Gecko ported to Konqueror – 3173 days old

[BobGuy]

Among the most exciting things to come out of aKademy, the recent KDE Community World Summit, is a Qt port of Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine. This will give Gecko the full native look and feel of KDE/Qt, and make it available as a KPart, where it can provide an alternative HTML renderer for Konqueror.

"This is the best of both worlds for KDE" said Lars Knoll of the KHTML project. "Integrating Gecko side by side with our existing renderer opens a lot of doors, without any compromise of the hard work and clean design that make KHTML what it is."

On the night before the start of the hacking marathon, a conversation including, among others, Ian Geiser, Lars Knoll, Dirk Mueller, and Zack Rusin happened onto the topic of integrating Gecko into KDE. Lars and Zack jumped into Mozilla's code, to see how feasible such a plan might be. Within four days (and before the end of the marathon) the two had a working port.

The Mozilla organization was supportive: "We are delighted to work with the KDE community, both to extend the reach of Gecko, and to be part of an effort bringing even greater depth to the KDE desktop. Making Qt another platform for Mozilla, and Gecko another option for KDE is a win for both users and developers" commented Mitchell Baker, President of the Mozilla Foundation.

http://dot.kde.org/1094924433/

Looks good on paper, but I'm still trying to figure out exactly what this means to me as a user.

[Grogan]

It basically just means what it says, you'll be able to choose an alternate html rendering engine for konqueror. Gecko instead of khtml. I probably won't care to do that either (and expect it to be buggy at first). When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When using Konqueror... surprise! I want to use it's own rendering engine. Firefox is only a click away if that's not working out at the time.

It probably also means we'll soon be able to build Mozilla browsers against qt for the GUI instead of gtk+ 1 or 2 if desired, as an offshoot of this work.

It might also give distributors some flexibility to customize.

[BobGuy]

"This is not some experimental hack. We're looking at the whole thing rendering natively in Qt. This is the full-monty..."

http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/view/615

[Grogan]

Well, there's QT code in Mozilla CVS now. You can now configure it with --enable-default-toolkit=qt for KDE integration.

I'll post a screenshot if I can get this to compile (having trouble)

[Grogan]

Well I did get it to compile after a bit more screwing around, but I had my hopes up for nothing. It's not usable code yet, just in very early stages of success.

This is all it's supposed to look like for now, but as you can see when it's more finished it will be integrated with KDE and use what ever style you are using.

It's been possible to make Mozilla look like Keramik before with a really horrible GTK+ style called Geramik, but this is going to be real integration.