Submitted by “There is one major web rendering engine that grew entirely out of the open source world: KHTML is KDE’s web renderer which was built from the ground up by the open source community with very little original corporate backing. The code was good and branches were born as a result, the best known being Webkit. Now, after years of split, KHTML and Webkit are coming together once again.”
In other Webkit news, the Gnome hackers at GUADEC 2007 managed to get WebKit running inside Epiphany (The Gnome Desktop’s GTK+ based browser) using the upstream GDK port:
http://blogs.gnome.org/xan/2007/07/17/epiphany-webkit/
Webkit is a clean code base, apparently easy to hack on and, as you can see, it’s obviously starting to make waves outside of Apple and KDE/Qt/Trolltech.
With Mozilla slowly cleaning out years of cruft (Here, on a whim I picked an example off of the top of the Burning Edge blog: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=332174) and Webkit provided a healthy injection of competition things could get really good for FOSS desktop surfers.
Edited 2007-07-23 22:16
This will bring REAL competition to Gecko, and everyone will benefit from this!
Well… yes, but WebKit is actually better a contender to Opera’s Rendering Technology.
But yes, Everyone will benefit from this (specially mobile devices’ users! =] )
We already do
Nokia’s browser is using Webkit… and Apple iPhone, obviously.
I see this used a lot, but I’m not sure that “competition” is the right term when it comes to something developed by free software communities. Wouldn’t “alternative” be better? I mean, what are they competing for?
I see this used a lot, but I’m not sure that “competition” is the right term when it comes to something developed by free software communities. Wouldn’t “alternative” be better? I mean, what are they competing for?
Marketshare.
Just because it’s FOSS doesn’t mean there’s no competition! When you sit down to play games with friends, don’t you intend to win? What would be the point of building an alternative if it wasn’t intended to compete with an existing solution in some way.
Maybe because “competition” is such a corporately-tainted word that has gained excessive dictionarial (English) baggage over the last several decades?
“Competition” is best used to compare Dell and HP, or Canon and Nokia, not KDE and GNOME or Gecko and WebKit.
That is, unless you want to count the corporate backings which are put behind such projects (Apple/Nokia/Adobe behind WebKit, Mozilla/Google behind Gecko, Novell/Sun behind GNOME, Trolltech behind KDE, etc). Then yeah, they’re “competing”.
The word compete is tained? That’s um.. interesting. Did corporations pay off dictionary companies to change the definition or something?
No. Whenever the term is used, it is almost exclusively used for companies who are competing for marketshare, vying for people’s money, and doing so feature-for-feature against each other in order to take the other one down and send him home packing.
The only other area in which the term “compete” is used just as much is in sports. You have two soccer/futbol teams who are vying for the World Cup; what, pray tell, does one team think about the game?
They’re thinking “OK, we have a chance to send that other team home to get an Italy-like beatdown. Let’s do it!”
You compete to win. You compete to take the trophy home. You compete to justify your worth on the world stage. And you might compete just to get revenge on the other team that took your best man out at the last competition.
What is WebKit or Gecko competing for? Is there a prize involved?
It was already stated — market share.
Just because some competition becomes very intense, does not make the word tainted and unusable in a tame context.
At aKademy, the term “co-opetition” is mostly used for Gnome (cooperation & competition in one term, indeed). And in the netherlands the term “con-collega’s” is used, roughly translatable as “colleagues from the competition”. After all, we invented the ‘poldermodel’, which apparently is also used for competition. A bit dangerous, of course (as it borders on illegal cartel deals and stuff).
The very definition of “game” means that there’s a winner and several losers. As for “marketshare”, it has very definite economical connotations, as in “buy and sell”. Now, I don’t recall the GNU manifesto speaking along these lines, in fact I distinctly remember it shunning commercialization.
A certain amount of competitivity is of course understood in any endeavour. The teams of similar free software projects will naturally have a drive to make the best stuff, surpassing the others. But it’s not for mercantile reasons.
“Marketshare”, “competition” etc. have distinct commercial tones and meanings. Which IMHO are not appropriate. At the very least, because they imply that free software is driven by the same mechanisms that drive economy, and that’s a huge fallacy.
Using Webkit. Probably won’t be in 4.0, but a nice proof of concept:
http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2007/07/web-on-canvas-and-dashboard-widg…
Edited 2007-07-23 22:27
Regarding free software friendly rivalries, I prefer to use the term “coopetition”. Yes, there’s competition among projects like KDE and GNOME, but there’s also lots of cooperation between them. And everybody wins.
OK, sounds better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coopetition
Didn’t know, though, that the term was allegedly coined by Raymond Noorda, former Novell CEO.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Noorda
Ironic, considering that he had what Bill Gates called a “tremendous vendetta” against Microsoft, buying lots of companies and assets in order to counter MS’s expansion into their field. It was Novell’s most profitable period, though; Noorda was pushed out in 1994, and its been downhill for Novell ever since.
So maybe we can now finally get a WYSIWYG control for Konqueror? That is one of the few cases where I still need Firefox. Oh and a few computer store websites that simply are broken in Konqui.
yes, Konqi will benefit from this. It won’t be before KDE 4.1, though a seperate release is possible. As trolltech will embed Webkit in Qt 4.4, KDE might use that, or they will have their own Webkit Kpart.
I was very excited about Epiphany when I learned it was programmable with Python. But I quickly learned that only the GUI was programmable — not the Gecko engine or content.
Will Webkit allow full access to all the browser parts though Python?
p.s. I really like kmeleon. Can’t understand why someone hasn’t made a linux clone of it yet. I’d like to see a cross-platform *flexible* browser to make custom experiences with. No, Firefox and Opera aren’t; at least in the context I’m using.
I remember reading somewhere that the KDE developers were adopting Webkit as the HTML layout engine for KDE4 and were dropping work on Khtml for KDE4 because of this.