tab.

      That's a feature not a bug. It's so that you don't inadvertantly close the window. It's been discussed on the Kfm-devel mailing list several times before, the last being about a year ago.

  • Another possible port? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 11, 2004 @04:33PM (#10222692)
    Now if only those KDE devs would port the Safari rendering engine us Linux users would be happy.
  • Seriously, Mozilla has been touted as a software development platform. What advantages does it present over the .NET platform, or the Java platform? Or is it something completely different?
    • As far as I can tell, the only project actually using Mozilla's "software development platform" is Mozilla. On the OSS side, people seem more interested in Mono than XUL.

    • Re:Advantages of Mozilla platform?? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ADRA ( 37398 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @05:01PM (#10222860)
      Think of Mozilla's platform as Java-lite. You can write very small programs that utilize many built-ins that the browser supports. It has a deployment framework through 'extensions', etc..

      Not everyone needs a fully library supported language like .NET or Java in order to do their work.

      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 .NET Runtime ~25MB
      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 .NET installed (trust me from experience, they don't). Less means better in this case. The smaller the release, the more likely an admin would choose your solution.

      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)
      • Less means better in this case.

        I would disagree. Who's going to quibble about a few megabytes of hard drive space? The differences between 5, 15, and 25MB is trivial. The important question is what capabilites do each of these frameworks provides. Which one is easier to work with? Who provides the best support? The disk space they consume is the least of your worries.

  • Firefox/Qt (Score:5, Interesting)

    by _|()|\| ( 159991 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @04:37PM (#10222716)
    Perhaps more interesting than porting Gecko to Konqueror is integrating Qt and KDE with Firefox. It sounds like this porting fest has gained a couple of talented developers for the Mozilla project. This is good for both KDE and Mozilla.

  • Good news... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by pebs ( 654334 )
    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 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 11, 2004 @04:40PM (#10222730)
    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.
  • Does this mean java applets will actually appear in the page like they're supposed to instead of popping up in a separate window? I hate it when I go to a (poorly designed) page in Konqueror that uses a bunch of java applets for button rollovers... I end up with a dozen little windows all over my screen. That this still hadn't been fixed by Konqueror 3.3 is what finally got me to switch to Opera.
    • The easiest way to avoid what you're seeing is to use KWin as the window manager. The java applets unfortunately open new windows with other window-managers.
  • Damn, I almost got the first post but I was having trouble getting Gecko to work in Konqueror!

  • Better news.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Visceral Monkey ( 583103 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @04:46PM (#10222768)
    The best news here is that Firefox will also now be able to use the native KDE widgets, etc. Sweet.

    • Re:Better news.. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cozziewozzie ( 344246 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @05:07PM (#10222887)
      I see a very encouraging pattern here:

      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:Better news.. (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 11, 2004 @05:18PM (#10222954)
        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.

        • Re:Better news.. (Score:3, Informative)

          by mrroach ( 164090 )
          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

    • Re:Better news.. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by pchan- ( 118053 )
      sweet. it is seriously about time for this feature.
      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-

  • Old stuff (Score:3, Informative)

    by Trofonio ( 812490 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @04:55PM (#10222827)
    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.

    • If either the Mozilla [mozilla.org] or Trolltech [trolltech.com] pages had been updated in the last year, I might agree that this is old news. As it is, two developers with a lot of experience with KHTML seem interested in making this a viable port. It also seems that their approach may be more sustainable, such that Qt/KDE can be a fully supported peer of GTK+ as a Mozilla front end.

    • Re:Old stuff (Score:3, Informative)

      by fault0 ( 514452 )
      AFAIK, this port is completely written from scratch. Since QtMozilla was made, nearly all the ui-dependent parts of Mozilla were rewritten.
    • 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.

  • The best part of all is.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ErichTheWebGuy ( 745925 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @05:01PM (#10222859) Homepage
    ... that we will finally have OK/Cancel buttons in the usual (correct) places in the Qt version of Firefox!
  • .. which KDE offers are the so-called io_slaves, so I can access, for example, my server using fish://bla (an SSH slave), WebDAV using webdav://bla, and so on. Does GNOME have something similar? It would be nice to be able to use these slaves in Mozilla/Firefox.

  • Konqueror + slashdot != true (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Great, now slashdot will look weird in Konqueror as well!!

  • To those of you crowing about removing KHTML... (Score:5, Informative)

    by benjamindees ( 441808 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @05:18PM (#10222958) Homepage
    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.

    • No managers? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by leonbrooks ( 8043 )

      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 he

    • Re:To those of you crowing about removing KHTML... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Quattro Vezina ( 714892 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @09:03PM (#10224231) Journal
      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.

      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.

  • konqueror could use them both (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 11, 2004 @05:19PM (#10222966)
    It might be a good idea to make khtml as standard compliant as possible and switch to the gecko enigne whenever konqueror detects a page, which has incorrect html.
    khtml would be very clean and probably easy to develop and konqueror would still be able to show all pages.
  • There was a QT port in mozilla.org's CVS in the past, but it got dropped through lack of maintenance. While the four days it took to port the gfx layer is obviously impressive, it is a shame that all of the original work was allowed to bitrot.

  • More information (Score:5, Informative)

    by fault0 ( 514452 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @05:26PM (#10223028) Homepage Journal
    Zack Rusin, one of the authors of this port, has written some more information about it in his blog.

    See his blog [kdedevelopers.org]

  • Great, but... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Money for Nothin' ( 754763 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @05:27PM (#10223029)
    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:Great, but... (Score:3, Informative)

      by pantherace ( 165052 )
      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 i

  • Nice job, but ... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kbahey ( 102895 ) on Saturday September 11, 2004 @05:48PM (#10223212) Homepage

    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.

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