Firefox Lead Engineer Scolds KDE Project 669
trent42 writes "Firefox lead developer Ben Goodger has had harsh words on his blog for the KDE project, in light of its public tiff with Apple over the KHTML rendering engine. Goodger says 'Safari's renderer is vastly superior to the KHTML used by Konqueror,' and that the KDE developers should follow Apple's lead and focus more on the needs of users, instead of insisting on software perfection."
Ben Goodger's blog URL (Score:4, Informative)
Whatever.... (Score:2, Informative)
this [kdedevelopers.org].
Let Goodger get back to selling the world on Firefox or whatever it is that he does and leave KHTML en Webcore to their respective developers.
Re:KDE should be grateful. (Score:3, Informative)
However, they are angry at something: people like you. Coming here on
Re:KDE should be grateful. (Score:5, Informative)
KDE-guys did not complain about Apple as such. They even specificly mentioned that Apple is abiding by the license. what they complained about were the USERS who whined when KHTML took time to incorporate improvements made in WebCore!
Do you "get it" now, or do I have to hit you with a clue-by-four?
Safari and KHTML (Score:5, Informative)
Submitted by carewolf on Fri, 05/13/2005 - 10:33. [kdedevelopers.org]
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Safari and KHTML againNotice how there isn?t a vs in the title?
Hyatt and Maciej joined us on IRC yesterday, and we had some really good discussions. I might as well also admit that Maciejs comment was true (but out of context). Please notice that that implies we are discussing solutions and a common future. The idea of a common source tree is pretty much abandoned as we have very different goals and requirements, but we are discussing improved cooperation. With Apple just having released Tiger and us preparing for KDE4 we have a unique opportunity for bringing our source trees closer again.
Since Apple is being a nice guy for the time being, I will let them announce how things will improve once we have a solution, but please, no more ?vs.? stories for the time being, we are working on solving it.
Submitted by carewolf on Sat, 04/30/2005 - 13:22. [kdedevelopers.org]
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Emphasis added by me...I just wish to weigh in on debacle to clear up some mistakes. First of all I would like to say I agree with Zack. The annoying part is not that Apple don?t cooperate as much as they could. They are actually helpfull in answering questions and _tries_ at least to separate OS X specific features in the code (allthough they fail miserably at it). No, our problem are users who think Apple does more and underestimate the effort it takes for us to implement patches from WebCore. We are doing this for free and for fun, all we really want is appreciation for our effort.
Re:KDE should be grateful. (Score:3, Informative)
Considering that this thing has been discussed quite a bit recently, I would have guessed that by now everyone who is interested on this would have read the ORIGINAL messages that sparked this whole thing? I mean this message [kdedevelopers.org]
Re:Odd.. (Score:2, Informative)
makes open-source different, and much appreciated.
Sorry, but I don't think this is true in all cases. I cite the recent negativity
against Debian and the lack of a recent release. They're now reacting to that
negativity and getting Sarge out the door.
Time to market - while not the ONLY thing - is still important. Whether it's
FOSS or not.
Re:Blah... (Score:5, Informative)
The KDE-developers commented about the USERS who whine when Safari-patches don't get merged in to KHTML. They never whined about Apple as such. They even mentioned that Apple is abiding with the license.
How exactly are they "pain to work with"? Apple got a kick-ass HTML-code from them, with NO questions asked, no price being asked and with zero red tape! How exactly does that mean they are "pain to work with"? If anything, this incident shows that COMPANIES are "pain to work with". KDE-developers REALLY wanted to work with Apple, but Apple wasn't interested!
Re:Some times a little conflict is good.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:User Needs vs Software Perfection (Score:3, Informative)
Re:User Needs vs Software Perfection (Score:5, Informative)
2- You probably missed all the proprietary MS crap in their implementation of the CSS, such as scollbar shit, that was NOT implemented in a W3C-compliant style (W3C allows proprietary CSS properties, but you HAVE to use precise prefix of type "-name-", which is why you see such things as -moz-outline)
3- CSS in IE6 is not "kinda bad", it's an awful heap of crap and a pain to work with from a dev's point of view
4- And if we extend from W3C's CSS to W3C's everything, MSIE sucks at W3C's HTML (heaps of missing tags, or not completely implemented ones), XHTML (which it doesn't understand at all in fact), W3C DOM/DOM Events and their binding in ECMA-262 (also known as ECMAScript/Javascript), XSL/XSLT...
Re:Agile (Score:3, Informative)
Apple sells hardware. KDE is a developer-first focus. They profit stricly on developer sales. Not hardware, sales, as Apple ..
I'm not 100% certain, but I *think* Apple sells software, too. Stuff like OS X, iWork, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Motion, iLife, WebObjects, Shake. From all evidence that I can see, that's software.
Re:In a way I agree (Score:3, Informative)
it has the panther, tiger and something else themes
This is an old story (Score:2, Informative)
Lucid had a product to get out, Stallman wanted to do everything right and his way. It resulted in the emacs/Xeamcs schism [jwz.org]. I didn't work on this directly, but saw my coworkers dealing with this as it happened. My view of the whole thing certainly biased by my experience there. Regardless, it wasn't pretty.
Wherever there are multiple development teams this tension between the ones that want to get the product out now, and the ones that want to do "the right thing" [jwz.org] will exist. I personally think the tension is good. You should strive to do the right thing, but when it comes right down to it you need to produce something people can use in a timely manner.
I just hope this doesn't produce another schism.
No user satisfaction without software perfection (Score:3, Informative)
Thanks to this perfection, KDE builds and runs, while Mozilla/Firefox can fall over when you pick wrong compiler flags -- especially on "exotic" platforms like FreeBSD/amd64.
The amount of compiler warnings in Mozilla code is astounding. Quite clearly it was written by result-oriented professional engineers, rather than the process-enjoying hobbyists.
Re:Can't wait... (Score:3, Informative)
Javascript itself has been standardized by the ECMA as ECMA-262 (ECMAScript) ever since Netscape donated the language to said ECMA (even though ECMA's work blows and no one ever read the normative definition because it sucks donkey balls), and W3C's DOM and DOM Events have extensive documentations [u]including documentations on how you're supposed to implement ECMAScript bindings[/u].
And that's not to mention really good reference sites such as QuirksMode [quirksmode.org], which is pretty much a Javascript bible (only sound, logical and actually holding relevant information... not a bible at all after some more thought).
Now if we specifically consider GMail and Google maps, they're not using only standardized javascript, they're using a feature called XMLHttpRequest which isn't normalized (and isn't even Javascript everywhere, the only way to use XMLHttpRequest-ish code in MSIE is to create ActiveX objects), and about that very command your point (about the lack of normalization) stands true.
BTW Google Suggests also uses XMLHttpRequest
Re:In a way I agree (Score:1, Informative)
Re:User Needs vs Software Perfection (Score:4, Informative)
They are saying that, despite all the media to the contrary, Apple's work is of no use to the KHTML developers. This is because Apple has been providing its changes in huge blobs without providing any clues what those changes are for or how they relate the the rest of the KHTML renderer.
Apple is following the license, which was never in doubt, but is being mean-spirited about it. The KDE devs just want people to stop the nonsensical meme that Apple is somehow helping KHTML development.
As I understand the situation, it is somewhat like an editor of a large book returning to the author only the errors in the book, but without any type of markup or explanation, in no particular order, and in a foreign language the author doesn't know. While the editor was (strictly speaking) doing his job (which is to find the errors in the book), he wasn't being very helpful.
The code could be sorted out, given enough time, but it's just as productive to ignore Apple's changes and do it from scratch.
This has nothing to do with focusing on the needs of the users, and it has nothing to do with software perfection. It is purely an issue of Apple being credited with helping KHTML, when it is doing nothing of the sort.
Re:Konq vs FireFox vs world (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Apple offered, but KHTML didn't want to. (Score:2, Informative)
I thought they suggested the KHTML team adopt WebCore wholesale. It should probably be noted that large portions of WebCore are written in Objective-C++, a language a stock install of GCC doesn't compile. This makes adopting WebCore completely infeasable.
Re:In a way I agree (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This sounds so reasonable (Score:3, Informative)
So, I guess in this case, the squeaky wheel gets the grease