Re: webkit in konqueror!

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Re: webkit in konqueror!
by Marc Driftmeyer on Monday 10/Mar/2008, @11:34

The sheer amount of projects, personnel, testing and general use cases for WebKit far outpaces KHTML allowing KDE to leverage a lot of resources without having to have the team resources to duplicate such efforts.

It's a nice example of community re-use.

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Re: webkit in konqueror!
by NabLa on Monday 10/Mar/2008, @17:11

I do see the technical reasons, however, I wonder whether the KHTML guys feel left behind... Are they shifting towards working with Apple on WebKit?

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Re: webkit in konqueror!
by SadEagle on Monday 10/Mar/2008, @19:47

No. There have been many attempts to work with Apple before, but they never worked out. Apple is good at having people work for them, not so much at working with them. And while they have some very nice and very smart people who I respect deeply working for them, they do a lot of things which, while they make sense for them, would be simply insane in a community-driven project.

And, speaking for myself, I will not work on any project which is disconnected from the KDE community and provides no way of protecting our interests. I am not willing to hand over control to a good chunk of our infrastructure to Apple. That Qt will be under control of Nokia is bad enough.

Will there be more tries to work together? Who knows. But at this point, it's all moot, since there aren't enough people interested in proper integration of WebCore (no, thin wrappers around incomplete Qt ports of out-of-date versions of the renderer don't count) for it to happen, while there are plenty of people who will spread FUD and lie to our users. I am personally open to that from the technical POV (the community issues are big, and I am not the sort of person to resolve them), but there are things I want to do myself, bug reports from our users I want to deal with, and bug reports from our users I have to deal with because it seems like no one else will.

And to the grandparent poster: go use IE. It has the best financial backing in the business.

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Re: webkit in konqueror!
by Patcito on Tuesday 11/Mar/2008, @10:36

> I am not willing to hand over control to a good chunk of our infrastructure to Apple

isn't the LGPL supposed to take care of that?

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Re: webkit in konqueror!
by SadEagle on Tuesday 11/Mar/2008, @11:22

A lot of people believe that, but it's simply not true in 99% of cases. You need people to make things happen, they don't show up out of thin air.

kdeprint was LGPLd, too, but there wasn't an active community around it, so when the main driving force behind it left, it was orphaned, and then abandoned entirely in KDE4. The result is that KDE4 has made a huge step back in printing functionality.

What some people want to see happen with QtWebKit, and in particular the way they are pushing it, make a chance of any KDE community connection with it close to nil, which means things will soon bitrot, and if one of the big corporate pushers has a change in priorities, we'll be pretty screwed.

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Re: webkit in konqueror!
by NabLa on Wednesday 12/Mar/2008, @02:57

That's what I would imagine. Personally I'd continue work on KHTML and stuff out Webkit. "Just" port over good features and the like. What I mean is that KDE has got total control over KHTML, its quality is very high and improvements can be made. I don't know about the quality of the source code as I'm not fit to judge that. But I keep my word on that I've yet to come to a site kthml can't handle since... well, probably KDE 3.4.

Not sure if some parts of the KDE project realize that KDE is made by people and people, as such, can get demotivated, angry, etc. If I was a khtml dev I would feel as awkward about trying to shove in Webkit as a kdelibs guy would feel if a different libs infrastructure was pushed in too.

How is Webkit going to be maintainable at all if it ain't provided by apple as a maintainable piece of software?

So I ain't a KDE dev, but the more I think about Webkit and KDE, the less sense it makes. I think whoever's working on Webkit kde is just wasting time they could be using into something more productive (let it be improving KHTML itself, or getting on with their own lives). The "choice is good" argument is a bit weak here. I've got a choice already: Firefox.

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