Welcome to the Jungle : Apple v KDE
The shake up in the browser market continues. While Firefox lights the touch paper underneath Internet Explorer an interesting situation is shaping up at Apple, unfortunatly for the wrong reasons, and is an almost turn of the tables kind of thing.
Safari, MacOSX’s default web browser, has its rendering engine based on a technology called KHTML, which is the engine that displays web pages on the KDE platform for Linux. Around 2001 when Apple showed an interest in basing its own browser, Safari, on the KHTML tecchnology, Mozilla was just a flash in the pan, over bloated and the news that Apple had chosen KDE technology over Mozilla’s technology was kind of taken by the wider KDE community as being a good thing and proved that KHTML could be the open source web technology of choice. Apple rebranded the technology into WebCore and initially KDE did beneift from web speed improvements, support for dropdown menus and other such related developments including better CSS support and bug fixes.
At the time it was hoped that KHTML would be improved by Apple developers and that the relationship was going to produce exciting developments for both the Mac platform and the Linux(PC and Mac) platform. Something happend, while IE stagnated, Gecko got fixed, Netscape went bust gave the code to Mozilla and Opera began its road on the IE-Wannabe route.
Unfortunatly it now seems that KDE developers were getting very little from Apple and now Apple have almost stuck the preverbial finger up at KDE the relationship is under serious strain and now Apple have KDE’s technology it seems Apple aren’t keen on sharing anymore. Meanwhile Gecko which is the engine that powers Mozilla has benefited from being set free and now finds its way into many open source browsers, Firefox is shaking up the market in big ways. It’s Gecko and not KHTML that is becoming the dominant force in Open Source web technology, and as long as an open source rendering engine is a serious player in the market, the web will benefit from being more flexible and adaptable to new technologies, both scripting and plug-in based. So the main technology for displaying web pages on a Mac could be moving back towards and Proprietary and closed technology.
Web developers already have to code for the differences between the engines, these being, MSIE, Gecko, KHTML, WebCore and Opera’s technology. Gecko is by and far the best platform to be developing towards currently if flexablity and futur proofing is required for a website. We are in a situation where Web Standards could go mainstream into the hearts andminds of developers, it’s an exciting time.
As a web developer and supporter of open source, I find the Apple situation appauling, the KDE developers had to sign secrecy agreements, is this setting an example of how open source should be allowed to work in a comercial environment? Is this the only outcome of such a partnership? I think not! I do think the two polar opposites can work together under the right conditions, in this instance it’s another case of taking free technology, making it their own and making you buy it without realising.
Next time you fire up MacOSX and Safari, bear in mind that Apple are no better than Microsoft in terms of exploting aulturistic developers and go install Firefox!
See this article at ZDnet for more details : Open-source divorce for Apple’s Safari?