On Friday 24 August 2007 12:27, Brett Parker wrote:
Except Konqueror sucks just as hard and uses the crappy Qt toolkit.
Not wishing to gainsay, but I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on what makes Qt a crappy toolkit.
From what I can see, Qt is a stable, lightweight, featureful and reasonably documented toolkit and some sound design ideas, available as Free software - I'd be interested to know how it comes off poorly against almost anything else available.
Not that it's perfect, of course - nothing is, and what foibles it has can jump out at you - I've had to hack around threading issues in the past. Sure as hell beats _porting_ apps between point releases on other toolkits into a cocked hat though. I hear a lot of superstition about how terrible Qt is, and not much reason.
I doubt you're likely to hold up a Mozilla platform or a Gtk as a shining example of toolkit brilliance, but I am curious to find out why you say this and whether you have some secret GUI toolkit in mind I don't know about.
(Also, KHTML is great, I suggest you have a nose around it at some point! :-) )
God I wish there was a browser that actually had: (a) decent css support (b) a fast (and accurate) rendering engine (c) no memory leaks (d) no random buffer overflows, segfaults, annoying habits (e) a UI that didn't entirely totally suck
It's very much these kinds of considerations that have me choosing Konqueror over Firefox for light browsing tasks, as the better of various imperfect browsers (well, on-balance. It's orders of magnitude snappier for most pages, and where I do want to fall back on any other browser for heavy js or ie quirks, there's a convenient option to in the menu).
Also, any kind of AA/SPH for fonts seems to look horrendous in firefox and lovely in konqy, which makes web documentation a little easier on the eye (for me anyway, YMMV).
Until that point, I'm sticking with firefox (well, actually, iceweasel in debian, at least there's half a chance that that'll get security updates)...
Ho hum - when will web browsers stop sucking and designers get the opportunity of not having to test a site it 10 million different browsers because they've all got their own quirks and interpretation of the specs - it's not like HTML is a new spec, heck, it's not even like CSS3 is new - and yet, where's the support?
Bah,
When the current generation of browsing bloatware dies, and browsers can track standards instead of what IE/Mozilla burp at them.
Let's not hold our breaths on that one.