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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Re: KDE browser work team
From:       Benjamin Meyer <ben () meyerhome ! net>
Date:       2009-07-02 16:16:47
Message-ID: 737E032B-198F-4FD8-AF47-1D990CC46680 () meyerhome ! net
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> And I personally am concerned about the current situation because it  
> reminds
> me a similar one a while back: KWin vs Compiz. Before KDE4 Compiz  
> was the new
> kid on the block, it had bling, developer community, youtube videos,  
> people
> were saying how it was the best technology ever with modules and  
> what not,
> and how KDE and GNOME should adopt it. KWin was the neglected old  
> thing with
> just one developer occassionally keeping an eye on it and it looked  
> like its
> days were counted. Do you know what we would have now if we went  
> that way? We
> would depend on a window manager with bling, a very unclear future,  
> rotten
> poor codebase, dying developer community, 1.0 release nowhere in  
> sight and no
> stability or feature parity with the previous solution.
>
> I'm afraid I won't have the time to do much about this browser problem
> myself :-/, but I would like to see people consider possibilities  
> before
> something gets in practice thrown out because of a new kid on the  
> block.
> Arora or Rekonq may look nice at the moment, but right now they seem  
> more
> like hobby projects to me, and who says they still will look that  
> nice when
> they reach the status when they will be a Konqueror replacement?
>
> That is why I would like to know the technical reasons.


Some notes on Arora to frame this conversation:

Yes Arora is a hobby project.  I and others work on it in our spare  
time.   I don't know any company that would fund Arora development so  
that wont be changing.  It has been a hobby for about 18 months now so  
it isn't exactly something that I am doing for a few weekends and then  
stopping (though there has been breaks here and there as real life  
intervened).  Though you can say the same thing for khtml and  
Konqueror devs I would presume.  For what it is worth I believe that  
the Arora code base is very clean and I have worked very hard to do  
that.  Consistently styled code, with autotests, manualtests and code  
reviews have really paid off.  Sense the project has started the  
number of developers and contributors has increases as time goes by  
and I will continue to hack on Arora.  Arora gets a lot of interest  
just from the demo browser and QtWebKit itself.  Developers using  
QtWebKit often checkout Arora to see how to do something and often  
stick around to help improve it.  I know that Arora as it is today can  
not compare to Firefox, but we are working at it and I believe that  
other then access keys (already done in a branch) and form storage  
(work on) Arora will soon have everything that I needed in a browser  
that I used to use Konqueror for.

But as Adam mentioned in his blog post Arora is suppose to be a  
desktop Browser first and not a desktop viewer so there will always be  
a place for Konqueror.  Just like Dolphin doesn't replace Konqueror,  
neither will Arora.

-Benjamin Meyer

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