Mozilla Project Hurt by Apple's Decision to use KH 647
Anonymous Coward writes "I Read this article from ZDNet claiming how some of the Mozilla developers were hurt by Apple's decision to use KHTML over Gecko. I can see both their points. Mozilla was made for cross-platform compatibility, and this probably adds to the bloat, however that's not what they were looking for. They wanted small and fast."
Nothing new here (Score:-1, Insightful)
Pride of Authorship (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll continue to use Mozilla, if it makes the developers happy!
Safari is only half finished... it will bloat (Score:4, Insightful)
At the end of the day though, who cares if they use Mozilla or not?
What's important is that they're dumping IE, thus freeing themselves from a dependence on Microsoft.
PS: "Bloated" or not, Mozilla runs just fine on my PC.
chimera! (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh boo hoo... (Score:5, Insightful)
oh well no shit (Score:2, Insightful)
KHTML developers (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, no! Horror of Horrors! (Score:5, Insightful)
Good to see KHTML in the commercial spotlight, and not just Mozilla. I'm typing this in Mozilla, which I sear by and tell all my friends about, but KHTML is good, too.
No... (Score:4, Insightful)
In the end this is a bit of a win for Mozilla and all open source software.
1. It is a high profile (if low distribution) browser based on an open source core. This is a good thing for open source projects in general.
2. Competition in the open source browser arena is not a bad thing. I predict that both browsers will get better as a result or some good natured competition.
3. Apple is not anti-Mozilla, they just decided to use a different rending engine for Safari.
4. Chimera (Mozilla based) is still a better browser than Safari on MacOS X.
Why hate KHTML? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple made a perfectly valid choice, and contributed their changes back to the free software community. Yet another great free software project now benefits from Apple, at IE/Microsoft's expense of market share on Mac desktops.
Don't draw any conclusions you don't have to. I love Mozilla, too, but Apple made a decision, and one which even most Mozilla developers feel was a valid technical choice, even if it wasn't the one they themselves would have made.
What exactly did Apple do wrong again?
even if it's "half finished".... (Score:5, Insightful)
Safari has a ton of room to grow before it achieves Mozilla's mammoth size.
Regardless of this, Safari is far more than halfway done.
Portability not an issue (Score:5, Insightful)
The Beauty of Choice .. (Score:5, Insightful)
Show me... (Score:1, Insightful)
The point of HTML is that it is cross-platform, once you have a good app on your platform to view it (preferably adhereing to certain standards), what more do you need?
Hey guys... (Score:5, Insightful)
"ZDNet trolls for more page hits yet again - film at 11."
Competition is good (Score:5, Insightful)
However, seems like the KDE folks have done a great job here, so congrats to them. The Mozilla folks shouldn't feel "hurt", this should motivate them to improve what is already a really good browser.
The competition is not only IE, but more stuff is showing up all the time. That's great, competition in the browser arena is back. For a moment I tought we'd be stuck with IE forever!
Why KHTML? (Score:3, Insightful)
Mozilla is a lot more mature, feature-wise, and Apple was probably looking for a clean slate. They just want a stripped-down rendering engine, and the interface is all theirs.
Re:even if it's "half finished".... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's great! (Score:5, Insightful)
Good in the long run (Score:2, Insightful)
Mozilla is great, but the kHTML project is also good and definitely worthy competition to Gecko. The competition, and even a rivalry to some extent, will cause make developers for both projects work harder to maintain "an edge." Just as the competition between KDE and Gnome promotes a better windowing environment, hopefully this competition will improve the rendering capabilities of open-source browsers.
Good for Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Safari lacks tabs (Score:3, Insightful)
So Mac users are especially prone to want tabbed browsing, as Mozilla products offer.
I started using Chimera a few days before Safari beta was released. I really like Safari, but in just those few days I was utterly hooked by the tabs of Chimera.
Until Safari supports tabs, I'm sticking with Chimera. I doubt I'm alone.
One thing to note, though... ALL Mac browsers now kick Microsoft's ass. Bye, bye IE-piece-of-crap. In any event, it is an awesome twist to see the Mac browser market so vitalized.
Fast web browsing was best with (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh well. At least I'll have something to gripe about when I'm an old man. "Back in my day..."
It's good for the software industry! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No... (Score:3, Insightful)
Who cares anyway? I don't think BMW or Mercedes will ever "take 100% of the market"... what's so bad about being the minority, as long as it's a quality product?
--NBVB
Not that bad for Mozilla. . . (Score:2, Insightful)
I think another viable browser that is W3C compliant (like the Khtml) gaurantees that more web sites follow W3C standards rather than IE's. That's good for all browsers(except IE).
Good for Standards (Score:5, Insightful)
The payoff for pushing for standards is that *everyone* benefits as long as they stick to said standards, and Mozilla's efforts seem to be working in that regard.
Re:even if it's "half finished".... (Score:3, Insightful)
Safari weighs in at 7.2 megs, Mozilla is 38.3 megs.
In all fairness, Mozilla has a full-blown email client, news reader, etc., included in that size.
A fairer comparison would be to Mozilla Phoenix [mozilla.org], which is a browser only. Still considerably bigger than Safari but nowhere near the size of the fullblown Mozilla.Strategic Decision (Score:5, Insightful)
For the longest time, Netscape owned the browser market, and set the standards. That was OK for Apple, except that the Mac version of Navigator lagged behind the Windows version, particularly with Java implementation. Then MS came along, and there was a "standards battle" between IE and Navigator; MS was so determined to win that they even wrote a better version of IE for Mac than for Windows. IE has emerged on top and, true to form, MS is now trying to move the standards to favor IE on Windows with things like ActiveX controls. Netscape/Mozilla has been and continues to be holding their own, without assistance from Apple. Apple's support of KHTML instantly puts a new rendering engine on millions of computers and lessens MS's grip on the web (albeit slightly), because IE for Mac will not be the default browser anymore on Macs (I'm assuming).
The best thing that could happen right now in the browser wars is not for Apple to jump into the IE/Mozilla fray, but to stir a rivalry between two open source browsers, KHTML and Mozilla. Get these to browsers to compete on features, and put MS back into the position of being a follower rather than a leader.
just fix the UA string, 'k? (Score:1, Insightful)
C'mon, Apple, it's 2003. The Mozilla-spoofing stunt was stupid when Microsoft first did it back in the Stone Age of '95-'96. Just come out and label yourself "KHTML/2.1 [en] (MacOS X)/Safari 1.0" or something similar. With all the high-quality spec-compliant browsers currently available, any serious website that is still sniffing for "Mozilla" is doing itself a disservice. There's no reason for it anymore.
Code to specs and trust the browser to do something sensible with it. If it doesn't, the user will upgrade, which is a good thing.
Multiple browser testing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Safari is only half finished... it will bloat (Score:5, Insightful)
Chimera is 20.6MB while Safari is 7.2MB and neither of them provide alternate localizations, afaik. So you're saying it takes 13.4MB of code to properly handle CSS? Believe it or not, but Gecko re-invents the wheel many times over under the hood for the sake of being cross-platform, and pays for it.
Re:KHTML can't be _that_ bad w/r/t cross-platform (Score:4, Insightful)
Safari does not use QT for MacOS X.
Chimera, yes (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been using Chimera [mozilla.org] nearly exclusively for months. The Dec. 20 release (vers. 0.6 + a few features) is the nicest so far. What a development curve in the past year compared to the much older Opera and iCab!
I think it's interesting that Chimera is related to NS and Mozilla (Gecko) yet is soooo much cleaner and faster. Unfortunately it gets tarred with the same brush by people who haven't used it much.
Chimera's a lot more Aqua than Safari, too! I think Safari is stunningly ugly for an Apple product.
I agree and don't see why both open source projects can't continue. Competition is not just healthier than bloated monopoly, it's essential when we don't even know precisely what we're after. And our shared mission must be to kill IE, or at least beat it back....
Re:even if it's "half finished".... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:abandon ship (Score:5, Insightful)
competition (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, but I think we can extend that to say "multiple Open Source browsers on the market." I think Apple adopting and improving on KHTML helps the KHTML guys, which makes them a better competitor to Mozilla. The same way a M$ monopoly is harmful to the industry, a monopoly by one Open Source browser, IMHO, is also not a good thing. So at the end, I think this will help everybody, not just Apple.
Re:even if it's "half finished".... (Score:2, Insightful)
Bloat (Score:5, Insightful)
21.4 MB (21,743,324 bytes) Dec 20,2002.
Safari
7.2 MB (6,928,478 bytes) Jan 11, 2003
Chimera is ONLY the browser and bug feedback.
Holy pessimism. (Score:2, Insightful)
That's pretty significant, and deserves a pat on the back -- not a bunch of whining about why another group was turned away.
Time Warp Baggage (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm using Mozilla to post this and I find it a wonderful standards compliant browser.
However, I've tried on occasion to download the source distribution and frankly I find it far too heavy (abstract, complex) for casual development. Guerilla development won't work for Mozilla; it has degenerated into long term trench warfare for anyone with the stamina for it. I applaud you Mozilla developers, but am not made of the same stuff.
I remember once coming across some C++ portability standards made up by the Mozilla team about 5 years ago. They were relevant to portability back then, but I think things have progressed some over the years. Many of those problems with different platforms have disappeared with release of the ANSI/ISO C++ standard and the work that's gone into modern compilers.
Personally, I think the Mozilla team ought to be unleased to begin Mozilla 2.0 from scratch, based on everything they know so far, and not be shackled to weird platforms from the early 1990s. Let the Moz 1.* tree address the needs of those using old platforms - the standards compliance should keep them humming for years to come.
The Moz 1.* development has progressed admirably, especially if, like me, you've worked in baroque plumbing factories of code, then you can doubly appreciate the accomplishments of the Moz developers.
But it's high time for them to start from a clean slate, just as the Safari folks have.
Re:Oh boo hoo... - AtheOS (Score:5, Insightful)
The crude abstract of this article implies KHTML is not cross platform. History says otherwise.
<soapbox> - you do not need to agree
Personally, I think Mozilla has set free software back about two years. Alternative browser development came to a standstill when netscape released the code. After all, we were all going to have a fast, lean, free, standards compliant browser as soon as they got it compiled. Then came the slips, the rewrites, the bloat, and the delusions of grandeur.
Re:mozilla (Score:4, Insightful)
Good point.... I'd wager that Apple moving away from IE will help push the alternative browsers along. Less people will think "I *have* to use IE to view the web sites I visit" and there will be more people investigating Netscape again, as well as Mozilla, Opera, etc.
Re:Nothing new here (Score:4, Insightful)
<sarcasm>Yep, that sure does "smack of proprietary lock-in".</sarcasm>
Re:Chimera, yes (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, Safari looks like a bad gtk app after the themers first discovered pixmap skins. I've crashed it quite a few times, and seen many rendering errors with it (even on simple pages; Google was all rendered on the left side of the window once, instead of being properly centered). It is very fast on my iBook/500, though, and I'm sure it'll get better with time.
But, for now, Chimera is my browser of choice for OSX. I don't want another ugly metal-brushed app, but if Apple works the bugs out and keeps it as fast as it is now, I'll "switch".
Re:Mozilla Lite? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Why haven't the Gecko-based projects, such as Phoenix, looked at KHTML?"
The answer there may be that it's not as cross-platform-ready as Gecko is; but most likely the answer is more along the lines of "What's KHTML?" due to Mozilla's high exposure.
mozilla, khtml and standards compliance (Score:4, Insightful)
This is really, really interesting to see this though. 2 years ago some people were getting worried that alternative OS users would be unable to browse the web by this time, but today we've got 2 OS standards compliant rendering that beat the pants off IE in speed, correctness, and to top it off, cost.
And despite the technical problems with Mozilla, people are still able to crank out excellent, lean, fast browsers such as Chimera and Phoenix, and other applications for embedded devices, etc.
Mozilla has become a platform, and KHTML has become the lean, fast rendering engine Mozilla was originally going to be.
Cheers
Stop Whining!! (Score:4, Insightful)
QUIT YER WHINING!! Stop crying foul, and focus on your project! So Apple decided to use kHTML as the rendering engine instead of Gecko. So what? How does that impact the Mozilla project? Make it better than Safari! I'm sorry that the decision injured your geek pride, but if you cry foul every time a company doesn't use your sacred works, then you get destracted from the mission of finishing the product.
Short version: FOCUS ON THE JOB!!
Re:Multiple browser testing (Score:4, Insightful)
IE compatibility isn't important. You may not realize this, but the W3C defines web compatibility. As long as Apple implements for the W3C, it doesn't matter who uses their browser.
While many web developers will be willing to test their pages on IE/Mozilla/Opera how many are going to be willing to get a Mac to test this new browser?More to the point, why would anyone need to? I do web development. I test against the W3C implementation. I don't care what browser you use. It doesn't matter. All you need is a W3C compliant browser.
You don't know what borwser I use, and you shouldn't care. I may have written my own. But even if I have, you don't have to get a copy of it to make sure that it works. You just have to make sure that you test against the W3C implementation.
Oh yeah, and anyone who tests against a specific browser and not an standard is a loser ;)
-BrentEspecialy since so many web developers use macs... (Score:4, Insightful)
Phoenix, Mozilla and KHTML (Score:2, Insightful)
Mozilla was intended to be able to render itself (XUL) as well as be a mail reader, online chat tool, and web page composer. It was also intended to be a cross platform web browser and GUI development tool. Of course it is not small - that was not entirely the goal (OEOne and other application developers would have no use for Mozilla if it only rendered web pages).
Had Phoenix been around when Apple was looking at browsers, they may well have just made a Phoenix based browser for OS X branded by Apple. But at the time Apple was looking at OSS HTML engines, it was unclear how much work it would take to get Gecko/Mozilla down to the size Phoenix has now gotten it to now (due to the complexity of Mozilla's code, you can't just take a quick glance and see what needs to be done). It was also very clear that KDE already had a nice little rendering engine, even if it wasn't quite as far along.
So Apple's decision to use KHTML isn't a surprise given their goals and the circumstances at the time. What is nice about all of this is that we'll end up with two very nice rendering engines and browsers out of the deal - Apple will make improvements to KHTMLs rendering of real web pages, and Phoenix will continue to give us a lightweight Gecko browser (which already renders very nicely). Everyone but Microsoft wins. How can Slashdot not love that!?
Mozilla has no reason to be upset (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, KHTML was chosen over Gecko for purely practical reasons. It was smaller, faster and easier to integrate with OS X. As posters have already mentioned, Safari is not a cross-platform project, so it does not need all the extra code that guarantees Gecko works on every OS under the sun.
I would guess that the Mozilla project would have had an uneasy relationship with Safari should they have chosen the Gecko renderer. Look at the mozilla website. It says, "Mozilla is an open-source web browser and toolkit." Note "and toolkit". Mozilla's ambitions are far beyond a simple web browser. Mozilla is aiming for a complete web-based cross platform environment, "the web is the OS". This would all be extra baggage for the web browser. KHTML is just a web-rendering component of a conventional GUI (KDE) and thus fits in better with the ethos of the apple desktop environment.
Re:even if it's "half finished".... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh please. That's such a pile of crap.
Developers always start off thinking they can do what the competition does, except faster and smaller. The Mozilla project themselves started off that way. I remember in the early days them proudly announcing their rendering engine would fit on a floppy disk.
Then they started making it actually work and be useful on the web. They added support for the latest technologies, they made it cross platform (which itself has quite a bit of overhead) and so on.
Getting to about 80% of the features of your nearest competitor while staying small and fast (relatively) isn't hard, but what you always find is that after you've done the last 20% and you have enough compatability to be useful in the real world, and your software has all the hairs necessary to make it work on grans bizarro ancient setup, and then you find you made a mistake in the design that wasn't obvious at the time so you hack around it and so on ... by the time you've done all of that you're just as big and "bloated" as the competition.
The idea that somehow the KHTML have magically produced something better than Gecko is fallacy. Don't get me wrong, KHTML is a fine piece of work, but to pretend it'll remain fast and light when it has to deal with enough web pages to be useful and support all the new tech (XSLT, XForms, SVG etc, XPath, SOAP) that's beginning to filter down into the general purpose web is insane.
Joel Spolski wrote a good article on rewriting software in this way, and despite the fact that KHTML was already there, it fits into his theories quite well. Sometimes you don't have much choice, the old Netscape codebase was SO bad it could never have gone further, but it's something that's done in dire straits only.
Oh and finally, considering Phoenix is smaller than that, but does more, I'm not particularly impressed anyway.
What Does Being Cross-Platform Do For Me? (Score:3, Insightful)
I only use one platform at a time. While I'm waiting for Mozilla to do something, should I find solace in its cross-platform abilities?
Cross-platform code maymake life simpler for coders, but what does it bring to the user?
Public Service Announcement (Score:2, Insightful)
It is only feelings of some of the programmers that were hurt. The actual Mozilla project is not affected by this. It's time to rename the article.
Now, back to your regularly scheduled program.
Re:And this is a Surprise, Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
With all the features they would have to wade through to update mozilla to their standards it would take years. Not to mention mozilla changes very swiftly. For compatibility reasons its a good idea for them to pick KHTML, because its smaller, would take less time for them to optimize for their platform. Nothing is stopping mac users from continuing to use Mozilla if they are interested in bleeding edge web technology.
The point is choice is good. If people are interested in smaller browsers with less clutter (note, size does not always equal clutter/bloat). My only problem with mozilla is the UI bloat. I could care less if IE or Mozilla eats 50MB of my RAM if it works faster. I have a GB of RAM and the only time I use all of it is when I am rendering large scenes in MAX or editing large images in Photoshop/GIMP. But thats my opinion and like assholes, everyone has one.
Open SOurce is a lot like evolution, there are hundreds of projects out there and a lot of them overlap, the successful ones thrive, mutate, and become bigger. The unsuccessful ones whither and die or become incorporated in the bigger ones to help them grow. Besides if Mozilla was the answer to everyone's needs why would anyone bother making KHTML in the first place? Someone was disatisfied with the browsers available and made their own browser. Lucky for us its open-source and everyone can learn from its technology.
Open Source needs Open Minds.
ship shape (Score:2, Insightful)
that's precisely what they did with their darwin operating system, available here [apple.com]
if you poke around a bit, you'll also find rendezvous and quicktime streaming server available for download, as well as the significant changes made to khtml and kjs (called "webcore" and "javascriptcore" on apple's site) ? this all rather puts the lie to your statement that apple doesn't give back to the community
note that apple was not compelled to release any of this, but rather, they chose to do so
DEATH TO BRUSHED METAL!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't be the only one thinking this can I ?? probably... good thing I have my flame retardant vest on.
Re:Actually (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:David Hyatt on KHTML vs Gecko (long) (Score:3, Insightful)
In fairness, nowhere in there does Shaver refute the contention that Gecko is basically unsuited to Apple's requirements, which pretty clearly were fast startup and rendering, followed by correctness.
'jfb
Re:Raise your hand if you read the article (Score:3, Insightful)
That's odd. I read: "We decided it will be easier to make Khtml work right, than to make the Gecko code easier to use/integrate" Which is not a rationalization, but a simple balancing of time/cost factors.
-chris
Re:even if it's "half finished".... (Score:2, Insightful)
You just said it yourself. Safari will be OSX only.
In addition it is just a browser (unlike mozialla) which will cut down on bloat.
They decided this over a year ago! (Score:4, Insightful)
Over all the ruckus about HTML vs. mozilla aparently nobody noticed that Apple based their browser on an open source project and decided against doing it closed-source on their own. I think that's great news.
Re:even if it's "half finished".... (Score:2, Insightful)
As has been stated elsewhere, the figures are installed size. Installer/tarball size is a useless metric, as it drastically impacts both the difference in cross-platform binary sie and the differences in various other non-binary storage (docs, etc.) which should really not be part of the comparison anyway. The binary sizes posted are, for PowerPC binaries, reasonable. I'm not going to go and verify them, but they're certainly in the right general vicinity.
Re:Why hate KHTML? (Score:1, Insightful)