[link|http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1129|http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1129]

"With the help of Hyatt's Safari patches, Ivor Hewitt(*) and I have finally made Konqueror pass Acid2 as only the second browser."

Furthermore they have opensourced the derivative - WebKit and there have been browsers built on other platforms based on the WebKit code.

The post you cite was one that spurred the opensourcing of [link|http://webkit.opendarwin.org/building/checkout.html|WebKit].

resulted in Hyatt and Malone (the Safari team as I know it) reaching out to the K people and trying to find some common ground/improve code sharing. It was kind of the trigger.

So I'd say it has changed, they are trying to do the right thing, WebKit is being used beyond apple, and I don't think they're being ungrateful leaches about it. Bear in mind that K was immature and Apple had to put a lot into it to have a decent web browser SOON as IE was being EOL'd.

Could they have put more into it sooner? I suppose, at the risk of jeopardizing their ship dates, which might not have been an option.

There's a balance there. WebKit remains up to date, there's a blog that talks about what's going on with it, and there are outside developers with commit rights. Seems pretty open to me. The fact that it seems to have ended up a fork is unfortunate, but might have been necessary. That's life.

but on this particular issue - I don't think its fair.

I work with the Safari developers on compatibility issues and I know them as people. Its a little harder to think of people you "know" being evil than it is to think of corporations being evil.

They want to do the right thing. They have an employer and customer base to please too.


Hyatt writes: [link|http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2005_04.html|http://weblogs.mozil...ives/2005_04.html]

"For what it's worth, the patches I posted are to WebCore, which consists of both KHTML and KWQ (our port of Qt). They are posted to illustrate all the WebCore bugs that had to be fixed in Safari to pass the Acid2 test. They are not solely KHTML patches. The antialiasing bug was in KWQ, and so doesn't even apply to KHTML. The better object element support necessarily involves KWQ as well, since the plugin code is (obviously) platform-specific.

What do you think Apple could be doing better here? Comment or trackback. I'll read it all."

And one of the complaints is:

"The annoying part is not that Apple don't cooperate as much as they could. They are actually helpfull in answering questions and _tries_ at least to separate OS X specific features in the code (allthough they fail miserably at it). No, our problem are users who think Apple does more and underestimate the effort it takes for us to implement patches from WebCore. We are doing this for free and for fun, all we really want is appreciation for our effort.

In December 2004 I "ported" the CSS text-shadow property from WebCore. I put ported in quotes because the only thing ported was the code to parse the property. In the rendering Apple had created an extension to KWQ (their Qt) that used an OS X call to draw the shadow. This meant that to "port" it I had to write the shadow drawing myself. "

So the complaint isn't that Apple doesn't give back its stuff. Its that people don't appreciate the amount of work the Konqueror people still have to do because their target OS has less to work with.

But what was Hyatt to do? Write his own shadow code when he already has code in his target OS to implement it? That would be bloody stupid and I can't blame him for taking the short cut as I would have done exactly the same thing. (Actually, I did exactly that sort of thing with ObjectiveCLIPS - lots of ObjectiveC/Apple specific code was added to a base open source library - I forked it to make it more useful - so sue me).

No, instead their response was to listen and then open it all up. [link|http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2005_06.html#008281|http://weblogs.mozil...05_06.html#008281]

So lets recap - the real problem is the ungrateful Konqueror community.

"When I said "all we want is appreciation" I didn't mean "Look at me, I am so good.". I was hinting at users who are down right rude.
Look at bugs.kde.org and you can find many Konqueror bugs where the users are telling us how incredible lazy and lame we are because we don't just copy all the shit Apple is doing "for us"."

Fucking ungrateful linux users looks more like the correct root cause to me.

I can't comment on other open source efforts at Apple but I've been in the middle of this one and its not Apple's fault.

Its up to the browser to provide it. Safari's is Safari (<version-number>). This goes all the way back to 1.1 at least (current is 2.04 I think).

This is annoying because it fragment's all the Safari versions across our metrics report. It does not say khtml I don't think - did it ever? Not sure.

Maybe I'm biased, but I'd behave the same way in their shoes. KHhtml just provides the parser and the DOM I think - basically it does the same thing I did for Scrutinizer. The converting DOM to pixels is done in a platform dependent way through Apple's Qt compatibility library that in turn calls Quartz. Many fixes end up in this layer and don't help the K people. Oh well. Do they have to back port all those changes to K's rendering engine?

I don't see why they should. Its a completely different beast.

I don't think I'm blinded by the RDF - but I do identify with the people involved in this instance.