In kicking off the Macworld Expo
keynote, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled
a new Macintosh web browser named
Safari. Jobs
said the browser was
"based on standards", "works with any Web site", has much-improved
performance over IE (page-loading speed is "three times faster",
JavaScript performs twice as fast and it launches "40% faster" - comparisons
to Netscape 7.0 shows similar performance gains on the Macintosh platform).
The KDE connection: "[f]or its Web page
rendering engine, Safari draws on software from the Konqueror open source
project. Weighing in at less than one tenth the size of another open
source renderer, Konqueror helps Safari stay lean and responsive."
The good news for Konqueror: Apple, which said that it will be
"a good open source citizen [and] share[] its enhancements with
the Konqueror open source community", has today sent all
changes, along with a detailed changelog, to the KHTML developers.
Congratulations to the KHTML developers for this recognition of
their outstanding efforts. Update @22:34: Dirk Mueller has
posted
an interesting mail from the Safari engineering manager as well
as his response. Hats off to collaboration!
Apple Announces New "Safari" Browser
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Comments
Agree, including lack of support for xml files containing tag like this:
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="blah.xsl"?>
which on IE and Moz causes them to transform xml using the xsl file.
Konqueror will likely not support this for years ...
One thing Safari will have that is better than Konqueror and 7 gazillion times better than mozilla is a usable UI for bookmarks history and searching.
MOZILLA'S BOOKMARK UI IS SO BAD I NEVER BOOKMARK THINGS AT ALL ...and konqueror's is barely better.
I just use google and hope forthe best.
press F9 in mozilla
> Too bad that these efforts were not coordinated from the beginning,
> because right now, the changes in safari-khtml look very massive
> (and impressive!), so basically this is a fork. I hope that the fork
> will be closed soon, though, maybe in time for KDE-3.2?
Perhaps now people see how seminal the Aegypten and Kroupware Projects were/are in this regard.
Congratulations!
KDE really rocks. i love it!
gunnar
Apple started by borrowing KDE's JavaScript implementation (KJS)
Now, they've moved onto KHTML to help replace M$'s "Internet Exploder"
Methinks perhaps Apple might be getting tired of being tied down with crappy old versions of M$Office as well, so can we expect AppleOffice soon, based on KOffice of course :-)
Why don't they just buy Trolltech and free the code for all platforms; that way the community can port all KDE apps and frameworks to the Mac easier than currently being done by the good guys at the Fink project, and at the same time they can be ported over to windoze so we can destroy M$ in their own back yard!
Jingle Bells,
Bill Gates Smells,
Ballmer's Run Away,
Oh What Fun To See KDE Ride
Into One, Micro Soft Way... Hey!!
;-)
> so can we expect AppleOffice soon, based on KOffice of course :-)
Well, Appleworks already exists. Whether it's future versions will be based on KOffice or OpenOffice is a good question :)
> Whether it's future versions will be based on
> KOffice or OpenOffice is a good question
Tough call to be sure. KOffice is probably tons simpler to tweak into an Apple looking application. By default it simply looks nicer, and KWord offers a distinctly different approach from MS Word. It's also far more inline with a publishing application, which is certainly smack dab in the middle of Apple's core market. Just try getting a Quark user to bring up MS Word some time. It makes for some darn entertaining and colorful language.
For all that's going for KOffice, OpenOffice still has significant advantages. It's codebase and stability are quite obviously more mature. The file importing and exporting from MS products is about as good as can be found in any competing application. There is also the usability advantage that OO mimicks MS Office so closely that training needs are reduced.
What may just toss the whole decision over to OO is that it is being actively worked on right now for OSX, where KOffice isn't. Depends on how fast they would want to come to market with an MS Office replacement. If there's no hurry, they may tweak away at KOffice through 2003 for a big announcement in 2004. Whatever happens, it'll make for one heck of a show if they do push MS products off their product line.
I actually thought about attempting to take a look at doing the port of Koffice.... How hard can it actually be? There is a native version of QT for the Mac so the widgets are handled out the box with a recompile... the tough part is finding out what are the absolute minimum KDE libs that are needed for Koffice to work. The Fink project has all of them native to Darwin X11... So at the worst you have to run them thru Qmake and compile for Mac. Relink where the apps look for the libraries so they look within the .app bundle instead of the system if needed....
I know I am probably smoking crack... Since I can not remember how to do half that stuff! But I think somebody more skilled then I could knock out a nasty version of it in a couple of weeks tops with the eval release of MacQT 3.1.1.
Might be an interesting thing for someone on the KDE side of the house to do to take advantage of some of the momentum of the safari release.
Looks like The Fink Project already has a KOffice package done up.
http://fink.sourceforge.net/pdb/package.php/koffice
BTW, thanks for the "Fink" reference. This is the first that I've heard about it. Looks like they've already managed to get quite a bit done over there.
Personally, I won't be doing much playing with OSX until Quark supports it. When it does, I'll have at least two machines in my marketing department moving on over to it. Most likely I'll keep one box around for myself to play with. It would be just too weird seeing KOffice up in Aqua.
If not though about this seams an ideal solution, but think a little bit more and you will easly find why apple would never do this... it would be their death... who would buy apple's hardware (even if better built) when they can have a cheap PC that will run their software for free?
Trust me, this WILL not happen, all that would possibly be left would be Pro software (Final Cut, DVD Studio Pro and Cie).
OpenOffice sounds like the obvious choice. Many rumours are about that Apple is prepping for an Office like suite to take over M$ in the advent that M$ pulls support for Mac.
>"who would buy apple's hardware (even if better built) when they can have a cheap PC that will run their software for free?"<
Well, for the most part Apples 'Final' versions tend to be pretty rock solid. I totally respect the KDE/GNOME/LINUX crowds, keeping software 'real', but for peoples such as myself who seem to be able to run an file browser amuck, we have come to heavily rely on the overly propietorized MacOS to help us forget about what our computer is doing and just use the software we need to get a job done. I just want to plug in my computer and use my software. Anything else is just Time lots and lots of time!!!!!!
Thank goodness for OSX and its 'unix' underpinnings! The clueless such as myself are starting to realise the amazing works of the OpenSource community.
My hat is off to you all!
Not in an effort to be rude, nor pro Microsoft, but the Microsoft Mac Buisness Unit (MBU) has done a great job with Office v.X. It is the best version of the Office on any platform. It's stability, speed, look, and feel are superb. I have hatted M$Office since version 6 which was the spawn of Satan. Despite this the new MBU has produced and maintained some great products: MSOffice v.X, Remote Desktop Connection, and MSN Messenger. Sure Windows Media Player on the Mac sucks a fat one but ever since version 6.4 on the PC is has becoming nothing but pure trash. Just thought I would toss in my ideas.
An office-like Apple product, if done correctly (AppleWorks 6.2, OSX port is NOT an example to follow), would be a terriffic thing.
Oh, and buy the way, Ballmer is weiredest guy on the face of the planet.
This is a GREAT example for how Open Source works! Now if only others would realize the potential power in adopting OSS!
cesman
"Next Step" ... hmm a pun! :-)
... why not some ways to make migrating AppleScript to KScripts (coming soon!)
... implications of this for GNUstep and a GNUstep based browser.
C++ and ObjC can suposedly be mixed in the same file in futre versions of gcc ...
Thanks for using open code Apple and contributing bug fixes to CUPS Konqui etc.
Now: RELEASE A VERSION OF QUICKTIME THAT WORKS ON UNIX
Sorry for the all caps ... Apple has almost 8 years to do this and they SIMPLY WILL NOT DO IT.
If you do it I will help whn it comes tine to convert/port Quartz to something the Adobe doesn't OWN (hmm fresco and SVG ... heheh).
Considering that Mac OS X is FreeBSD 4.4 with a pseudo Mach/BSD Kernel (Darwin), with Coccoa and Carbon APIs derived from Next, and a Quartz/ PDF rendering engine ...
I'd say that Apple *does* have a version of Quicktime that works on UNIX. ;-)
<<<
Darwin Michaels-Mac.local. 6.3 Darwin Kernel Version 6.3: Sat Dec 14 03:11:25 PST 2002; root:xnu/xnu-344.23.obj~4/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc
>>>
> Now: RELEASE A VERSION OF QUICKTIME THAT WORKS ON UNIX
> Sorry for the all caps ... Apple has almost 8 years to do this and they SIMPLY WILL NOT DO IT.
But I thought Quicktime worked in OSX?
but quicktime works on unix!!
http://www.mplayerhq.hu
apple cannot release quicktime opensource due to the licensing agreement with sorensen, also in the new quicktime, Mpeg4 is used and that works on all platforms...
Who said they need to make it open source? Real Player 8 is closed source and works fine (albeit not supported, I think I remembering seeing a Real One for Linux, but Real Player 8 works fine for me without much fluff).
I've tried using Mplayer to play Quicktime, and I've gotten audio but no video. Granted, I might have been doing something wrong. Mplayer is great though, its better at playing DivX then Windows Media Player in my experience.
At first when I read about this at OS News I could barely believe it. I don't know if being on Apple puts KHTML in the "mainstream" but it certainly puts it out there.
When did you try MPlayer for Quicktime? I believe it's a recent development that MPlayer caught up to the most recent Quicktime codec. If you haven't tried it in the past month or so, give the latest version a shot.
I built mplayer with QT6 support on debian a couple of weeks ago, and it worked just fine for everything I threw at it. It's worth noting, however, that it uses the Win32 QT libraries for decoding, just like it does with the other Win32 libs that mplayer can use.
Yeah, it works, but it'd be nice to see an official, supported version of QT on a *nix platform. (and please, make some .debs available? ;) )
"...it'd be nice to see an official, supported version of QT on a *nix platform.
Mac OS X is a "*nix platform".
> Now: RELEASE A VERSION OF QUICKTIME THAT WORKS ON UNIX
well, not exactly from Apple, but you may want to check this:
http://www.openquicktime.org/
I suggest one would hop on this great OS X site and look at this neet little CLI QT player ;D
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20021021055603766
...call the guys at Slashdot!! Quick!!
;-)
--Darkstar
eheh they buried the news as deep as they could inside
an insipid review of MacWorld.
Insanely biased they are ;)
Not only that, but a whole bunch of them are griping that Apple didn't use Gecko. Slashdot grows tiresome.
Some of them don't really want choice in software; they just want a different monopoly.
Stumbled across you on the Web.
Gimmie a holler and tell Glenn I said hi!
Shallom.
Apple did quite a bit of work coding a layer that sits between KHTML and Apple's own Cocoa framework for Mac OS X. This is not what Apple is contributing. The Changelog clearly shows a multitude of bugfixes, improvements and additions specifically to KHTML in areas including: ECMA (Javascript), CSS handling, HTML rendering, XML, Document Object Model and core services. Clearly this will result in a direct improvement to KHTML (and ultimately Konquorer) and, judging by the reaction of the KHTML developers, is much appreciated.
I agree that a more open appoach where communication could have started earlier would have been adventageous to both groups. However, Apple is not required to do so and was likely trying to keep this project as secret as possible. Now that the wraps are off Safari, I'm sure Apple's developers will be in contact a great deal.
Now if only the Eazel folks could explain what happened to all that investor RCF...
"Apple did quite a bit of work coding a layer that sits between KHTML and Apple's own Cocoa framework for Mac OS X. This is not what Apple is contributing."
I have done Objective-C wrappers for the KHTML classes (via C bindings, not calling C++ directly as you could with Apple Objective-C++). They in the cvs under kdebindings/kdeobjc. I haven't had time to generate the Objective-C bindings for a while, but I should have some time to do it soon. Maybe extracting the KHTML Objective-C classes into a separate cocoa compatible framework could be a useful project?
-- Richard
The layer being talked about is called kwq (apparently pronounced "quack"), and is in fact part of the open-sourced webcore project. It seems to implement the APIs that KHTML wants in terms of Apple's native frameworks (though I don't know much about KHTML, so I could be wrong).
This is great news.
By the way, now that konq has tabs, any chance it'll get "mouse gestures" too? At least that nifty right-left "back" click sequence from a certain Norweigan browser would be nice...
I never liked Mouse Gestures. Saw that feature in Galeon and hated it. Often whenever I move my Mouse some action takes place and then I think 'wow something broken now ?'. Please no Gestures they are stupid.
I use gestures in Opera, and I love them! Of course, if Konqueror gets gestures, they would be an optional feature. If you don't like them, switch them off. No problems there.
No, that's the wrong attitude. Yes include gesture support, and make it disabled by default so as not to scare the newbies who don't have a clue what's happening, and for those that just don't like it.
It's all about options, not straight-line decisions ;-)
Mouse gestures don't have to be a browser feature, but a whole KDE feature (disbled by default) becaue they're very important in other enviroments and everywhere for handicapped people.
Not sure about konqueror but this is from the kde 3.2 feature page:
KHotKeys
Update to version 2.0 (http://dforce.sh.cvut.cz/~seli/en/khotkeys), which includes more features like mouse gestures. Lubos Lunak
have fun
Felix
khotkeys2.0pre2 works even with KDE3.1
And it is nice. It needs a tweak for using the right button, though.
good luck.
SoN
Mouse gesture to go back? Why? Just activate the "Right click goes back in history" option (and use kind of gesture to pop up right mouse button menu in future).
Mouse gestures are the only missing feature that keeps me from using Konqueror as my primary browser. Once you learn to use gestures, they are such an incredible time-saving feature, that you can't ever go back. I don't need to go to a menu or take my hand off the mouse to open a new window, close a window, go back or forward in the history, etc. It is really a great feature, and I wonder why GUI environments like KDE and GNOME don't make this a feature, for the same reason that it is great in a browser: if your hand is already on the mouse, and the pointer is in the middle of the page, why would you want to have to go all the way up to a menu to do what you want to do?
KHotKeys2 in KDE 3.2 supports generic mouse gestures. Not sure how good the integration with Konqueror is though.
I agree. I use mouse gestures in opera and theyre great! Once you use them, you can never be without them. They save a great deal of time and energy and since there is no need for ugly navigation buttons cluttering your browser, you have more space for page content. =)
I'm all in favour of having them, too. Not only backwards and forwards, but also open a new tab, go home, increase/decrease font size etc.
Are there no plug-ins (mozilla style) available?
Cheers
This message is posted from safari. I thought Chimera was a fast browser. This is blazing fast.
I can't explain it. Super duper duper fast.
Wow! This is so exciting! :-)
I look forward to trying this out tomorrow on the OS X box I have access to.
Just a small note that I didn't see here yet: AtheOS also used a modified KHTML, again with its own wrappers around KDE/Qt things.
I wonder how Apple handled KIO, KParts, etc. that make Konqueror more than just a plain old web browser (not that I particularly like all the default semantics in either Konqi or IE (the other browser that claims that title)).
Ken
I don't think they used Konqueror, just KHTML and KJS.
Safari source code is now available at
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/webcore/
WebCore :
http://a1408.g.akamai.net/7/1408/1388/010303/www.opensource.apple.com/pr...
JavaScriptCore :
http://a1408.g.akamai.net/7/1408/1388/010303/www.opensource.apple.com/pr...
I have long been a Mac user, but had never felt so happy about it. Today I realized that Apple is truly supporting Open Source and viceversa.
Thanks to all of you for making it possible for us OS X users to have the privilege of such a quick browser in our platform.
emxgarcia