On Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 12:48:57PM +0100, Richard Lewis wrote:
On Friday 24 August 2007 12:27:21 Brett Parker wrote:
Excellent: another (good) reason not to use Firefox.
Konqueror ftw ;-)
Except Konqueror sucks just as hard and uses the crappy Qt toolkit.
I've never done any serious work with Qt but it seems to have some quite cool concepts like the signal/slots thing, a nice component set, and its cross-platform.
So, you're not a developer and you don't know the intracacies... well done! As for signal/slots - that's what dbus was designed for (note: don't like that crap either).
Mix in the fact that it's not just a web browser but a nasty file manager
In fact, that's part of the appeal of Konqueror. Not so much that its a Web browser and file manager, but that its a kind of meta-application in which an KPart component can be displayed and which can make use of the kioslaves I/O abstraction layer.
Errr, right.
I would argue that you're just biased against: Qt because of its dubious free software credentials in the past; KDE because its large and pretty; and desktop environments because you like the kudos of using the terminal for everything.
When did KDE get "pretty", it's been ugly as sin for as long as I can remember, and I haven't seen it looking nicer recently. Qt is a crappy toolkit but has a nice API - if it wasn't for the fact that it is so damned ugly it might be worth time investigating, but, no, it's ugly and not as portable as GTK... (note: I hate new versions of GTK with a passion too, mostly because Gnome took over development of it and then fucked it over in "new and interesting" ways, Gtk-- isn't bad for the C++ peeps out there.
On the other hand, I use the terminal quite a bit and concede that in the hands of a proficient user it is often a more productive method of interacting with your computer especially for jobs like file management and text processing. But there are some things I really like about feature-rich desktop environments like: notification systems, clipboards (including consistent copy/paste behaviour), and homogeneous interface styling.
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
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?
Of course there is an obvious answer to this: you could make your own/improve FF.
Eeek. Please don't hurt me!
It's on my to do list - along with (now) finishing off a window manager that doesn't suck and doesn't have a complete twazzock as a "maintainer"... a Free java implementation that doesn't entirely suck... a decent Free search backend (though - actually - looks like xapians example backend is actually really rather good)... a decent CMS (that doesn't leak memory, doesn't take a year and a half to do anything and doesn't annoy the hell out of me)... etc, etc, etc.
Hum ho - of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion - but *anyone* that thinks that *any* of the web browsers out there at the moment is worth anything is seriously mistaken - they all suck in their own ways - wether it's because the CSS rendering engine is *too* lenient (*glares at Konqueror*), under implemented (*glares at firefox and IE 7*) or just entirely missing (*glares at 99.9% of other browsers).
Anyways - just got back from "1 or 2" beers, and am thus going the heck to sleep.