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Apple Businesses

Safari Code Benefiting Open Source Community 66

Posted by pudge from the apple-is-wonderful-and-good dept.
saha writes "Thought this article about Apple's Safari contribution back to the open source community may interest some of the readers. KDE adds Safari feel to desktop Linux: The Konqueror Web browser, which shares its basic engine with Apple's Safari, has benefited from Apple's Safari work, KDE said. Konqueror now loads and renders more quickly and has better support for Web standards. One of Apple's major efforts with Safari has been to encourage users to report sites that don't work properly with the browser, in order to improve compatibility."
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Safari Code Benefiting Open Source Community More

Safari Code Benefiting Open Source Community

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  • KDE 3.2 (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kethinov ( 636034 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2004 @04:17PM (#8253066) Homepage Journal
    I recently installed KDE 3.2 in my Gentoo box and I have found that Konqueror was one of the greatest improvements done to KDE compared to 3.1.x. I really hate corporations and Apple is indeed a corporation. But as far as corporations go, I've always said that Apple is the corporation I hate the least. :)

    • I really hate corporations (Score:5, Interesting)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2004 @06:09PM (#8254212) Homepage Journal
      That is not very logical or kind. Many individuals incorporate to protect there home and family from law suites. Many charities that do good work are also corperations. I find it odd that a person would say they "hate corpations" yet own a computer with an AMD or Intel CPU, drive a car, and watch cable TV.
      Odds are what you mean is that you do not like the actions of iirresponsible people.
      • I think the main problem is that under american law corporations have the rights of individuals. a huge corporation of hundreds of people is not able to act with the ethics and prudence of a single person, but under the law it does have that right. it does not, however, have the responsibility. if a corporation's product kills someone, the corporation (or not even the business unit) does not "go to jail" or "get executed" in the manner of, say, dissolving its assets, or firing all or significant parts of th

  • They made tons of changes (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    And added quite a bit of code to KHTML.

    Now it's definitely a worthy adversary of Mozilla and IE.
    • Now it's definitely a worthy adversary of Mozilla and IE.

      Maybe I'm just not aware of it and it already exists, but a windows version of Konqueror would be nice for those who want a consistent feel across their multiple OSes (like with Mozilla, Open Office, etc).

  • Why is this newsworthy? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Captain Rotundo ( 165816 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2004 @04:29PM (#8253211) Homepage
    There are tons of companies that contribute to Free and OS Software.

    Lets see Sun, IBM, RedHat, Novell, CodeWeavers, oh and Apple (isn't the underlying OS for MacOS X open source?) not even mentioning the INDIVIDUALS who contribute (who arguably get less out of the deal since there is no direct profit motive)

    Oh wait, is this news because you would normally assume Apple to be parasitic and not give back to anyone?

    • Re:Why is this newsworthy? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by javaxman ( 705658 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2004 @04:44PM (#8253384) Journal
      It may be newsworthy because this time the contribution is squarely in the Application space, and is high-quality and very easily usable, impacting the actual end-user application/desktop experience. It's also newsworthy because so many people were initially skeptical that Apple would give anything back.

      To my ( somewhat limited ) knowledge, most of the effort companies you've listed have put in show up only for administrators and developers, not desktop users. Arguably because that's where effort has been needed most ( maybe up until now ), but still...

      OpenOffice is equally newsworthy, but maybe not exactly as easily usable and feature-complete, though I'd argue that's mainly due to it's larger feature set as compared to the KHTML engine. I think it'd be interesting to know how many resources Apple has thrown at KHTML compared to the resources Sun has thrown at OpenOffice, for example. If the manhours are comprable, shame on Sun. I personally feel that OpenOffice may be the single most important open source project right now. If I didn't spend all of my spare time surfing /. and raising my two-year-old, I'd contribute...

      Of course, I'd like to see Apple pick up and work on OpenOffice as an AppleWorks replacement ( they need one ) but there are so very, very many reasons I can't expect that to happen.

      • Re:Why is this newsworthy? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by mivok ( 621790 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2004 @05:07PM (#8253643) Homepage
        Perhaps apple would be more likely to contribute to koffice instead, continuing what they started?

      • Re:Why is this newsworthy? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Captain Rotundo ( 165816 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2004 @05:10PM (#8253676) Homepage
        Well I don't follow KDE, so I don't know mmuch about Apple's or anyyone else's involvement. But Novell bought Ximian and pratically before the ink was dry on the deal they had bounties up offering money for people that did arious tasks to improve the desktop experience. Which reminds me Ximian was a company that was directly involved in the desktop, and now thats Novell by extension.
        • Good point!
          Since I don't have any direct experience with Ximian, and keep thinking of it as a separate company distinct from Novell, I'd failed to make that connection.

          On the other hand, Ximian releases are often Slashdot stories, and thus just as "newsworthy" as this story, I guess... anyway, my point was just to counter that this is actually slightly newsworthy for several reasons; mainly, it's nice to see Apple living up to their promises.

          I certainly didn't mean to downplay the great contributions of t

      • Re:Why is this newsworthy? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by lpontiac ( 173839 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2004 @08:33PM (#8255257)
        Of course, I'd like to see Apple pick up and work on OpenOffice as an AppleWorks replacement ( they need one )

        Following the release of Safari, MS dropped support for IE on Mac, directly citing the existence of Safari as the reason.

        Apple need Microsoft Office, so I can't see them daring to touch an actually competitive office suite.

        • Apple need Microsoft Office, so I can't see them daring to touch an actually competitive office suite.

          As much as running programs via X11 sucks, I use OpenOffice instead of OfficeX. At first, MSOfficeX was just too expensive. Later on I had access to OfficeX, but I was much happier with OpenOffice.

          Apple does not need OfficeX.

        • Hmmm...actually, Apple is taking on M$'s Power Point, part of the Office suite. Apple released Keynote, XML based presentation software that is, in many ways superior to Power Point(ex. slide changes, image rendering, etc.).

          The key to this is compatibility with Office for Windows. As much as we hate to admit it, it is the standard by which all others is judged. Any suite that wants to replace Office, or at least become a major player in the office suite arena, has to be fully compatible with M$ Office.
    • What about the story last friday about MS releasing the source for Allegiance? That means MS also contributed to OS Software, does it not?
    • is this news because you would normally assume Apple to be parasitic and not give back to anyone?

      Considering that Konqueror is GPL'd [gnu.org] and KHTML is LGPL'd [wikipedia.org], it would be fruitless for Apple to even consider being parasitic. You're seeing the GPL family of licenses at work, where proprietary and open source companies mutually benefit one another. Everyone wins, specially the users.

      = 9J =

  • Can Konqueror be embedded easily like Mozilla? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    cause if it becomes really nice I'd like it to be embeded within a GTK2 browser.

  • yup... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pb ( 1020 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2004 @04:37PM (#8253294)
    I'm no KDE fan, but I actually have KDE 3.2 on my box just so I can run Konqueror... it really has come a long way, it's very snappy, and renders pages quite well.

    Of course it isn't entirely stable yet, I do get the occasional SEGFAULT, but I've seen that happen even with browsers that theoretically *are* stable. :)

    • Re:yup... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by irc.goatse.cx troll ( 593289 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2004 @05:11PM (#8253690) Journal
      Still doesn't support XSL, as shown on http://semi.getanotherfuckingisp.com.
      key:
      mozil la: perfectly rendered
      IE: supports the xsl but not the css
      konq/opera: doesnt support the xsl.

      Considering XSL is an old(5 or so years) spec needed for the web to develope further, especially in a way the OSS community would prefer, its pathetic that some browsers still just don't render it at all.

      • Re:yup... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by spectral ( 158121 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2004 @05:28PM (#8253846)
        How old is PNG and IE still doesn't support it properly (alpha-transparency specifically)? Age means nothing. What about MNGs? Hell, what about CSS? :) Browsers are a mess of incompatibilities. The web stagnates because of it, and I (like many) blame IE for this, partially. Their lack of adherence to standards is so annoying. They have, however, added things that were working drafts at the time they were added (I seem to remember something about their XSL support being based off of an incomplete spec). I just wish they'd work on getting the current stuff working properly, before fixing it halfway or adding things that aren't 'finalized' yet, and then never fixing their implementation when it is.

        • Re:yup... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by 7-Vodka ( 195504 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2004 @06:20PM (#8254292) Journal
          Why would they do that?
          For now they've WON the browser wars.
          They have 95% of the browsers and webpages are coded to whatever crap IE renders whenever necessary. No need to fix anything. No need to add anything new, no need to try to conform to any type of standard at all.
          They have a long time before any other browser challenges them, so they might as well put it to good use writing proprietary lock-ins for people to stumble into and never be heard from again.

          • Re:yup... (Score:3, Insightful)

            by jc42 ( 318812 )
            [Microsoft] have 95% of the browsers and webpages are coded to whatever crap IE renders whenever necessary.

            You do have to be a bit careful with repeating this sort of claim, because many of the statistics you'll read fall into the "87% of all statistics are just made up" category. It's very easy to interpret web-server logs and sales figures in radically different ways.

            Thus, I recently installed the latest Opera on my Powerbook, as part of my collection of browsers for testing web pages. I checked with
      • Does it really need to support XSL? Remove all of the hype, and think about it for a while.

        All XSL does is transform your XML into HTML/CSS (or another format). It's a meta-markup language. Look at the stylesheet at your link. This isn't some new standard, it's plain old HTML and CSS in disguise.
        • But it produces a webpage that to the average user is just a normal webpage, but to us powerusers we actually have real data that can be worked with.
          It would be so much easier to parse a webpage like that and actually get usable data, than fudging through lots of crappy html parsing thats easy to paste. It also allows you to provide much more data than you actually use, and transform it later. Look at the file list page, and the screenshot/pictures galleries. Same xml, lots more info than I use. This dat

      • Re:yup... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Spy Hunter ( 317220 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2004 @08:03PM (#8255080) Journal
        The reason Konqueror doesn't support XSL is that KDE development is pragmatic. KDE developers focus their effort on things that will actually make the browsing experience better today, not complex standards few people like. An example of this pragmatic philosophy is Konqueror's support of the CSS extension that allows you to set scrollbar colors. Mozilla refuses to implement it simply because it's not W3C sanctioned, even though it's a perfectly reasonable CSS extension that is widely used.

        KHTML doesn't implement XSL because practically nobody uses XSL. Personally, I doubt it will ever catch on; it's just too complex and the syntax is way too ugly. I haven't seen any compelling reason to use it. If it does catch on, though, you can bet the next release of Konqueror will support it. KHTML developers just don't see the need to waste their time implementing complex standards that nobody wants to use in real webpages. Besides, it's not like KHTML supporting XSL will catapult it into wide acceptance or anything, because KHTML is in a different position than Gecko or IE.

        If you want to talk about pathetic, just consider that Mozilla still doesn't support SVG. KDE 3.2 ships with native SVG support. SVG is a well-liked, widely supported standard that is getting a lot of attention and has the potential to change the browsing experience for the better, today. KDE developers realize this, and that's why Konqueror now supports SVG.

        • Re:yup... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @12:58AM (#8255800) Journal
          An example of this pragmatic philosophy is Konqueror's support of the CSS extension that allows you to set scrollbar colors. Mozilla refuses to implement it simply because it's not W3C sanctioned, even though it's a perfectly reasonable CSS extension that is widely used.

          I dislike this extension. I have no idea whether this is a Microsoft-introduced extension, but I would strongly suspect so. Microsoft has a general policy of building a browser that trusts remote web sites to do a good job of presenting content and not being malicious, and can make it easy to make poor design decisions. I cannot think of a good reason to change scrollbar colors -- from a HCI perspective, this is an extremely poor idea. The user spends a long time learning to immediately recognize the scrollbars on the system, and this would make scrollbars look different at different sites. Mozilla and most other browsers have taken a much more restrictive approach, not letting remote sites have as much control over a user's computer. This approach is more security-centric, and, I've found, works better.

          It's not just this one extension, but a vast number of things -- sites bookmarking themselves, sites popping up windows, and all kind of other nastiness that I boggle at every time I use IE on someone's computer.
          • Konqueror doesn't let sites hijack your browser the way IE does; that would run contrary to its pragmatic nature. It just wants to do its best to display the site how the designer intended it, within reason. Konqueror allows no popups, no status bar tickers, no window raising/resizing, etc. But changing the color of the scroll bar is quite harmless. Scrollbars are easy to recognize no matter what color they are. They are always in exactly the same place, and they're always exactly the same shape and si

            • Re:yup... (Score:4, Interesting)

              by JimDabell ( 42870 ) on Thursday February 12, 2004 @09:45AM (#8257740) Homepage

              Scrollbars are easy to recognize no matter what color they are.

              As far as I can tell, the overwhelming majority of people who try and change scrollbar colours do so to make them blend in with the colour scheme used on their website. This usually makes them far less obvious.

              They are always in exactly the same place

              No they aren't. Scrollbars can appear in frames, iframes, <object> elements, textarea fields and elements with overflow: scroll set. It's very easy to miss them in a large number of cases, even if you are an experienced surfer.

              In any case, anybody who dislikes this misfeature should vote for the bug [kde.org].

        • "HTML doesn't implement XSL because practically nobody uses XSL."

          Chicken and the egg. Why did NCSA Mosaic implement HTML? No one uses it, this gopher thing is all we'll ever need.

          XSL isn't really complex, check the w3school tutorial on it, you'll learn it in about an hour or two of messing around.
          It does get a little ugly when working with tags that have arguments, but HTML gets ugly to when working on highly redundant elements (think news posts or other such repeated blocks of html), and XSL cleans that
          • Except that as I pointed out in my post, it's *NOT* a chicken and egg situation at all, because this is KHTML we're talking about. KHTML has such a teensy market share that whatever it does will not affect web developers in the slightest. The main two browsers (IE and Gecko) already support XSL, and guess what? Nobody uses it anyway.

            Personally, I think putting XSL in the browser is retarded. If you really like to construct your HTML from XML using XSL then that's your business, but do it on the server

        • Using XSL allows me to seperate Content, Presentation, and Navigation.

          By putting just article text in an XML file, presentation in XSL and CSS, and Navigation in RSS files, I can make a site way more flexible.

          If a site detects XSL capable browsers, Once the XSL, RSS, CSS, and images are in the viewers cache, article downloads are really fast.

          It also means I don't have to dynamically generate or hand edit a zillion HTML files every time there's a new article to link to.

          • If you really love XSL, then that's great. You can still use it to make your site more flexible and separate your content, presentation, and navigation, or whatever. But there's no reason to make the browser do it for you. The saved bandwidth is negligable, but the added complexity and processing power needed on the client is large. Do it on the server, just like any other website templating tool does.

            Personally, I think that if they added the equivalent of C's #include to HTML (not like iframes but a

            • With server side XSL, many XSL transformations have to share the same CPU. With client-side XSL, the viewer's CPU does the transformation. All the server CPU needs to do is blast bits from the filesystem to the network. This saves the website money, and the viewer time.

              • For static content, you do the transform once and cache the result; there's no performance penalty. For dynamically generated content the overhead of doing the XSL is probably going to be pretty small compared to the database lookups or whatever else you're doing to dynamically generate stuff. In many cases you can still use caching anyway. Doing it on the client is unnecessary; the small advantage in a few situations doesn't justify the increase in browser complexity. More complex browsers have more th
        • Don't worry, they're working on it. Partial support is available. See the link below

          http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/

          • Yeah, they've been working on it since forever ago, and it never seems to get any closer. Wake me when it's in the default install.
      • Layout doesn't work in IE due to IE bugs not my problem. Opera and early versions of konq don't support XSL. Oh well

        What a dumbass. It actually is his problem because next to no one is going to visit his site... It looks like his intention is to only cater to Moz fanboys
    • That's strange, because right now I'm loving KDE 3.2, but I can't stand surfing with Konqueror, it's an ugly browser with way too much UI clutter (I mean, come on, it adds three useless entries to every folder in my bookmarks). Not to mention the huge menubar with a ton of crap on it.

      I much prefer Firefox for surfing, though I admit Konq is a good file manager.

  • To be fair to the KDE developers (Score:5, Informative)

    by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2004 @04:52PM (#8253478)
    A lot of the improvements in 3.2 were *not* because of the contributed Apple code. Some significant parts went in, but other major parts are going into 3.3. Its great that Apple is helping, and I don't want to minimize their contribution, but I'd like to see credit given where credit is due.

  • shouldn't it be apple's (Score:5, Funny)

    by martinde ( 137088 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2004 @05:01PM (#8253582) Homepage
    kontributions to the open source kommunity?
  • safari 1.2 now finally has liveconnect. does anyone know if liveconnect has made its way into Konqueror? i've searched around on the web but i haven't come up with anything that seems official.
  • Safari is based on Konqueror, which is something the article should have pointed out. While the improvements(Konqueror) in 3.2 did come from Safari, a true story here is that Open Source works. Using this example corporations can see how they can benefit from OSS and how to give back.

    Cecil

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