Safari patches. State of KHTML.

[Dimosthenis Kaponis]

Hello,

Before I begin, and as per the request on 
www.konqueror.org/developers/, I am stating that I am not subscribed to 
this list.

By compiling KDE 3.3 early this month, I was saddened to see that the 
'cousin' browser, Apple's Safari, provides vastly superior rendering 
quality on a much larger number of pages. I must admit I was surprised, 
as I had the impression that Apple was providing patches back to the 
community in a timely fashion and that, as they are using KHTML, it 
would be fairly straightforward to apply those patches to the 
konqueror/khtml codebase. I must assume that this has not happened to 
date, judging from the differences between Safari's rendering and 
Konqueror's.

Are these correct assumptions? Are the reasons for which Apple's 
patches/changes -- if they exist -- have not been integrated with the 
khtml codebase of a political, legal or otherwise non-technical nature, 
or are they the result or reduced developer interest/manpower/time 
and/or unavailability by Hyatt and his colleagues?

Finally, with Gecko providing consistently better quality output than 
the Konqueror KHTML variety (Safari comes pretty close in most cases -- 
something surely not bad for khtml and kde), is the qt-gecko port going 
to slowly overshadow khtml's dominance in konqueror or is it expected 
that khtml will -- soon -- be brought up to the level of the safari 
'branch'?

Regards,

Dimosthenis.