kde4 browser roadmap

[Duncan]

Aljosa Mohorovic posted on Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:30:10 +0200 as excerpted:

> kde4 is now approaching stability of kde3 so i guess it's the right time
> to ask about kde4 browser roadmap. i'm sure that not everybody will
> agree but konqueror is not a modern browser although it has excellent
> integration with kde.
> 
> i personally believe that browsers are today as important as koffice,
> pim or any other part of kde.
> from my point of view there are 2 options: 1. push konqueror development
> to catch up with firefox, chrome and safari 2. chose firefox or chrome
> and work only on integration with kde
> 
> when i say catch up with other browsers i mean: - active development to
> support html5 - extensions - browser release cycle independent, similar
> to firefox
> 
> what do you think?

Umm... you know that the webkit that both chrome and safari use as their 
rendering engine, as well as now qt4 itself, is a fork from kde's own 
khtml, right?

Actually, particularly now that qt4 is including webkit as well, there 
has been serious debate about switching to qt4's native webkit based html 
rendering.  Plasma is actually using qt4's webkit engine already, and 
konqueror will probably follow at some point, but it's not going to be 
right away.  I'd guess kde 4.6 to 4.8, so 16 to 30 months out, and almost 
certainly requiring at least qt 4.5 if not 4.6 or 4.7 by then.

Beyond that, really, the only way to even have a hope of catching firefox 
in terms of extension support, etc, would be if all the webkit based 
browser folks, safari, chrome, qt, konqueror, band together and agree on 
a common extension format.  That's really the only way to get a user base 
anywhere close to large enough to develop the active extension community 
firefox already has.  Well, unless they decided to get compatible with 
firefox's chrome (the XML based UI language not the browser) based UI.

As is likely evident by now, I've done some thinking on this myself, in 
addition to following planetkde, etc.  I like konqueror's integration, 
but am slowly coming to find the functionality of firefox's extensions 
irreplaceable, thus, find myself gradually switching more and more to 
firefox over time.  In my case, it's the noscript and viewscript 
extensions, which make keeping scripting off by default **MUCH** easier 
than konqueror makes it, since about the only way to find the scripts and 
where they are coming from on konqueror is to view-source the page.  With 
noscript and viewscript, it's simply a matter of a couple clicks to see 
where the scripts are coming from, and then activating the ones one 
wishes, without having to resort to globally allowing javascript in 
ordered to un-break the page.   I also use DownloadHelper for Youtube, 
since I don't have a flash plugin installed, and that lets me download 
the videos for watching using smplayer (for kde4) or kaffeine (for 
kde3).  However, others will have their own favorite extensions they find 
they can't live without, and it's simply not even remotely realistic to 
expect the devs to come up with all that variety of features on their 
own, without a wide variety of users contributing as well, and that 
requires a user base of critical mass before it even begins to take off.  
KDE by itself simply isn't there yet, and won't be for the foreseeable 
future, thus my conclusion that the only way to accomplish it would be to 
either get compatible with firefox's extensions thereby eliminating the 
problem, or agree with all the other webkit users on a common webkit 
extension format supported by all of them.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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