Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 7th Nov 2008 09:45 UTC, submitted by mlauzon
Most of the popular browsers these days are based on one of the two open source rendering engines - khtml/WebKit and Gecko. The most popular browser, however, is based on proprietary technology: Internet Explorer. Even though IE made some progress during the past few years, it's no secret that it took Microsoft far too long to counter the success of Mozilla's Firefox. Currently, Microsoft is working (and thus, spending money) on Internet Explorer 8, and this prompted an audience member during a keynote by Steve Ballmer to ask an interesting question: is it worth spending money on IE, with so many open source engines readily available? Ballmer's reply may surprise you.
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Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2005-11-21
But it is a fork...it started as a fork of the source code.
Apple forked KHTML and created WebKit
Apple forked KHTML and created WebKit
Holy crap. Yes. WebKit was "originally" a fork of KHTML/KJS. That's where it ends. The growth, scope and size of WebKit Project dwarfs KDE's projects tenfold. With WebKit we now have 4 distinct ports and growing.
Member since:2006-05-09
Member since:2006-03-23
bwahahaha, you are a moron, and widly blinded by propaganda.. khtml has always been really fast, and quite adhering to standards.. it wasnt untill much later when webkit was adopted by other people that crapple themselves, that they were forced to stop making direct crapcode. and cleanup from their own damage has taken quite some resources..
Member since:2005-06-29
KHTML was rendering a lot of stuff very nicely already at the time Apple took it. Sure, they have done a lot of nice stuff with it but you could say the same for KDE and now also GNOME (WebKitGTK) and Google (Chromium) who all contribute more to the main codebase than just the "ports". Btw, KHTML is based on the original GtkHTML 
Member since:2006-05-09
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GtkHTML
GtkHTML was forked from KHTML!!
Member since:2007-02-17
it did not render correctly a LOT of web pages, it was unstable and relatively slow
Not correct.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML
Some quotes people may find interesting:
A forked version of KHTML called WebKit is used by several web browsers, among them Safari and Google Chrome.
KHTML renders faster than the Gecko layout engine
many websites fail to support KHTML or claim no support even if the site does work correctly in Konqueror. Gmail, for instance, only works if Konqueror reports itself as Firefox (see User Agent Spoofing)
That is the interesting one, isn't it? If Konqueror lies, and pretends to be another rendering engine than it really is, websites work fine with it.
For the real history of it see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_KHTML_and_WebKit
Most of the work that Apple did to turn KHTML into Webkit actually involved getting to work with OSX and Cocoa.
Member since:
2005-11-16
"Apple didn't design Webkit either. Webkit is just a fork of KHTML. Designed by KDE. "
Please give the credit to who it is deserved to. Apple created webkit, starting from the code base of KHTML which was pretty much limited (it did not render correctly a LOT of web pages, it was unstable and relatively slow, but it was a small and clean code base that Apple was looking for to start upon) before Apple created webkit.
By itself, the first version of webkit that Apple built for Safari 1.0 was already a big change from the original KHTML and rapidly webkit became a complete independent project that was growing much faster as it was managed (and still is) by Apple.
Again webkit was born with Safari 1.0 and all the work on the initial version was done by Apple. And yes it is derived from KHTML but webkit is not a simple fork of KHTML (please don't say non sense), this a major rework of the code base and a large addition of features was done compared to the original KHTML.
Edited 2008-11-07 14:47 UTC