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Too many Windows users simply do not know there is a viable alternative. Heck, most Windows users don't want to know.

They don't know there's an alternative to Windows. Many that know macs exist don't trust something different, aren't sure it will work right - can they do everything they can already do? Do they need to learn something new?

IE IS the internet for most. If they don't know what a web browser is or does, or that there are alternatives that are better, how do you expect them to know where to go, install, and use it?

The problem isn't intertia itself - the problem is ignorance.

It would probably help if Windows had drag-and-drop application installation, but don't hold your breath....

"It would probably help if Windows had drag-and-drop application installation, but don't hold your breath...."

Easily done with .Net applications, provided it doesn't need to access the registry.

application can mostly be designed like that but some shared library are considered common enough among dev.
static linking is nice and fast but is not considered as disk space wise. Plus an OS panel for install/uninstall is quite common and useful when wisely designed ( see : package manager in most linux distros ).
dotNet doesn't solve the problem but help with the commonly known 'dll nightmare' where shared library version are overwritten by older version

Well, "coming to the Windows platform" was specified, and as far as I know, there are no KHTML-based browsers built for Windows. I suppose Konqueror itself could be run via Cygwin, and KDE4 has plans for Windows support, but that's all not quite the same...

Besides, are WebKit and KHTML not effectively the same (particularly with Unity and all)?

well, konqi is only usable atm by using cygwin. also, khtml is not webkit, apple forked khtml. for KDE 4 there is the Unity project which might bring both trees back in sync, and KDE 4 apps will run on windows and Mac OS X, so in 6 or 7 months we might see konqi using webkit on windows. but GetWebKit was first, then ;-)

Has anyone confirmed that this is for real?

I'll upload a screenshot once the WWDC keynote is over, okay? Works fine here.

Being the reckless sort that I am, I installed it on my WinXP box. The installer stopped with "Module C:Program FilesSwift TeamSwiftbinWebKit.dll failed to register. HRESULT -2147010895. Contact your support personnel." This error dialog had the options of Exit Installation, Try Again or Continue. I chose to continue, and the installer finished up. The program wouldn't start however, saying something about an incorrect application configuration.

This sounds like an installer error more than anything else. I doubt it installed any malware; my antivirus and spyware/malware scanners aren't getting any hits. That being said, proceed with caution.

That's error code 0x800736B1, a library manifest problem. Make sure you have the Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable installed first - you can download it from
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=32BC1BEE-A...

I had the same error. Following your advice I was able to install it and use it.

Glad to help. If you have the time, you may want to notify the Swift developers about the problem and the fix.

Wait a second. Would that be a dependency issue? On windows? Clicking "next" didn't just work? Maybe yum, apt, portage, conary, ports, pkg_add or something similar would have helped.


Feel free to mod me how you like. I couldn't help myself.

Now if the author forgot to include the DLL in the installer, what is the difference if he forgets to add the dependency to the library in a package (and he would have forgotten it, as we see)? None.

In both cases that file would be missing.

Dependency handling is non-trivial on any operating system, but it's the responsibility of the package maintainer. Not wanting to defend any particular OS or anything, but in this case the fault lies smack with the developers since they forgot to include the merge module for the VC2005 runtime in the setup.

Wow, stealing KHTML and using an opera interface, innovative, just kidding, the tabs on top are the best position, I hope Konqi gets that right one day. For the rest I don't understand why they just try to help porting Konqueror to windows, it's gonna be done anyway and the project is pretty much a bit more mature, and they're going to sync with webkit again and going further together (under the name: Unity). But well, if it's for fun why not ;-), good luck with it I'd say.

Why do you dismiss KHTML ? Konqueror is a very good browser, and is free.

You're kidding, right?
KHTML is eveything but bloated. Some thinks that Konqueror, the interface for KDE that uses KHTML, is bloated (whatever that means), but it is a pleasure to use. Isn't that more important ?

Konqis forte seems to be bloated code...

Dude, what are you talking about?

First off, Konqui is simply a shell wrapper for khtml.

Khtml was chosen by Apple over Gecko specifically because it was smaller, leaner and more efficient code.

From Apple at the time:

"When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out," Safari Engineering Manager Don Melton wrote. (KJS is KDE's JavaScript interpreter.) "Not only were they the basis of an excellent, modern and standards-compliant Web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open-source projects."

And Mozilla's response to that?

"I guess I'm supposed to be mortally offended--or at least embarrassed--that they went with KHTML instead of our Gecko engine, but I'm having trouble working up the indignation," wrote Mike Shaver in a Web log posting. "We've all known forever that Gecko missed its 'small-and-lean' target by an area code, and we've been slogging back towards the goal, dragging our profilers and benchmarks behind us, for years."

Shaver, who left Netscape three years ago but retained his position on the small Mozilla staff, said that in Apple's shoes he might have made a similar decision.

"If I had to write a new browser, and I was going to have to touch the layout code in a serious way, I would think about Mozilla alternatives," Shaver wrote. "I really, really hope that Mozilla will learn from Safari/KHTML, because they've done a lot of great work in about a tenth of the code."

It's also worth noting that the Safari team had roots in Mozilla, yet selected khtml anyways.

(source: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-980492.html)

If you want to argue the merits of various browsers, that's fine, but please, explain again exactly how Konq/khtml suffers from "bloated code"? Compared to what, exactly? Lynx, maybe?

Haven't you heard? Everything in KDE is bloated. Your fancy quotes, facts, and reasoning doesn't make any sense, because it is obviously wrong.

</sarcasm off>

Clearly the poster was just complaining that Konqueror has too many buttons. And he has a point, although the simple mode that Kubuntu defaults to isn't that bad. What people don't realize is that a gui has almost no impact on how bloated an html engine like khtml is.

"Is there anything like this for Linux?"

Yes, http://www.konqueror.org/

Yeah, I guess that slipped my mind. But is the css and javascript rendering of KHTML vs Webkit really close enough?