Safari patches. State of KHTML.

[Leo Savernik]

Am Mittwoch, 22. September 2004 02:17 schrieb Dimosthenis Kaponis:
> Hello,
>
[...]
> 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.

Yes.

> I must admit I was surprised, 
> as I had the impression that Apple was providing patches back to the
> community in a timely fashion

Usually not. We receive the bulk of changes mostly through their source code 
releases of a WebCore-version.

> and that, as they are using KHTML, it 
> would be fairly straightforward to apply those patches to the
> konqueror/khtml codebase. 

Given how much Apple has changed to their KHTML, merging most features back is 
a big pain.

> I must assume that this has not happened to 
> date, judging from the differences between Safari's rendering and
> Konqueror's.

Safari fixes *are* merged, only at a slow pace.
>
> Are these correct assumptions? 

Mostly, yes.

> 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,

No.

> or are they the result or reduced developer interest/manpower/time

Yes, we severely lack manpower.

> and/or unavailability by Hyatt and his colleagues?

No, the Apple guys are usually quite responsive.
>
> 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 

I don't think so.

> or is it expected 
> that khtml will -- soon -- be brought up to the level of the safari
> 'branch'?

If we had as many people working full time on khtml than Apple, yes. At the 
current state of affairs, replace "soon" with "later".
>
[...]

mfg
 Leo
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