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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla-KDE Integration 128

Posted by Hemos from the working-together dept.
zniper writes: "According to this mail on the KDE-KFM-DEVEL mailing-list, Corel revived the Mozilla QT-port and claim to have a port even more stable than the official GTK version. Additionally, they are planning to port Gecko to the KDE2 kparts architecture, allowing it to be embedded into Konqueror and other KDE2 programs. "
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Mozilla-KDE Integeration More

Mozilla-KDE Integeration

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  • Exercise: Spot the problem

    Oooh! Oooh! I know - it's the comma after green, isn't it? Did I spot it?

  • ...about as much as Mozilla does, as far as I am concerned, but it is always nice to be able to choose!

    I mean, how long have they been working on Mozilla?

    And when did development of the Konqueror HTML widget start? I am really surprised they could build a good-functioning (speaking as of the final-beta [kde.org] ) web-browser in such a short time!

    How did the KDE developers manage this? Or did it just not get the same attention (as Mozilla) and have they been working on it for quite some time before it got into the public?
  • remember - desktop users mostly use Windows. Can they use Konquerer?

    Yes, I think they can. Because it's based on QT which is a crossplatform development environment, I guess it would be quite easy to port it (if you really wanted to). Would take some work I guess, but it could be done.

    By the way, please don't make the mistake that KDE only runs on Linux, Konqueror also is a platform independent browser (Linux, *BSD, every other platform that compiles QT/KDE, which are quite a lot I guess).

    And Mozilla depends on GTK being available just as Konqueror depends on QT being available for a certain platform, so both have (about) the same level of platform independance.

  • Konq can already use NS plugins... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    See title ;-) Konq and KDE's HTML widget has supported NS plugins for quite some time. Flash, RealPlayer, etc... all work fine.
  • I believe that in the previous Mozilla thread, someone mentioned that Mozilla development on the Mac was going badly because, in addition to having to deal with the poor OS, when something went wrong on the Mac version the Mac users would all complain and nobody would actually help fix the bug.

    You say you want "a browser that allows you to read the sites you want to read". Guess what - that describes even Lynx. What you want is for the sites to look like they were intended, which is why standards compliance is so important.

    I've found Mozilla on Linux to be faster, more stable, and more useful than Netscape 4.75. I uninstalled 4.75 last week.


    --
    No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.
  • You say you want "a browser that allows you to read the sites you want to read". Guess what - that describes even Lynx. What you want is for the sites to look like they were intended, which is why standards compliance is so important.

    Sorry, I guess I was unclear. Of course that's what I want -- but they way I decide when I've got is by using the browser and seeing if it works for me, not by checking to see if the developers plan to support NAFTA, WNBA and PB&J-1 and 2.

    I believe that in the previous Mozilla thread, someone mentioned that Mozilla development on the Mac was going badly because, in addition to having to deal with the poor OS, when something went wrong on the Mac version the Mac users would all complain and nobody would actually help fix the bug.

    And in the time since then, I've come up with a better response than the one I gave him: ;-)

    • You and I are willing to try out prerelease builds, test them, report bugs and maybe attempt a patch. The general public is absolutely not willing to do that. Saying, "If you want that fixed, write a patch!" is fine for hacker projects but any company that thinks an open-source plan means they can do that is heading for serious trouble.
    • Mac users looove iCab. Is it really good? No, it's barely usable. But the iCab developers made it clear that they're committed to the Mac platform. Mozilla has made it clear that the Mac port is a secondary concern for them, and that Mac users will have to be satisfied with an ugly, buggy, kludgy port. So Mac users don't give a damn about Mozilla.
    • Besides, do you really think Joe Windows User says, "Gee, Mozilla isn't rendering llamaporn.com properly." and whips up a patch? Or Jane Slashdot, for that matter? The Mozilla project is driven by full-time Netscape developers who work on Win32 and Unix. That's where those bug fixes are coming from, not from "the community". (At least when I was last trying to contribute to Mozilla, about 6 months ago.)
    • And "the poor OS" doesn't seem to hold Microsoft back at all.

    ---------

  • The guys at Troll Tech created a mozilla based off QT already. Some of the work involved has been done already. That might help speed up the process You never know
  • They took that work and progressed much further..
  • Gecko has been pretty damn good for a very long time now, it's the rest of Mozilla that's lagging. Konqueror isn't anywhere near as ambitious as Mozilla, even if it may be as standards-compliant once both it and Mozilla are done. Mozilla runs on Windows, Mac and various Unices, Konqueror only (AFAIK) runs on KDE, which only runs on Unices. Mozilla is also supposed to support mail and news, neither of which Konqueror does. I also think Konqueror reused an existing Javascript implementation, whereas the Mozilla one is written from scratch for Mozilla.
    This is not to say Konqueror isn't impressive; it is, even though I personally like Mozilla better. And all the stuff in the previous paragraph is AFAIK, I could well be wrong on some of the points, because I haven't done much research.

  • Older, text-based versions of WordPerfect were ported to Unix long ago. You might even still be able to buy them (not from Corel, but from the company that did the actual porting; I forget their name). For a number of years, WordPerfect's cross-platform abilities were touted as a major selling point.

    Yes, it's cross-platform (I've seen X11-based Wordperfect on Solaris and AIX, possibly even IRIX at my uni), but the ports themselves *suck*. Even on an Ultra-1, with 256MB of RAM--hardly a slow machine back in 1996, the bloody things *chugged*. No, we were not running CDE, we were running vanilla X11R6 with (I believe) fvwm for the window manager.

    Wordperfect 8, on Windows, also was a pain. The installer isn't nearly idiot-proofed for the typical (l)user, and though it's overkill for 99% of the people, the problem I had with Wordperfect is that compared to MS Word, the UI was less intuitive (not saying that MSW has the ultimate UI, mind you, just better than WP8 IMO).

    I'm just hoping that Corel Draw would be enough to carry the company through....


    --
  • People might as well get used to seeing Mozilla news similar to this for a long time to come. Things are just beginning to really take off.

    Even before its done, people are basing their new applications on it (see mozdev.org), and are embedding gecko (and soon more of Mozilla) into existing software.

    BTW, there was an ActiveX version of Gecko that ran in IE a while back.

  • As far as Konqueror, is anyone working on a win32 port? That could prove to be yet-another choice for that platform :).

    Alex Bischoff
    ---

  • Hi,

    Is this code in the Mozilla CVS repository or somewhere at Corel? I haven't been following Mozilla development lately, but this sounds exciting.

    /Jonas U
  • I'm tired of people being tricked into thinking
    by the popular press that Corel have only months
    left. It's just ridiculous. It has over 1000
    employees, and a huge range of top class products.
    And they do give a lot to the opensource community. (contributed to Wine, SMB, QT, gecko, ...)
    I can't recommend enough Wordperfect Office 2000
    for Linux. It's way ahead of anything else on
    the platform.
  • Seems to me that both these window managers are ready to form alliances with just about anyone that will make them the "default" window manager for *NIX
  • Dear Corel,

    Thank you for supporting open source software. Thank you for supporting Linux. Now would you please stop goofing off and get to work on a fix for the hundreds of bugs that infest WordPerfect Office 200 for Linux?

    Seriously, WordPerfect Office 2000 is a great demo of the what can be done with Wine. It shows what a killer ap WPO 2000 for Linux could be, but it's way to unstable to take seriously as a finished product.

    Please - before you irrepairably harm your reputation with the Linux community try to focus long enough to fix the bugs in the programs you're already selling.

    Sincerely, Someone who has already lost way to much work to WPO 2000

  • Your right. M$ forces you to react. They just set up something like this favicon.ico thing, IE > 5 searches for it in the directory, where someone clicks Add Bookmark.

    You have to setup mod_rewrite to provide this "service" in a proper way.(Kudos to the apache team for things like that!)

    I can only hope that M$ isn't providing nifty features in IE6, you can only use with their web server.

    Michael
  • If you take a closer, less literal look at this memo, you'll notice that they dont' seem to be "doing this", only vaguely suggesting that it may be a pretty good idea. There is nothing saying that they will suddenly delete the Konquerer code, which has been building for several months to replace it with Mozilla. Most likely, Mozilla will simply have the level of integration that Netscape does now- comfortable, yet not demanding.
    I think this is just one of the thousands of "wouldn't it be cool if..." letters passing between developers every day.
  • I can't decide whether this will help unite KDE and Gnome, or help split them further... Any ideas?
  • Mozilla is way more than a browser people, yet you continue to treat it like it's one.

    Well, how else are we supposed to treat it? As a mail client / news reader / chat client / whatever-the-hell-else it's not competitive with other products in those domains. As a web browser it's not so hot either, come to think of it, although at least it has Gecko.

    As a cross-platform toolkit, it's a horribly misguided mistake. The premise behind Mozilla is that developers should be able to write an application/interface once and have it run on anything, looking exactly as they intended it. That's a bad idea to begin with; different OSes have different interface conventions, and those MUST be followed to create a usable product. Who cares if it looks the same in X and Windows? How many people do you know that regularly switch between the two for whom interface consistency is a big concern?

    And the worst part is you get the lowest common denominator and can't take advantage of a system's built-in functions; Mozilla has to basically re-impliment the clipboard on every system and it sucks. Not to mention it fails to conform to any interface standards, and native users hate it (see comments about Mac versions, for example).

    Skinnability and cross-platform UIs are fine and good for simple applications like web sites and media players, but have no place in such a crucial application as a web browser or e-mail client.

  • Nice one Corel (Score:4)

    by Darren Winsper ( 136155 ) on Thursday September 21, 2000 @03:04AM (#764803)
    It's nice to see Corel helping out the Mozilla and KDE projects this way. Since Nautilus already uses Gecko and now the possibility for Konqueror to use it, we are one step closer to having a more standards compliant web.

    Once Netscape 6/Mozilla reach RTM versions, all that really stands in the way of true standards compliance is WinIE. MacIE is already wonderfully standards compliant by all accounts, and hopefully the WinIE team will follow suit.
  • I don't think it's important whether this helps unite KDE and GNOME or not.
    What's important is that it represents more choice for users and that's always good.

    Personally, I don't think there's such a thing as as "good" or "bad" software when it comes to comparing functionality, only "more choice" or "less choice"

    Mozilla for KDE in addition to mozilla for GNOME is good news!

  • now I need 2 copies of mozilla.

    ack.

    ________

  • ... Yes, it is slick, but AD2000 Most sites
    have hardwired javascript, which Konqueror
    seems not to be able to do... Probably
    because of autodetection on the code,
    but mozilla usually survives.
  • No you don't. The Mozilla shared libraries can be used by any application, they just need the extra wrapper for the widget set you intend to use. There already is a gtkmozembed. All you need is qtmozembed.


    --
    The world is divided in two categories:
    those with a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig.
  • "all that really stands in the way of true standards compliance is WinIE"

    I like the way you put this... get rid of the product that holds ~80% of the market share and everything will fall into place. :-)

  • Think of it this way, if there was only one major desktop environment out there (be it KDE, GNOME, or something new), it likely wouldn't be as advanced as either of these two environments. Competition pushes progress.

    My biggest fear in all this is that the developers will compromise stability for new features. Then, we start to get into the old Microsoft problems.

  • You don't understand. Gecko is much more featureful than KDE's HTML engine. If you want the quick viewer use KDE's, if you want support for stuff like XML+CSS, MathML, XSL and all the other funky things that the great Moz does, then use Gecko.
    --
    The world is divided in two categories:
    those with a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig.
  • --

    On an off topic note. What has Linux done that windows hasn't? So far the desktops are somewhat differnet looking, but neither has done anything that is noticably better than Windows. Sure some may say it is more stable, but then so are Solaris and the BSD's. They are almost equal on the game playing field. They are near equal in the application field (although some may argue one way or another that one is better). But what has Linux or UNIX in general done lately that Windows hasn't. (And don't give me that lame security argument as you can secure a windows box [put it behing a UNIX firewall]).

    --

    I write as a newbie to linux. Though I have used linux since RH5.0, I got a net connection just a few months ago. I depend entirely on the local computer magazine CD for the linux goodies. I had a project to write, a sort of book, and I felt miserable trying it with MSWord. I tried StarOffice on linux and it was worse. Trying wordperfect 8.0 trial on linux was another miserable failure. The last time I downloaded KDE2 pre (Korner) took me a whole night and a fat telephone bill (it was not free), and Kword was better but unstable. Then I tried Lyx. Lyx (+LaTeX) in concept was way different. It does not have an interface to boast about, but I easily managed to get a 63 pg report ready in a few hours, complete with TOC and index. Now this is a killer app I could never dream of on Windows. (I know windows ports do exist, but they either require an X server or Cygwin)

    I am waiting for the KDE2 version of Lyx (Klyx) though. If Klyx integrates with Koffice so that , for example, I can embed a Kspread part in my document, edit the object using Kspread part in klyx, then in final output translate the spreadsheet into a Lyx (or Tex) table and get a printout, in less than half the time it would take in a conventional Wordprocessor; this could be something unique to linux/Unix, and KDE, which Windows does not have.

  • We never wished for Mozilla to be anything more than a browser.

    So what. Mozilla was never about just providing an open source browser for Linux. Netscape/AOL have much bigger plans for it. Believe it or not, a lot of people use the current netscape communicator for browsing, email, news, etc. Mozilla/Netscape 6 still needs to at least support that feature set, or a lot of people that are current users are going to be pissed. It will be the basis for AOL 6 for Windows, MacOS, and the linux based set-top boxes. Hmmm...the people cutting the paychecks for most of the developers have different goals than some anonymous coward on Slashdot. It's not too difficult to see who's goals they decided to go with! If you just want the browser, you can build it without all the other stuff if you want, so what's the big deal?

  • the common sense to not release buggy product on every odd release number

    Well, if it works for Linux....

  • ...and it annoys me even more when any product that faulty gets some sort of reverent praise.

    I don't think anyone gave it reverent praise in this thread yet but I'm tempted to give it a try.

    But it annoys the jeebus out of me when someone calls either of them a "word processor."

    And it annoys the skin off my tongue when anyone calls anything a word processor. That's just one of a million examples of badly-thought-out inexact brain-dead IT terminology. Calling LaTeX a word processor is no less meaningful than calling computerized typewriters word processors since it's a meaningless term in the first place. LaTeX calls itself a document preparation system, which at least shows that Leslie Lamport speaks intelligent English. Anyway, why do I use LaTeX myself? Simply because the documents it produces look great and take less time to prepare than with a WYSIWYG productivity-inhibitor.
  • Konqueror was created to replace KFM, and I'm pretty sure they at least used KFM as a reference. It rendered web pages decently, but not much else. Now KDE has Konqueror which boasts everything you'd expect a web browser to do: HTML 4.0, CSS1&2, Java/Javascript, and SSL. What was once a wishlist in May is a reality now.

    And I do believe you're right in that the KDE developers have not recieved as much attention. Think about how many news items we have seen about Mozilla or Nautilus in the last few months. When was the last time we heard about Konqueror? I just did a Slashdot search and saw a news item for it dated back in May (its *only* news item).

    I think the only reason it has no attention is because it's a KDE app. You generally only hear about the "whole package" of KDE, and nothing about its individual apps. This is unfortunate because Konqueror *really* stands out. The people who normally complain that Mozilla is too bulky should definitely try out Konqueror. It does everything necessary, yet is faster and lighter. I was impressed with the no-hassle SSL. It just utilizes OpenSSL if you have it installed. In fact, this is the first time I've ever been able to get a browser besides Netscape to use SSL.

    Embedding Mozilla into Konqueror seems strange at first, since Konqueror does a fine job of it's own. However, wouldn't it be neat to be able to choose a render engine? Imagine a case where the KHTML widget renders a page not quite like you wanted it to. Flip over to Mozilla rendering to give yourself a second shot! =) Hey, there's a first for everything.

    -Justin
  • I think the idea (and I haven't read any of the replies to your post, so sorry if I'm just repeating what they say) is that the user can replace Konqueror with Mozilla if he chooses to.

    That is a very good thing. If I use KDE 2 (which I plan to as soon as KOffice hits public beta), and hate Konqueror, or just feel like doing something neat on a rainy Tuesday, switching the internal browser on KDE should be fairly trivial.

    And for the record, because you can change the rendering engine if you so desire, integrating the browser with the everything is not nearly as insidious as MSHTML.

    As for porting Mozilla to QT, standard widgets are good, and Corel likes KDE. And it sounds like they are stripping down Mozilla for KDE - note that they only took Gecko, not the rest of it.
  • Corel, without the upcoming cash infusion, probably has around $17M in cash on hand. That doesn't last long with 1000 employees...

    The $56M will help go a little longer, but you're making a judgement based not off of financial data, but your personal belief about Corel's products.
  • And when did development of the Konqueror HTML widget start? I am really surprised they could build a good-functioning ... web-browser in such a short time!

    Well first off all, the Konqueror team set themselves some reasonable goals. Second, they leveraged off some existing work in KDE. But the third factor was probably the most important one: Konqueror is built on a set of simple but powerful Qt and KDE APIs. The people who designed these APIs understand that their job is to simplify the programmer's day-to-day work, not to pile on every whiz-bang feature-de-jour.

    If you download Qt and work your way through the tutorial, it will soon be obvious why any Qt-based project will go with suprising speed.

  • I've been driving myself nuts trying to find any good tutorial on LaTeX. Where would you suggest?

    Oh, and BTW, I like your nick.;-).
  • You and also try to use skipstone [muhri.net], which does not depend on GNOME, only GTK.

    --

  • There are some subjects which are too serious to be trivialised, and the crucifiction is one of those subjects.

    Any religion that can't stand a little fun being poked at it, isn't worth much anyway. Yes that includes mine.

    YIKIBT
  • I am aware of that, but last time I checked, Mozilla was more standards compliant than Konqueror. IIRC it supports more of CSS2 and (This part could be wrong) it has better DOM support.

    OK, I'll give it the fact that it's beta software, but its rendering engine isn't as complete as Mozilla's (yet).
  • I agree with everything you say about LaTeX. The output looks great, and for the type of writing I do it is infinitely beter than any What You See is All You Get word processor.

    But, with that said, I look at LaTeX with the same jaundiced eye I use for X and Emacs (and, to some extent, Unix itself). Each of them is "good enough" at what they do that there is no compelling reason to replace them (or, perhaps, each of them are aguably the best thing available for what they do, and its difficult for most of us to imagine what could replace them). But each of them have obvious, huge, glaring problems that all of us can easily see, but none of us have enough energy to fix.

    Oh well... Worse is Better... [jwz.org]
  • Well, most people write 'reflection' instead of 'reflexion' these days.
  • GUI logic is certainly a big part of an interactive application. Can you show me any Win32 or X-Windows programmer who thinks that their native API properly supports the common, everyday tasks of user interface design?
  • AFAIK Mozilla doesn't support XSL yet.
  • But, what is this talk of writing it in Postscript? Are you nuts? Have you ever scene Postscript? It was not built to be edited by hand by any means. Me thinks you are crazy.

    Well, maybe I'm crazy. I used to do a lot of coding directly in PostScript. (I also used to use NeWS, when X11 was still relatively new.) At one point, my resume was written entirely by hand in PostScript, and I thought it was perfectly readable. Computer-generated PostScript usually isn't readable, but is that really a surprise?

    I had drifted away from PostScript programming for a few years, but I'm starting to play with it again because I recently bought an HP LaserJet 4050 with a builtin PostScript interpreter. (For example, I wrote some simple PostScript code to print videotape labels.)

    Well-written PostScript is actually pretty fun to work with. I wouldn't want to hack generated PostScript without a compelling reason, however.
  • Well, most people write 'reflection' instead of 'reflexion' these days.

    Yeah, but "reflect" is spelled with a "ct" and "crucifix" is spelled with an "x".


    ---
    Zardoz has spoken!
  • Yeah, but 'reflex' is spelled with an 'x'. I think the difference is that there's no verb 'to crucifict'.

  • Not a troll. A fact. Stone, cold, dead-on fact. I have an Athlon 750. I have 128MB ram. I have a 600kbps DSL connection. There is no shortage of memory here. There is no weak processor here.

    The text portion often renders about the same speed as does any version of netscape 4.* I have tried but the graphics are WAY slower...on EVERY page I have ever gone to. On Slashdot, the icons, the banners, ANY graphics are loaded WAY slow. On an web-email page I use from my university, the graphics load WAY slow (not critical for that page but it is annoying - I LIKE graphics). Essentially, on ANY page I go to that has graphical links, graphic decore, or banners - they all load incredibly slowly while netscape 4.73, which I have to keep going back to for "stability" vs any of the more recent netscape releases, loads images and text very quickly.

    I have downloaded the M17 binary, I have downloaded the preM18 binary. I have downloaded a recent binary nightly build. I have downloaded the source of a nightly build and compiled/installed it myself. In no case at all has the slow graphics loading been corrected. Also in EVERY case the number of segfaults has been intolerable. Try to download newsgroup messages: segfault. Try to login to one of my pop email accounts: segfault. Try to download some file/tarball/rpm: 30-40% of the time...segfault.

    It sure LOOKS pretty doing before it segfaults though. Unfortunately, with the slow graphic loading (this occurs, incidently, also on my celeron-based laptop with 96mb ram when it is connected directly to my university's lan) and segfaulting, it is impossible to use it for anything. Ultimately, I have to keep going back to netscape 4.73 (which suffers far fewer bus errors than 4.74 OR 4.75). Konqueror looks to be the only hope I can see for getting past netscape/mozilla bus errors/segfaults or slow image loading behavior. And it will be ready FAR sooner than any final version of Mozilla. That is a fact, like it or not.

  • You cannot drag-n-drop files from mozilla to your desktop (or other file) on KDE but you can with Gnome. This is GOOD integration between Mozilla and Gnome that needs to be given to KDE too. This is a GOOD kind of integration, not the perverted, broken, evil "integration" practiced by M$ with their crap.

    It merely means that Mozilla would be able to communicate/intercommunicate with your desktop environment while remaining a separate, independent application.

  • Yeah, but 'reflex' is spelled with an 'x'. I think the difference is that there's no verb 'to crucifict'.

    Yes, but "reflection" is derived from "reflect", not "reflex" (which is a related but separate concept).


    ---
    Zardoz has spoken!
  • Well they're not just going to fade a way,
    with no value for shareholders. This is just
    silly.
    IMHO the 3 main options they have in increasing
    order of preference are:

    CorelDraw 10 + Wordperfect 10 revenue will soon fix things (this will probably happen).
    Sell some of there other company holdings (rebel, gojo, many others I can't remember).
    Sell off some products.
    Sell the whole shooting match to IBM/HP/whoever

    The bottom line is that they have great products,
    which is fundamentally all that matters, and
    the current cash flow crisis is then by definition
    temporary.
  • We don't need to get rid of IE (It has some damn nice features, shame it still doesn't support some things like DOM properly), we just need to convince MS to sort out the standards compliance issues.

    With MacIE being very standards compliant, maybe it's a sign of things to come with IE6 (Remember MS have been working on it for some time, after all, they can't have put that many resources into IE5.5).
  • That should of course have been decreasing order of preference.

  • Have you tried here [cam.ac.uk]? I personally found the Introduction to LaTeX2e to be very helpful.

  • If I use KDE 2 (which I plan to as soon as KOffice hits public beta)

    KOffice is part of KDE, which has had a number of public betas now. In fact, I'm using the latest right now, and KWord seems a hell of a lot faster than any other similar package I've used. I switched over a long time ago, without any problems whatsoever.

  • Older, text-based versions of WordPerfect were ported to Unix long ago.
    While there are definately a fair share of commercial wordproccessors for unix that run in console mode, there are no opensource ones available, at least to my knowledge. There is a decent selection of X word proccessors, and as a matter of principle I plan on writing my Masters Thesis in latex or postscript so I could do it in vi. However, it'd be nice if I had the choice of using an opensourse console word proccessor. Reminds me of the time when I didn't associate a blue screen with Bad OS design
  • /*
    I think these are important questions to ask. Whenever anyone here tries to raise the issue of "What went wrong with Mozilla?" it's always
    met with angry accusations of trolling and claims that the project is doing great, just great! especially if you've tried the last couple of nightly
    builds which are much better than those of a few days ago.
    */

    Seems like the Mozilla project is trying to one-up Emacs or something; I mean, it's a *web browser.* I doubt the average user will even care that it's able to facilitate writing cross-platform software. Many won't use the IRC function. Many will use some other mail reader & newsreader, which means that that huge open sore of code taking up memory is doing just that: taking up memory.

    Mozilla could have been the greatest browser to date. Instead, it's an "everything-but-the-kitchen-sink" browser that doesn't do anything perfectly, but half-asses a lot of stuff really well.

    I'm not trolling for hotheads. I'm just being brutally honest. I'm fairly confident that there are a lot of folks out there that feel like I do, that what they want is a freakin' Web browser that lets them browse the Web, and browse it well. I had high hopes that the Mozilla project would do a lot of fat-trimming; instead, it added neato-schmeato features like skins (ooh, ahh.) Instead of building on the platform-neutral framework that Mozilla already had, they built their own platform-neutral toolkit. (Gee, thanks.) It's why people such as myself are glad they got some things completely right, like allowing the HTML renderer to be embedded in other software. That way, projects like Galeon have a chance of saving the browser. Galeon will be great as soon as it picks up JavaScript & a coupla other goodies; I'd be using it right now, but I need some other features. No, I haven't been helping, for which I feel guilty. :^( I simply don't have the kind of networking experience necessary for such an undertaking.
  • My father-in-law no longer opens his paper to the sports section, but now starts with the obituaries. After confirming htat he's not there, he goes on with his day . . .

    Just how many Corel obituaries are we going to get? I just can't keep up; I'd thought that it was corell waiting to be revived, and KDE/mozilla doing well (kozilla? :)

    By tomorrow, perhaps it will be the kde/mozilla project reviving Alan Turning . . .
  • I would propose a different theory. The reason that you don't hear as much about Konquerer as you do about Mozilla is because of the differences in marketing decisions.

    The Mozilla team is similar to most companies nowadays, in that they'll make a point of advertising every minor advancement made on the road to the final product. This is because every little minor advancement is a big deal. Either design wasn't precise enough, the language doesn't lend itself well to the project, or maybe the design team's too large. In any event, you _have_ to hype the little things, because otherwise the morale of the development team'll drop too low.

    (And heaven forbid someone mentioning the project's dead, or that something went wrong.. Same case; you don't want to spook your programmers!)

    Now with the Konquerer team, on the other hand, you have a completely different development model. Marketing only comes into play whenever a major change occurs. Minor details needn't be hyped, because there isn't as much worry of morale dropping. (Probably a symptom of good design, which means that the job's more manageable, and likewise, you don't have as many people who're indisposable.) Developers aren't making things more difficult than they need to be, and everyone's speaking on the same wavelength. And more time is spent designing code than fixing bugs, in the long run.

    Personally, I can tell you which of the two will get the more press when they're finally released. (Mozilla) And likewise, I can tell you which of the two'll have the better design. (Konquerer) Not because of development time, size of team, or any of the other reasons I've listed. Rather, because if I look at the source code, I can understand the language of Konquerer. I understand where all of the paradigms come into play, how the code fits together, and how it's designed.

    Mozilla, with all of it's bizarre module names, disjointed designs, and the total lack of even an elementary level UML diagram of how the whole bloody kitten kaboodle fits together, looks to me like open source software's new Moby Dick. I hope it finds a nice home alongside the Emacs before it.

    James
    --
    vi ask?
  • There's no one standard desktop. The standards that KDE and GNOME introduce are *open* which means it's possible to write/hack your own desktop management system without using the bloat crap. If you need the bloat crap, use KDE/GNOME/whatever. Personally, I'm holding out great hope for Rasterman's grand vision for E (integrating EFM). My great fear is that Raster/Mandrake will decide to do a major rewrite (again) of E and the code won't be ready till 2002/2003. :^( Please, God, grant them the ability to think clearly, and, please, God, grant Raster the ability to spell. ;^)

  • Re:Konqueror already rocks... (Score:5)

    by update() ( 217397 ) on Thursday September 21, 2000 @05:51AM (#764843) Homepage
    Incidentally, this news is not about Konqueror, although there has been speculation about using Gecko as an alternate rendering engine for Konqueror, alongside khtml.

    I mean, how long have they been working on Mozilla?..And when did development of the Konqueror HTML widget start? I am really surprised they could build a good-functioning (speaking as of the final-beta ) web-browser in such a short time! ..How did the KDE developers manage this?

    I think these are important questions to ask. Whenever anyone here tries to raise the issue of "What went wrong with Mozilla?" it's always met with angry accusations of trolling and claims that the project is doing great, just great! especially if you've tried the last couple of nightly builds which are much better than those of a few days ago.

    Mozilla is the flagship project of the "Open Source Movement" (not to be confused with the "Free Software Movement") and when it was launched, Eric Raymond and CmdrTaco were featured prominently in everything from C|Net to Cat Fancier preemptively declaring victory in the browser war. Three years later, Mozilla isn't close to their first release and has been crushed by Microsoft in both market share and quality. At the same time, the Konqueror team has come up with a 90% usable browser from scratch in half the time, with a tiny fraction of the developers and bug testers and without the resources and experience of Netscape behind it.

    It seems to me that the sensible course would be to make an honest effort to figure out where Mozilla went wrong instead of keeping up the pretense that everything is going perfectly. I mean, when Eric Raymond goes into CEOs' offices doing what he's not embarassed to call his Prince From Another Country act [linuxworld.com], don't they ask him what happened to Mozilla? Wouldn't there be practical and rhetorical advantages to having an answer to that question?

    ---------

  • It would be interesting to see Konqueror with the mozilla rendering engine. I think this would speed up Konquereor and give it better rendering. I have also heard that the 2.0 verison of Konqueror will have full JavaScript and Java support as well as plugins. I don't use kde, but I don't mind installing the base and libs and multimedia to get kfm. I like kfm as a file manager better then GNOME, and have tried it as a web browsers and right now it is just to slow (kde 1.1.2). Who knows by this time next year Linux users may have several free browsers that are XHTML compliant as well as fast.

    On an off topic note. What has Linux done that windows hasn't? So far the desktops are somewhat differnet looking, but neither has done anything that is noticably better than Windows. Sure some may say it is more stable, but then so are Solaris and the BSD's. They are almost equal on the game playing field. They are near equal in the application field (although some may argue one way or another that one is better). But what has Linux or UNIX in general done lately that Windows hasn't. (And don't give me that lame security argument as you can secure a windows box [put it behing a UNIX firewall]).

    I ask here cause slashdot hates my posts!

    I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
    Flame away, I have a hose!

  • Teach me for checking about half a time every six months. :)

    Never minding that every time I go and install Linux, I end up losing everything on my hard drive within a month - usually in the middle of a Windows reinstall.

    *Mutters*
  • Aw, c'mon.

    There's talk of a possible hack of Bonobo to integrate DCOP into the system. This was on the GNOME developers' news site.

    There isn't an object-sharing standard for UNIX machines. There isn't! The KDE team (as I gathered; again, I'm relying on remembered information from *their* developer's news site) they were working with CORBA, realized how horrid it was, and decided to work up something that was a bit more sensible (to their way of thinking.) Nearly everything about their system was already there; it's based on libICE, which is already a part of X11. It's fast. It doesn't take up a lot of overhead.

    Quite frankly, the GNOME team was saved by Red Hat. Some of their guys (this is apparently while Raster was at RH; again...well, you've read my disclaimer twice. :^) got to work writing their *own* implementation of CORBA, called ORBit.

    Wait, isn't CORBA some kind of standard? Yes and no; and I think this is the dirty little secret. At the time, CORBA was being touted as the acronym of the week. A nice little object-sharing mechanism that wasn't COM. So GNOME used it. What started out as a nice, lighter alternative to KDE is now an alternative to KDE that's an extreme memory hog. Thanks, guys.
  • Will Corel also provide a Mozilla/Qt for Windows?

    (Maybe the answer to this question was in the mail (but I couldn't find it).

  • Err... I have been goofing around with several of the latest mozilla releases (M17, various nightly builds, compiling my own). I have found, in each and EVERY case, that page rendering and image rendering are WAY SLOW. MUCH slower than Netscape 4.73, 4.74, 4.75. I download pages and have to wait and wait and wait for certain image/links to render so I can move on.

    I do like the newer blue theme or even the classic theme for mozilla (HATE the modern). However, I also think it should not be called my milestones, but rather tracked on segfaults, which it does CONSTANTLY: "Here we have mozilla segfault17, here is the latest segfault18. In a few weeks we'll have segfault19!"

    After all the incredible amount of time that mozilla has been struggling along (and getting lapped by konquerer and the gnome equivalent), the thing it STILL does best of all is segfault. Ah well, at least it is DIFFERENT than bus errors. That counts for something doesn't it?

  • what benefits am i going to get from integration? my mozilla browser works fine AS IS.

  • Re:Konqueror already rocks... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I had high hopes that the Mozilla project would do a lot of fat-trimming; instead, it added neato-schmeato features like skins (ooh, ahh.) Instead of building on the platform-neutral framework that Mozilla already had, they built their own platform-neutral toolkit. (Gee, thanks.)

    And yet, if you say the same things about the people who pissed away their time and energy on Gtk instead of finishing Lesstif, you get crucified. I wonder why?

  • When MS integrated IE into their shell, explorer, everything.

    I don't get it, I really don't. It wasn't like you couldn't get IE out of windows if you took a minute either.

  • Can't anybody spot trolls anymore? Any reactionary comment from an Anonymous Coward should just be ignored, especially when it demands or dares moderation.

    And what's with "crucifiction"? That spelling was only used by anti-Christians last time I hung out on the newsgroups.
  • Uhm...chill. Yah that about says it. I got $20 that says Jesus himself would have gotten a good chuckle out of that comment. Come on, do you really want a god with no sense of humor?

    /me puts on his asbestos underwear.
  • You are correct for the most part... Konquerer is just a web/file browser. News comes from KNode, mail comes from KMail. KMail and KNode can be embedded in Konqeuror. Kmail doesn't even have it's own address book... it uses one of two current address books as options, and can support different ones (like one written to work with an Outlook directory or such). KDE2's goal was to be modular. Netscape/Mozilla's goal was to be the only app you need to take advantage of the internet. They are different paradigms; niether approach is superior or inferior. I personally like the modular approach. In Linux, I use Netscape for mail and WWW, in Windows, I use Netscape for mail and IE for WWW. Opening up Netscape just for mail is a bit of a resource hog, however. I'm looking forward to KDE2, so I can use Konqueror for WWW. I'll be using Netscape for mail, as KMail (AFAIK) doesn't support IMAP yet.

    "Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
  • I'd have to say I'm in agreement. 99% of the time IE on Mac renders my HTML/CSS the way I thought it would be rendered when I wrote it (and this may be a problem with me, but HTML is not rocket science and I've been writing it since Mosaic was the most common browser), yet that same HTML is goofy as all get out on Netscape for Mac (not to mention that IE for Mac has great cookie management, the likes of which are only beaten by the new cookie piece in Konqueror/KDE2. IE5.5 on Win95, however, seems broken to me. It manages to screw up even simple pages when the graphics don't include height/width information (that is, redraws don't seem to be functional). My only concern about Gecko for KDE functionality is that it will impair development of the khtml library (if people are patching Konqueror to use Gecko for rendering, this is less people putting the khtml library through the paces), unless the KDE team makes the decision to abandon khtml in favor of Gecko. I mean, it's the rendering engine. In theory the end result should be exactly the same, right?
  • I don't use kde, but I don't mind installing the base and libs and multimedia to get kfm. I like kfm as a file manager better then GNOME, ...

    Fortunately, GNOME's current file manager is at the end of it's life, soon to be replaced with Nautilus.

    On an off topic note. What has Linux done that windows hasn't? So far the desktops are somewhat differnet looking, but neither has done anything that is noticably better than Windows. Sure some may say it is more stable, but then so are Solaris and the BSD's.

    Um... Clustering, (good) Server, Portable, X11 (windows can't just serve programs over a network)... The list goes on and on... Linux may not be quite ready for a consumer desktop but that's not what it was originally built for.

    But what has Linux or UNIX in general done lately that Windows hasn't.

    Not crashed.

    --Ben

  • At the same time, the Konqueror team has come up with a 90% usable browser from scratch in half the time, with a tiny fraction of the developers and bug testers and without the resources and experience of Netscape behind it.

    OK, let's see - Mozilla came up with 90% usable browser, plus the architectural foundations which make platform independence and extensibility possible, in only twice the time it took the Konquerer team to make an 90% ready HTML renderer for KDE? I have nothing against Konquerer, and I will be very happy when I have many excelent browsers for Linux, but remember - desktop users mostly use Windows. Can they use Konquerer?
  • I'm stuck in Windows, don't have much chance to play around with Konqueror.

    As far as I remember, Mozilla is supposed to run on both Win32 and Linux, while Konqueror is not even able to make to Win32. So, it's a much more complicated job to also accomodate Win32, right? Do you think it's fair to compare the development time for two products?

    Indeed, Gecko has been there for quite a bit of time. Without the UI complications, development of Mozilla isn't going too bad compare to Konqueror.

  • Corel Product Line (Score:3)

    by FFFish ( 7567 ) on Thursday September 21, 2000 @08:57AM (#764862) Homepage
    CorelDraw -- widely recognized as the best vector illustration application available. Beats Illustrator hands-down, both for ease-of-use and sheer functionality. Challenges Adobe Pagemaker in many areas.

    Ventura Publisher -- the only professional-level long-document layout/publishing tool available for desktop-class machines. Adobe FrameMaker is a wanna-be, in comparison: it's adequate for smaller publications and independent contractors, but lacks the functionality required by high-end professionals. Quark doesn't even register on the scale.

    WordPerfect -- regarded as one of the two best general-purpose wordprocessing applications (MSWord being the other). Has many strengths that Word lacks; has some weaknesses. Does deal moderately well with SGML; it's a viable alternative to XMetal for those that need more versatility than SoftQuad's product; high-end professionals are using ArborText's products.

    PhotoPaint -- recognized as being as powerful (in many ways more powerful) than Adobe Photoshop, but generally presents a challenging interface to anyone who has become used to the Photoshop/Paintshop interface. Once you get over the UI hurdle, it's magic.

    Paradox -- as powerful as any desktop-class database, and far better than the dog's breakfast that MS Access provides.

    Quattro -- as powerful as any desktop-class spreadsheet. Not as many frills and thrills as MS Excel. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to have math errors; Excel has had some primo botches in the past.

    In the end, Corel has the world's best desktop-class software. Nothing comes close to Ventura and Draw; and it's neck-and-neck for the other products.

    What Corel doesn't seem to have is a marketing plan, the common sense to not release buggy product on every odd release number, and respect.

    It's a crying shame.


    --
  • I'm fairly confident that there are a lot of folks out there that feel like I do, that what they want is a freakin' Web browser that lets them browse the Web, and browse it well.

    And what does thast mean, exactly? For me it means to be able to correctly render HTML and XHTML with CSS1 and CSS2, JavaScript and Java, XML with XSLT. Show me a browser that can do that - there aren't any. It looks like Mozilla will be able to get closest to that goal, while preserving the modularity and extensibility, which allow things like Galeon, and other Mozilla derived apps to happen. Why do you think this is an easy task, that could have been completed by now?

    I had high hopes that the Mozilla project would do a lot of fat-trimming; instead, it added neato-schmeato features like skins (ooh, ahh.) Instead of building on the platform-neutral framework that Mozilla already had, they built their own platform-neutral toolkit. (Gee, thanks.)

    One more time - skins are not a separate feature, they are a side effect of the UI architecture. It is part of the cross-platform framework that was needed to be built from scratch. (If you think the old/current Netscape cross-paltform capabilities are worth a dime, you haven't used Netscape on Linux).

  • Corel? Corel?? (Score:3)

    by FascDot Killed My Pr ( 24021 ) on Thursday September 21, 2000 @03:11AM (#764865)
    Of course I appreciate any effort expended in making Free Software more usable--but what on earth is Corel thinking? They are on the brink of disaster, surely they should be working on something that will Make Money Fast.
    --
    Linux MAPI Server!
    http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
  • I know how they can do that. I had an email about it the other day. All they need to do is send $20 to this bloke, and he'll send them these 'business reports' that they can then sell themselves for as much as they like to loads of people. They can make $$$! Earn $100,000 a month or more!

    It's not illegal, either, the bloke said, and it's not one of these pyramid schemes.
  • Its sad to see that a company that is signifigantly benifiting the opensource community is dying. Obvisiously Corel Draw and Word Perfect have been dying for a while now, but its still sad. Fortunatly, Corels benifits of a better WINE and work on the QT version of Mozilla will continue to live on. Is there any way Corel can auctual become profitable, or should they just continue to suck money out of investors until they die? If they do the OSS comunity will benifit. Hopefully though before they die they release the source code to Wordperfect for DOS so maybe all us Linux/*BSD users out there will finally have a console Word Proccessor without having to learn latex or install dosemu.

  • Trust me, bad software does exist :) The main reason that choice is so important is to enable users to choose *good* software...

  • Re:Corel? Corel?? (Score:3)

    by decaym ( 12155 ) on Thursday September 21, 2000 @03:28AM (#764871) Homepage

    They way they can make money is to sell products. The way they can sell products is to draw attention to themselves. The way they can draw attention to temselves is to create talk in the press over projects they are supporting. This is a good thing!

    The quickest way for Corel to completely fade away is to stop doing new development. It's kind of like evolution, either you advance or get overrun. A company that terminates all development efforts is usually on it's last leg.

    When you consider how much money Corel is burning through, how much is it really costing them to have a couple of programmers dedicated to a project like this? $200-250K/year for a company operating on the level of $20-30M/year is not that big of deal.

  • Gecko is much more featureful than KDE's HTML engine.

    Perhaps. But from my experience, KHTML renders quite flawlessly, supports Netscape plugins, Java, etc etc *and* is a _lot_ faster than Gecko.

    If you want the quick viewer use KDE's...

    That's what 99% of webbrowsing is about. A quick viewer.

    But sure, I'd love Gecko support within Konqueror. On the condition that KHTML remains the default engine.

  • Windows does do clustering too. Windows has servers and some think that they are good. With Citrix winframe window can serve programs over a network, besides X11 is outdated and needs revision.

    you must be zealot.

    I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
    Flame away, I have a hose!

  • I really don't think I'm too much of a zealot. (He says writing in IE) I am aware that there are many ways for windows computers to server programs over a network but from what I know it's not nearly as transparent as under Unix.

    As for clustering, I have heard of windows clustering but seeing as I've never heard of people using a Windows cluster which leads me to believe that, while technicly true, windows probably can't do it too well.

    --Ben

  • Does it support the DOM?

    The difference between dynamic and static documents is ... well ... the difference between IE/Mozilla and everything else.
  • It'll probably do nothing to change the current landscape. Mozilla will hopefully stay desktop environment neutral, while the KDE camp will continue to champion Konquerer and the GNOME camp will continue to champion Galeon.

    What I'd like to know is why would Konquerer wish to depart with there current engine and replace it with Gecko. From my understanding, tearing out Konquerer would probably requre the KDE team to rewrite a substantial amount of code to employ Gecko for rendering remote (i.e. FTP) and local file management (e.g. graphic preview and thumbnail) display. This seems to be part of the growing trend by both camps (in emulating Microsoft) to embed HTML engines into filemanagement and the GUI shell. Where is this going towards?

    What will the any advantage of porting Mozilla to QT be? Perhaps Corel, who is quite short in cash at the moment, should follow Galeon's lead and attempt to strip down Mozilla for KDE instead.

    MashPotato - Mobile Array of Support Helpers for Potato

  • Re:Great... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't think it's important whether this helps unite KDE and GNOME or not. What's important is that it represents more choice for users and that's always good.

    Yes, it's like with cars .. you may take the red broken one, the green, broken one or the blue broken one.

    Exercise: Spot the problem

  • Getting Galeon working (Score:3)

    by Cato ( 8296 ) on Thursday September 21, 2000 @03:29AM (#764888)
    This is not a very elegant solution, but it worked for me... Try updating to the latest mozilla nightly build, and then installing Helix Gnome. Galeon is now working very nicely, and is very fast. Still a bit primitive, but not bad.
  • Since Corel is porting Mozilla to KDE/QT for their own purposes, not as part of the main Mozilla development effort, I don't see how this will delay Mozilla by more than the time it would take the Mozilla crew to say "No, we don't need a QT port, but thanks for asking".
    Of course, Corel could have had people help on the main Mozilla effort instead, which could have a positive effect, but let's not forget about the mythical man-month.
  • That's because Galeon [sourceforge.net] is spelled Galeon.

  • Someone remind me please... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is Corel the evil one that we're supposed to slam at every opportunity, or is that Caldera?

    It's so hard to keep track of these things...
  • All you have to do is to run the installer to see that Mozilla is modular, and you can choose which modules to download and install. I don't know why I keep seeing endless Slashdot ranting denying this.

    > Instead of building on the platform-neutral
    > framework that Mozilla already had, they built
    > their own platform-neutral toolkit.

    Mozilla did not already have a "platform-neutral framework". What are you talking about?
  • I know this is a troll, but still...

    Most people are now seeing Mozilla performance at least as fast as NS 4.x for any value of x, at least in raw rendering speed. There are several reasons you might now be, insufficient memory being the most likely one.
  • Make money fast? There is no way to do that with Free Software (now that the OSS IPO boom is over). You can't make money off of support/service until you have a large enough user base (and no one's earned decent profits off of it yet). So you're left with proprietary add-ons of some kind.

    I think Corel is going the best course. Slow, steady, and ignore the pundits. Of course, if the Borland shenanigan gets resolved, they have Kylix to generate dough with.

  • Newworld Macs (iMac and later) usually require a boot partition for Linux, too (to hold the txbi script that OpenFirmware loads to load the yaboot booter on a Linux paritition). Old World (Biege) Macs don't need a bootstrap, there booter, quik, can boot directly off of a Linux partition.

    I've done some info on these booters over at iMacLinux Guides and Howtos [imaclinux.net]. Also check out PenguinPPC [penguinppc.org] for more stuff.

  • Got Pliers? (Score:4)

    by Spoing ( 152917 ) on Thursday September 21, 2000 @03:48AM (#764908) Homepage
    Its sad to see that a company that is signifigantly benifiting the opensource community is dying.

    1. [Sam Kinison, talking about Jesus on the cross]

    2. Crowd (mumbling): 'Jesus, it's too bad you've got to die!'

      Jesus (screaming): 'Well, I wouldn't have to if somebody would get a pair of pliers!'

    It's not a question if there are Corel products that are worth having and ... yes ... buying. The question is 'Is it worth it to you?'

    So far myself, I've downloaded the freebies and have considered recommending v.2 of Corel Linux for less-tech savy friends and family. I can't justify getting WordPerfect because it uses a closed format, and I don't do that much graphics work so I'm not a customer for Corel Draw. I've only spent a few minutes fiddling around with Photopaint only because I don't do much graphics work.

    The only thing stopping me from recommending v.2 Corel Linux is that I know more about RedHat and RedHat derrived distributions then Debian. Not a big hurdle, true, yet if anything goes wrong or needs changing, I'll have to make the changes (via. SSH, of course!).

  • Re:The tradegy of Corel is continuing (Score:3)

    by Floyd Tante ( 210193 ) on Thursday September 21, 2000 @03:49AM (#764909)
    Hopefully though before they die they release the source code to Wordperfect for DOS so maybe all us Linux/*BSD users out there will finally have a console Word Proccessor without having to learn latex or install dosemu

    Older, text-based versions of WordPerfect were ported to Unix long ago. You might even still be able to buy them (not from Corel, but from the company that did the actual porting; I forget their name). For a number of years, WordPerfect's cross-platform abilities were touted as a major selling point.

    -- Floyd

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