aKademy Hackers Port Mozilla to Qt/KDE


project. "Integrating Gecko side by side with our existing renderer
design that make KHTML what it is."

implementation to the maturity of the respective technologies and KDE's
component architecture (though the caliber of the hackers certainly
platform for Mozilla, parallel to the drawing and widget layer for
connecting Gecko to the higher level browser machinery in Konqueror
such as KWallet and KCookieJar.

for both users and developers" commented Mitchell Baker, President of
the Mozilla Foundation.

from lack of maintenance and little advocacy within the Mozilla

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You're comparing different urls ;P

by anon (not verified)

Uh........ you aren't using Konqueror 3.3 are you?

Here is a screenshot in Konqueror 3.3:

by Anonymous (not verified)

Since they use Quirks mode, no browser is supposed to show this correctly

by aim (not verified)

Which theme for Firefox do you use?

by Joachim Werner (not verified)

I am very pleased to see this project. Konqueror does most of the things right already (I've been using it as my default browser for a couple of months now), but there is one thing only the Gecko engine is able to do on Linux right now: in-page WYSIWYG editing. If I get it right, a Konqueror with the Gecko engine should be able to run the existing Mozilla-based WYSIWYG-editors like HTMLAREA or Kupu. That would eliminate one of the last reasons for me to still use Mozilla/Firebird from time to time ...

by Andre Somers (not verified)

Maybe you should check out Quanta. It's "Bleeding Edge" branch features just that, and yes, that's based on KHTML.

by wilbert (not verified)

I think Joachim means in-page HTML editing, just like a textarea but with bold, italic, lists, tables, images, etc. that generates HTML that can be submitted with a form button to a content management system, not a full WYSIWYG editor for HTML-files.

by Andras Mantia (not verified)

No need for using the "Bleeding Edge". Quanta 3.2 and 3.3 has the WYSIWYG (VPL) support. Well, by mistake it's disabled in the 3.3.0 release, but it's there and mostly works. And it heavily depends on KHTML, so I hope that it's development won't be stopped. ;-)

by anon (not verified)

Koos Vriezen today posted his first try at implementing Mozilla's MIDAS editing. See


by Anthony Tarlano (not verified)

I don't think many understand the ramifications of this news!

Now we can have all the Mozilla apps, firebird, sunbird, etc.., as well as the mozilla platform internals XUL, XBL, XPCOM, spidermonkey, etc. work with QT and KDE.

This is the best news I have seen all year..

by 0tom0 (not verified)

This are really great news.
Does anybody know if this will also be available for kde 3.3 or just for 3.4(4.0)?


by KDE developer (not verified)

Please please do *NOT* kick khtml.
Make "kfirefox" a choice (optional), but khtml is just so cool.
khtml is THE choice for me, and as maybe some of you know: even the "brand new firefox" has its old contamination (hope this is the right word) whereas khtml s so clean and *small*.

- khtml fan

by anon (not verified)

Are you retarded or brain damanged? Who said that khtml is depreciated?

by regeya (not verified)

I wouldn't worry if I were you. I recall that when the Navigator 5.0 source release was announced, there were two camps: the people who got all excited that KDE could integrate Navigator components, and people who were upset that the KDE-native engine might die. It's been a few years; KHTML is still around.

Still, it's nice to have the option of using Gecko. May the best engine win.

by Matthew (not verified)

I gotta say i'm quite happy about this development
first of all because firefox never looked right in kde due to its gtk themeing
and second of all if they manage to seperate Gecko Engine from Mozilla properly as kpart then i can use Konqueror Exclusivly and for me it means less space being used

well, thats good we now have a new standalone browser made with Qt/KDE libs.
know, we need konqueror ship as a standalone packages (with khtml)

what about fix from apple, long time I have not heard about new commits from Apple. they are at version 1.25 in Safari 1.2. And gmail works fine in safari but don't in konqueror. please get the new fixes.


> please get the new fixes.

Getting them is easy. But extracting them from there and merging into khtml is the work.

Getting "magic fixes" from WebFork is not easy, mind you.
There's no public CVS. All you get is a big fat tarball with very few hints about what changed or why.
Was it something really wise, some one-time dirty hack to keep a common DHTML script happy, or some pointless rename-half-the-methods-so-PHBs-think-we-are-going-ahead (they do that at every friggin release)?

You take your pick painfully after hours of code scrutiny, and that is not exciting.

wow,... if only I knew....

sharing a same repository would not have been an option ?
I guess they don't want to...
and I suppose they are not generous enough to send patches for important stuff .... its another marketing thing who does not help anybody.

what about the first few ? does Apple gave more collaboration, or that just was as painfull ?

by Steven T. Hatton (not verified)

The first time I skimmed this article, I had the sense it was more one-sided than it actually is. The author /did/ acknowledge that the ease of porting was due to the design of both KDE and Mozilla. My original reason for returning to the article to respond was to stress that Mozilla's design was probably a significant element in the success of the effort. After reading it again, that's not necessary. Nonetheless, I do want to point out what appears to me to be a very noteworthy aspect of Mozilla's design approach:


I've never actually written code using the approach, but it does seem to provide a framework for very clearly defined interfaces. I'm not saying KDE should or could use that exact approach. I'm just pointing it out as food for thought.

...they finally ship Gecko separated from all their Mozilla products. That is something they promised to do for years but still haven't realized. Currently non-Mozilla project still have to rely on and be compatible to a particular version of a full whatever-Mozilla-product installation. Also within the Mozilla products available at one given time the discrepancy between the used Gecko version in Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird etc. is a whole mess and a whole lot of unnecessarily duplicated code on the HD, and every single update to either the UI or the Gecko core pushes the user to update the whole thing again.

Considering that the Mozilla foundation is concerned about market shares for their XUL technology (which I agree is great) I have to seriously question their priorities, a Gecko runtime should have existed from the very beginning instead keeping it bundled with software demoing the technology and breaking compatibility to third party software with each version.

For those interested in contributing to Mozilla (and supporting its use in other projects) and wondering what I'm talking about, look at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/xre.html (stalling since nearly two years now).

by Mathi (not verified)

when will be binaries/source be released? Should one has to wait for KDE3.4 or KDE3.3.1?

by salah (not verified)

I need hacher programes

by Anonymous (not verified)

No, you need a spell-checker.

by salah salah ald... (not verified)

asl3amo alakom
i want some hack programes
and thanx u at all
thanx my friend

It has been a long time since this announcement, i've thoroughly searched google, but haven't a clue what has happened. What is the status of this project?

Thanks for the link...i'm pleased to hear it hasn't died, and will wait excitedly for the first release.

I would be happy to have a qt ported firefox since I have absolutely no gtk support whatsoever installed and I don't intend to install it anytime soon only for the sake of one application. On the other side to address any of my university issues (like registering for curses or exams) I have to use a site which doesn't work under Konqueror. So... what is the status? Any other browser using qt?