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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Some food for thought (regarding nsplugins, gcc, mozilla)
From:       Hetz Ben Hamo <hetz () kde ! org>
Date:       2002-03-01 0:35:36
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Gentlemen,

I have been doing some talking with few people from the KDE developers, and 
few companies outside the KDE community regarding plugins...

I'm talking about Netscape Plugins - and what I'm writing here is just food 
for thought, which I think would be better to be discussed...

As it stands today - users with distributions like SuSE 7.x, Debian and 
Slackware don't have any problem with nsplugins now - it compiles and runs 
very nicely...

Users with Redhat 7.X (or rawhide), Mandrake 8.X and anyone who use GCC 3.0.x 
starting to "feel" the problem - you'll need to compile the client side wih 
GCC 2.95 and staticly link it in order to make it work well - or else you'll 
find lots of places when browsing with konqueror and where nsplugins is being 
used (flash ads etc..) - nsplugins crashes a lot. Add to that the fact that 
there is no maintainer to nsplugins these days...

The problem is getting worse, but not regarding nsplugins as it stands today, 
but more of newer plugins, this is more of a political game, and I'll 
explain...

When big companies today are creating any browser plugins - they're creating 
Mozilla/Netscape plugins for 2 reasons:

* For them - Mozilla = Netscape, and Netscape is more known to the public 
then Konqueror, specially since that in the back of Netscape stands AOL.

* When a company who is making in USA a multi platform product/plug-in - most 
of the time if they're planning to do a Linux client - they're approaching 
Red Hat - which recommends to do a Mozilla client or Plugin (Redhat has an 
investment from Netscape which are owned now by AOL). 

That leaves KDE & Konqueror with 3 options:

1. To co-operate with Mozilla regarding new plugin infrastructure to let them 
work both on Mozilla and Konqueror.
2. Come up with a KDE solution - like the SVG solution.
3. Create a new plugin system that will allow Mozilla plugins to run under 
Konqueror..

Option 1 doesn't seem to be too much realistic. I have been talked to people 
from both sides and no one is really into co-operation - specially from the 
Mozilla side (and I'm being polite here!).

Option 2 is problematic - specially when trying to implement a closed 
source/closed protocol implementation (audio, video, 3D, etc).

Option 3 is a good option - if there are volunteers for that to tinker at 
Mozilla code and implement it on KDE/Konqueror...

Of course - everyone could just ignore this issue and hope for good - but we 
can already start see some plugins that are developed exclusivly for Mozilla 
(Adobe, Blender, and I heard rumors about Real Networks), which leaves 
Konqueror out of area for the end user to enjoy those plugins.

I know that people here will jump all over and flame me because those plugins 
are not open source and "it's their problem", but lets be realistic - it's 
our users that will loose here and will be forced to switch browser just to 
watch those clips, audio, or whatever comes...

KDE has always been known about it's great integration and I'm the last 
person to tell you about it, how people love it (just count the distributions 
who gives the user KDE as default desktop enviroment and see what I mean) - 
lets give those users a solution to this problem also...

And once again - this is just food for thought...

Thank you,
Hetz Ben-Hamo
 
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