George Wright's Blog: Category WebKit

QtWebKit vs. KHTML - again...

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0100

After reading Will’s latest post, I feel I have to chip in.

I am a long time user and huge fan of KHTML. I still use KDE 3, and my day-to-day browser is still Konqueror from KDE 3, using an old version of KHTML. For 99% of websites that I visit, this is sufficient. Notable exceptions are YouTube and Facebook, both of which are very AJAX-heavy, and I keep a separate Firefox (well, Iceweasel) window open for them on a permanent basis.

Why do I keep both browser windows open? Well, for general Googling, random surfing, wikipedia, etc, I love the sheer speed of Konqueror, and its configurable web shortcuts (such as gg:, wp: etc) are insanely useful. Scrolling is blisteringly fast on just about any webpage and everything happens instantly. This is one of the major reasons why I don’t use KDE 4 yet - Konqueror 4 just doesn’t seem that fast anymore. I realise this is all very subjective, but things don’t quite feel so fast anymore.

However, this is a very suboptimal solution. As Will says, KDE needs a good web browser that can integrate with the rest of the desktop, and people shouldn’t need to resort to alternatives like Gecko. Personally, I hate Gecko. It’s got a massive memory footprint and it’s not as fast as I would like.

I’m not going to be flavour of the month for suggesting this (am I ever?), but I’d say the best thing to do at this point is for the developers to forget about KHTML, and start working upstream on WebKit, as well as work on integrating WebKit with Konqueror. Yes, there are probably some very good reasons as to why this is not great for KDE, but are they good enough to justify hindering the entire project’s success? WebKit Qt isn’t perfect yet (it can’t handle Facebook Chat particularly well, for example), but it’s still a lot better than KHTML at the moment. There’s a KPart being developed to allow WebKit to render inside Konqueror, and all it needs is a bit of polish before we can maybe start using it full time. In fact, now that I have time and I’m going to be working on WebKit as part of my job, I’ll look seriously into getting into core Konqueror development.

Call me crazy, but back in ‘02 Konqueror was the browser to have - it was fast, it worked on every website (back then), it was slick and it was KDE. I’d like to be able to go back to that, but fast forwarded 7 years!

Graduation and return to open source!

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 21:58:00 +0100

So I’ve finally finished my university degree, and I graduated on Thursday with a BA. It’s been a particularly trying year, so I’m glad it’s all over now. I’ll always remember that we were one short for graduation - wish you could have been there dude.

Now I’m back at home and likely to be doing not very much for the next couple of weeks, except that I’m hoping to shoehorn myself back into the free software community as I realised the other day that I’ve fallen out of the loop pretty sharply in the last few years!

In just under 5 weeks I’m flying out to Toronto to start my new job as ~~pmax’s dishwasher~~ a software developer which should be particularly exciting. Before then, I’m spending a few weeks at home, then a couple of weeks down at Bisley shooting the Imperial Meeting which is a series of international competitions, representing Cambridge University and Cambridgeshire for the last time!

In short - I’m back!

Nokia N810

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:35:00 +0000

Now that they’ve released the Nokia N810 in the UK, I ordered one yesterday and it arrived this morning; hurrah for prompt delivery!

My initial impressions are mixed.

Good things:

the screen is fantastic
it came with maps for the GPS for free
it has a keyboard
it’s responsive
it’s nice and small

Not so good things:

the battery cover is incredibly hard to take off
the battery doesn’t clip in - it just sits there and is held in place by the cover
the GPS takes ages to lock
the keyboard feels a bit mushy, and the top row is hard to type on

Anyway, I’ve now installed Maemo Mapper which works like a charm (a bit of hackery is needed to get the internal GPS to work with it though), and ssh from xterm is very usable with the new keyboard. Haven’t installed our WebKit stuff on it yet, but the Gecko-based MicroB engine isn’t too bad.

Overall a very nice piece of kit, and I’m very pleased with it.

WebKit & KDE

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:32:00 +0000

Now that I have a KDE 4 environment that I’m willing to use, I thought I’d take a look at Trolltech’s WebKitKDE KPart for embedding WebKitQt into Konqueror (or any other application which supports KParts).

Unfortunately, it seems that the project has been stagnant for a while and had bitrotted to the extent that it no longer compiled. I have now committed a fairly trivial fix that lets it compile and load, but it’s still in a fairly broken position. Hopefully I’ll be able to find some time to look into it more closely and potentially sort a few things out.

Now for the gratuitous screenshot:

WebKit in Konqueror with Firefox in the background

Greetings Planet GNOME!

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 19:03:00 +0000

So in the spirit of Freedesktop.org I was added to Planet GNOME yesterday. Thanks Jeff!

This doesn’t mean I’ve converted to GNOME or relinquished KDE, but as the work that I’m doing these days involves both KDE (in the form of my NX stuff) and GNOME (WebKit/GTK+), I figured it was time I had myself added to Planet GNOME.

Here’s to exciting times ahead!