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  aKademy Hackers Port Mozilla to Qt/KDE
Konqueror Posted by Kecko Team on Saturday 11/Sep/2004, @10:40
from the integrative-desktop dept.
Among the most exciting things to come out of aKademy, the recent KDE Community World Summit, is a Qt port of Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine. This will give Gecko the full native look and feel of KDE/Qt, and make it available as a KPart, where it can provide an alternative HTML renderer for Konqueror.

"This is the best of both worlds for KDE" said Lars Knoll of the KHTML project. "Integrating Gecko side by side with our existing renderer opens a lot of doors, without any compromise of the hard work and clean design that make KHTML what it is."

On the night before the start of the hacking marathon, a conversation including, among others, Ian Geiser, Lars Knoll, Dirk Mueller, and Zack Rusin happened onto the topic of integrating Gecko into KDE. Lars and Zack jumped into Mozilla's code, to see how feasible such a plan might be. Within four days (and before the end of the marathon) the two had a working port: Gecko running on Qt. They credited the speed of implementation to the maturity of the respective technologies and KDE's component architecture (though the caliber of the hackers certainly didn't hamper the effort). In their implementation, Qt is just another platform for Mozilla, parallel to the drawing and widget layer for Mozilla's other platforms like GTK, Win32, or MacOS X. Though the work is on-going, the team is close to integrating Gecko into Konqueror, connecting Gecko to the higher level browser machinery in Konqueror such as KWallet and KCookieJar.

The Mozilla organization was supportive: "We are delighted to work with the KDE community, both to extend the reach of Gecko, and to be part of an effort bringing even greater depth to the KDE desktop. Making Qt another platform for Mozilla, and Gecko another option for KDE is a win for both users and developers" commented Mitchell Baker, President of the Mozilla Foundation.

There have been previous starts at this idea in the past. Trolltech's QtScape, some initial Corel work, and a Mozilla-based XPart, foundered from lack of maintenance and little advocacy within the Mozilla community. The current team will be full-fledged contributors to the Mozilla code-base, with KDE people and mozilla.org behind the effort. The Qt port will live and develop in Mozilla's CVS repository. The code to embed the corresponding QWidget will live, naturally, in KDE's repository.



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this is a great example...
by ian reinhart geiser on Saturday 11/Sep/2004, @11:23
... of Qt's toolkit and KDE's component system in action. It was very cool to watch Zack and Lars rip though the code like no tomorrow. I think this is a great example that shows off the power of the KDE archatecture for enterprise applications. Now all we need is Opera and Konqueror supports basicly all the big rendering engines ;)
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questions and musings
by Navindra Umanee on Saturday 11/Sep/2004, @11:41
Congratulations on the great hack!

I take it that for the immediate future KDE will provide KHTML as default and Gecko as an "alternative". Are typical Konqueror users expected to know that they can switch from KHTML to Gecko? Or are we expecting that distributors will evaluate the choices and choose one themselves?

What has the Kecko team found so far, is Konqueror with Gecko competitive vs Konqueror with KHTML? I suppose if it is, it only makes sense to defer to Gecko as the default since it has a massive and independent development effort behind it.

Have any distributors expressed an interest in using Konqueror with Gecko instead of Firefox? I suppose the next step would be to get KaXul in Konqueror.
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javascript
by Navindra Umanee on Saturday 11/Sep/2004, @11:44
Also, what about JavaScript in Konqueror/Gecko? Is this still handled by kjs or does Gecko take over? Essentially, does using Gecko in Konqueror mean that rendering will be 100% comparable with Firefox or will there be something missing?
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KFirefox?
by Turd Ferguson on Saturday 11/Sep/2004, @12:18
Well, as neat as this sounds, I would like to see a standalone web browser that supported the extensions of Firefox on the Qt side of things. I really don't want to see Gecko rendering in Konqueror as much as a Gecko browser for KDE that's not Konqueror. Hopefully we will see this.

My main complaints about Konqueror are twofold:

No mozilla extension capability, so no adblock.

Clicking on home takes you to your home directory.
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Wow..
by Michael Jahn on Saturday 11/Sep/2004, @12:41
This a very surprising and exciting! And it raises an even more important question: if the Gecko port offers all the features of the current engine and can be embedded easily, should KDE get rid of khtml + kjs?

Warning: uninformed user opinion below ;)
I am all for it. Now don't get me wrong, I use konqueror almost exclusively. And I don't think this is very likely to happen but one may speculate. The reasoning:
1. Gecko has much more exposure (even though there is Safari) and thus at least _some_ web developers pay attention to make their site compatible.
2. Reduce duplication of efforts. The OSS world would have only one major rendering engine.
3. IMHO Gecko is still a little more standards compliant.
4. The most important part last: devs could spend more time improving KDE instead of working on khtml :-)

What do you think?
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Where is the code?
by KikoV on Saturday 11/Sep/2004, @14:10
I have looking for some NEWS in Konqueror homepage and Mozilla, but I can't find anything related to this.

Where is the code for that? What's the actual status? Is it usable?
Are there more links about it?
Thx
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Zack's Blog
by Anonymous on Saturday 11/Sep/2004, @15:20
Be sure to don't miss http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/view/615
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SpiderMonkey; Standards compliance of KHTML
by anonymous on Saturday 11/Sep/2004, @15:53
Just added this comment to specify that Mozilla's ECMAScript/JavaScript engine consists of SpiderMonkey (it wasn't clear in some replies, which seemed to assume that Gecko absolutely has to replace kjs)... So we have:

Konqueror:
KHTML
KSJ

Mozilla:
Gecko
SpiderMonkey

This also means that combinations of the two would also be possible if it was necessary provided there be a unified API between the ECMAScript engines...


Also, what I also consider a productive effort would be to make optional all non-standards behavior in KHTML and KJS. A user could decide to enable or disable proprietary extensions which are already implemented then, and if those extensions were documented (I.E. for each "feature" a checkbox with a comment, it would even be better. This would allow KHTML to be used even by standards pedantics, while not necessarily limiting it's functionality, and Web developers to easily migrate non-standard code to standard one, disabling a particular feature one by one and seeing where it breaks, to address each problem one by one...
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Interesting Idea
by James L on Saturday 11/Sep/2004, @16:00
Assuming this gets into konqueror at some point, Have a per-domain setting on which rendering engine to use: ala plugins, and browser id.

That would make sites that don't work with khtml (gmail) or gecko available to users of one or the other engine.

Amazing work, as usual. Thanks to all the people who work on KDE.
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So...
by ac on Saturday 11/Sep/2004, @16:02
...is Gecko finally cleanly separated out of all those different Mozilla products? Or is this just the addition of choice to depend on a whole Mozilla software package even when just using a part of it which should instead be available as runtime library?

For years GNOME (as in Epiphany and Galeon) already uses Gecko as default web rendering engine. But that didn't get anyone to finally solve the above mentioned huge dependency, leading to the experimental import of Webkit (aka khtml + kjs) into the GNOME CVS (see http://cia.navi.cx/stats/project/gnome/gnome-webkit ). I'm afarid this announcement is a nice showcase of flexibility of the involved projects, but not really anything more.
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Replacing Firefox with Konqueror + Gecko
by Rogério on Saturday 11/Sep/2004, @18:54
Now i can think in remove Firefox from my machine and start to use Konqueror for access my gmail account...
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Thank you konqueror developers
by a.c. on Saturday 11/Sep/2004, @19:51
While I can see value in having Firefox/Mozilla ported to QT/KDE, I prefer konqi. It is fast. It is clean. It does what I want it to do. In addition, one problem that I see with this port is that in the past, these kind of ports fall to the way.
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Well...
by fake on Saturday 11/Sep/2004, @19:57
This is obviously great news for all the Firefox users, who know can have a KDE native version.
Though, as a KDE user and lover, I would have preferred to see time spent hacking on KHTML/Konqueror instead of on Gecko. I mean, we all know that since 3.2 our beloved Konqi has made giant steps. But there are a few things still missing or to polish more, like cluttered menus, better CSS2 support, or an integrated adblock-like plugin. Well, why don't spend time hacking on those?
I'm not saying that porting Firefox is bad, since it isn't. But shouldn't Konqi have more "priority" on the development?
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Great!
by Mikhail Capone on Saturday 11/Sep/2004, @20:34
This is great news, I can't wait to try it out.

Konqueror is my primary browser, keep up the good work guys!
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Configuration
by Burrhus on Saturday 11/Sep/2004, @21:03
One of my favorite aspects of Konqueror is the site-specific settings. Will these settings work with Gecko? Can I enable javascript for some sites and disable it for others? Can I accept and reject cookies based on the site I am visiting? Can I make the browser identify itself as Lynx on some sites and Internet Explorer on others? Can I choose the rendering engine itself based on the site I'm visiting?

How about other config settings, like the default fonts, animation settings, or form completion?

KHTML also allows KMail to not load external images and other resources. Will this functionality apply to the Gecko KPart?

While I'm on the topic of settings, could we have a setting to lower the priority of the javascript interpreter? Some sites have scripts that seriously bog down the browser.
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Gecko vs khtml
by Dmitry Ivanov on Sunday 12/Sep/2004, @00:41
Look at screenshots of the article:

http://www.solutions.lv/~dimss/gallery/tmp/khtml_vs_gecko/index.html

I think they speak for themselves...
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WYSIWYG Editing in Konqueror
by Joachim Werner on Sunday 12/Sep/2004, @09:15
I am very pleased to see this project. Konqueror does most of the things right already (I've been using it as my default browser for a couple of months now), but there is one thing only the Gecko engine is able to do on Linux right now: in-page WYSIWYG editing. If I get it right, a Konqueror with the Gecko engine should be able to run the existing Mozilla-based WYSIWYG-editors like HTMLAREA or Kupu. That would eliminate one of the last reasons for me to still use Mozilla/Firebird from time to time ...
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Mozilla Platform with QT will be unstoppable
by Anthony Tarlano on Sunday 12/Sep/2004, @12:08
I don't think many understand the ramifications of this news!

Now we can have all the Mozilla apps, firebird, sunbird, etc.., as well as the mozilla platform internals XUL, XBL, XPCOM, spidermonkey, etc. work with QT and KDE.

This is the best news I have seen all year..
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Also available for kde 3.3?
by 0tom0 on Sunday 12/Sep/2004, @14:00
This are really great news.
Does anybody know if this will also be available for kde 3.3 or just for 3.4(4.0)?

Tom
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KHTML deprecated?
by KDE developer on Sunday 12/Sep/2004, @14:43
Please please do *NOT* kick khtml.
Make "kfirefox" a choice (optional), but khtml is just so cool.
khtml is THE choice for me, and as maybe some of you know: even the "brand new firefox" has its old contamination (hope this is the right word) whereas khtml s so clean and *small*.

- khtml fan
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Happy about this development
by Matthew on Monday 13/Sep/2004, @03:16
I gotta say i'm quite happy about this development
first of all because firefox never looked right in kde due to its gtk themeing
and second of all if they manage to seperate Gecko Engine from Mozilla properly as kpart then i can use Konqueror Exclusivly and for me it means less space being used
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whats the latest commit import from Apple WebCore?
by somekool on Tuesday 14/Sep/2004, @15:23
well, thats good we now have a new standalone browser made with Qt/KDE libs.
know, we need konqueror ship as a standalone packages (with khtml)

what about fix from apple, long time I have not heard about new commits from Apple. they are at version 1.25 in Safari 1.2. And gmail works fine in safari but don't in konqueror. please get the new fixes.

http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/webcore/
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Credit where credit is due
by Steven T. Hatton on Wednesday 15/Sep/2004, @02:29
The first time I skimmed this article, I had the sense it was more one-sided than it actually is. The author /did/ acknowledge that the ease of porting was due to the design of both KDE and Mozilla. My original reason for returning to the article to respond was to stress that Mozilla's design was probably a significant element in the success of the effort. After reading it again, that's not necessary. Nonetheless, I do want to point out what appears to me to be a very noteworthy aspect of Mozilla's design approach:

http://www.mozilla.org/scriptable/xpidl/idl-authors-guide/rules.html#interfaces

I've never actually written code using the approach, but it does seem to provide a framework for very clearly defined interfaces. I'm not saying KDE should or could use that exact approach. I'm just pointing it out as food for thought.
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title
by Mathi on Thursday 16/Sep/2004, @13:35
when will be binaries/source be released? Should one has to wait for KDE3.4 or KDE3.3.1?
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Hacker Programes
by salah on Thursday 23/Dec/2004, @07:20
I need hacher programes
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Alot of time has passed, what's the status?
by crobot on Saturday 16/Apr/2005, @15:52
It has been a long time since this announcement, i've thoroughly searched google, but haven't a clue what has happened. What is the status of this project?
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