[VValdo]

From his weblog :

Yes, I am a member of the Safari team at Apple. I work primarily on the WebCore, the open source portion of Safari that contains KHTML (as well as the implementation of the Qt subset required to support KHTML). In future blogs I'll be talking about some of the changes and architectural improvements that we made to KHTML and explain those in more detail, but for now I'm going to get some much-needed sleep.

I have to say that I am very suprised Dave Hyatt (inventor of XUL, XBL, and one of the Chimera people) would abandon Chimera for a KHTML-based "Apple" browser.

But, I'm anxious to find out why KHTML and not Gecko...so check back w/his blog for what's sure to be interesting information...

W

[TheIceMan]

I found this posted on this email from Don Melton (Safari Engineering Manager). I'll go ahead and post it here since it was freely posted on the web:


From: Don Melton <[email protected]>
Subject: Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 11:31:10 -0800

Hi,

I'm the engineering manager of Safari, Apple Computer's new web browser built upon KHTML and KJS. I'm sending you this email to thank you for making such a great open source project and introduce myself and my development team. I also wish to explain why and how we've used your excellent technology. It's important that you know we're committed to open source and contributing our changes, now and in the future, back to you, the original developers. Hopefully this will begin a dialogue among ourselves for the benefit of both of our projects.

I've "cc"-ed my team on this email so you know their names and contact information. Perhaps you already recognize some of those names. Back in '98 I was one of the people who took Mozilla open source. David Hyatt is not only the originator of the Chimera web browser project but also the inventor of XBL. Darin Adler is the former lead of the Nautilus file manager. Darin, Maciej Stachowiak, John Sullivan, Ken Kocienda, and I are all Eazel veterans.

The number one goal for developing Safari was to create the fastest web browser on Mac OS X. When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus. And the small size of your code is a significant reason for our winning startup
performance as you can see reflected in the data at http://www.apple.com/safari/ .

How did we do it? As you know, KJS is very portable and independent. The Sherlock team is already using it on Mac OS X in the framework my team prepared called JavaScriptCore. But because KHTML requires other components from KDE and Qt, we wrote our own adapter library called KWQ (and pronounced "quack") that replaces these other components. KHTML
and KWQ have been encapsulated in a framework called WebCore. We've also made significant enhancements, bug fixes, and performance improvements to KHTML and KJS.

Both WebCore and JavaScriptCore, which account for a little over half the code in Safari, are being released as open source today. They
should be available at
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/webcore/ very soon. Also, we'll be sending you another email soon which details our changes and additions to KHTML and KJS. I hope the detailed list in that email
will help you understand what we've done a little better. We'd also like to send this information to the appropriate KDE mailing list. Please advise us on which one to use.

We look forward to your comments. We'd also like to speak to you and we'd be happy to set up a conference call at our expense for this
purpose.

Thank you again for making KHTML and KJS.

Please forward this email to any contributor whom I may have missed.

--
Don Melton
Safari Engineering Manager
Apple Computer

P.S. -- I'm sending you this email while attending MacWorld exposition so it may take myself and my staff several hours before we can respond to email. My apologies in advance.


So it seems from this email (written to the creator of KHTML and KJS), that the creators of Safari wanted something fast, and KHTML and KJS seemed to be their top choices.

[DaveGee]

Originally posted by VValdo:
From his weblog :



I have to say that I am very suprised Dave Hyatt (inventor of XUL, XBL, and one of the Chimera people) would abandon Chimera for a KHTML-based "Apple" browser.

But, I'm anxious to find out why KHTML and not Gecko...so check back w/his blog for what's sure to be interesting information...

W

Well if you had read some of Dave's other weblog entries... Gotta go back to about May/June/July time frame he was never 'in love' with the Gecko layout engine (used in Chimera and Mozilla)... In a weblog reply to a thread that was started in these very forums he stated that "Gecko wasn't the be all end all ..."

I'll/You'll have to find the full entry since I don't wanna put words in his mouth but after reading what he wrote it was quite clear that Gecko had issues and Dave even said something like (Gecko just happens to be the best of the worst) ... something like that... again you should find the entry and read it to get the full thoughts as Dave expressed them.

Dave

[Guy Incognito]

Originally posted by DaveGee:
...Dave even said something like (Gecko just happens to be the best of the worst) ... something like that...

What's KHTML, the worst of the best? Or the best of the best?

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

What the heck is KHTML and XBL?

[DaveGee]

Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
What's KHTML, the worst of the best? Or the best of the best?

KHTML wasn't being talked about by Dave... he was talking about the current 'on radar' browsers MSIE, Opera, OmniWeb, iCab and the various Gecko based stuff...

Dave

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker:
What the heck is KHTML and XBL?

KHTML is an Open-Source HTML rendering engine. It is not Gecko, though it has a similar purpose. It's quite good in its own right.

KHTML's standards support is not quite as good as Gecko's, but it's better than anything else on the market other than Gecko. Unfortunately, Safari's User-Agent string lies in an attempt to be sniffed as Gecko; they should have used a Konqueror-derived UA string instead.

Why did Apple choose KHTML? In the end it all really boils down to size. You'll note that Safari is less than half the size of Chimera. That's not without its implications for download and loading speed.

XBL is a strange beast. But you know how CSS can be used to change the look of tags? In a similar way, XBL can be used to change the behavior of tags. It's actually pretty neat; someone used this to add support for XHTML 2.0 to Mozilla a while back. XBL isn't a Web standard, but there is currently no Web standard at all for this sort of thing (Mozilla has submitted XBL to the W3C as a proposal, and it's being discussed).

[MacGorilla]

I was talking with some Apple developers on IRC last night (#opendarwin is where they tend to hang out) and they said the choice of KHTML was because KHTML was actually faster than gecko in some of their internal tests. Add Qt to the mix, which is Mac OS X native, and it made porting KHTML to the Mac a breeze.

KTHML is a html compliant web engine. Its used primarily in KDE's Konquerer web browser, but also in small other browsers (K-melon on Windows). KHTML is a fine engine.

[lookmark]

Originally posted by VValdo:
I have to say that I am very suprised Dave Hyatt (inventor of XUL, XBL, and one of the Chimera people) would abandon Chimera for a KHTML-based "Apple" browser.

Think about why the project Chimera was begun in relation to Mozilla -- same idea.

Speed, compactness, clarity, size.

Apple seems to rather enjoy picking the dark horses these days.

[Rastar]

I like it. Fast, Neat, Compact...I think Apple is on to something.

Apple seems to rather enjoy picking the dark horses these days.

that is a Good thing.

[Diggory Laycock]

If you read his blog you'll see that the safari team have already fixed a few things already - Improved flash frame rates & a DPI issue.

Very open for Apple.

Also because WebCore/KHTML is open source the adventurous can re-compile it and get bleeding-edge rendering features before offical releases. (not for the faint hearted)

hmmm - imagine how much better Mail will handle HTML emails once they integrate WebCore.

tasty.

[JB72]

KTHML is a html compliant web engine. Its used primarily in KDE's Konquerer web browser, but also in small other browsers (K-melon on Windows). KHTML is a fine engine.

If I remeber correctly (I'm no Linux geek,) KTHML is also used by KDE system wide to browse files etc. Is that right? I'm too lazy to check.

[uninformed_fantasy]Maybe some third party devs could use the Safari work to make similar apps with other purposes like file browsing or, I dunno, something more creative and useful than I can come up with on the spot.[/uninformed_fantasy]

KDE.org
Konqueror

[crystalthunder]

Originally posted by Diggory Laycock:
hmmm - imagine how much better Mail will handle HTML emails once they integrate WebCore.

tasty.

Indeed!

[Earth Mk. II]

Konqueror (sp?), the default browser in KDE, can be used as a file browser, but I don't believe KHTML includes the file browsing abilities - Could be wrong.

But kudos to apple for doing the opensource thing.

[rw]

Originally posted by MacGorilla:
#opendarwin is where they tend to hang out

#opendarwin on what server?

[WJMoore]

Originally posted by Earth Mk. II:
Konqueror (sp?), the default browser in KDE, can be used as a file browser, but I don't believe KHTML includes the file browsing abilities - Could be wrong.

But kudos to apple for doing the opensource thing.

I'm no expert but I beleive the file manager part of Konqueror is called KIO and obviously is not a part of KHTML.

Wesley

[Earth Mk. II]

yeah, KIO sound about right... there's another componet too, but it's been awhile since i last played with KDE.

anyway, KHTML != file browser.

[Gul Banana]

Indeed, if you enter a file:// URL in Safari which ends in a directory, it opens it in the Finder.

[oVeRmInD911]

Originally posted by Gul Banana:
Indeed, if you enter a file:// URL in Safari which ends in a directory, it opens it in the Finder.

and if you connect to a FTP server, it'll open it in the Finder too. I didn't know what happened at first, but I like it now!

[Northform]

KHTML does not browse files. It is merely an HTML rendering engine like Gecko. That does not mean that Safari/Mozilla/Konqueror cannot browse files (in fact Konqueror is the equiv. of the finder for KDE). KHTML is part of the KDE project and licenced under the LGPL. Basically the LGPL means that you have to share changes to the original source. That means that Apple has to release the rendering engine from Safari, but nothing about the interface and such. The reason Apple chose KHTML is because of its size. Smaller doesn't mean faster, but it does mean more managable for programmers. KHTML never fully took off because of licencing concerns (that have been quelled by a change in the Qt Licence) combined with the fact that it was only for KDE (and although KDE is most of the Linux graphical world - I think 60-70% - it is still a small world). People wanted to concentrate on Mozilla because of its corporate backing and cross-platform abilities. People didn't want to waste their time developing a browser that few could use and might become extinct due to licencing problems. Mozilla offered people the chance to develop for Windows, Mac, BeOS, Linux (including KDE, Gnome, the rest), etc. rather than limiting them to such a small platform.

With Apple's dive into KHTML, the community might take another look at it. It is much easier to work with (code-wise) so it might attract some developers away from Mozilla. If someone makes a Windows browser based on KHTML it will finally have equal footing with Moz (and Qt - the development toolset that is used to create KHTML - is Windows compatable).

[Art Vandelay]

Originally posted by Gul Banana:
Indeed, if you enter a file:// URL in Safari which ends in a directory, it opens it in the Finder.

Anyone notice that as you type in a path, the icon changes to match the current matching point in the path.

For example, as you type file:/// the icon changes to a hard drive. Once you type file:///Applications it changes to the App fodler icon.

[Group51]

Ah! Little touches.

I don't know, everything looks a bit tighter display wise too. And the text doesn't lag when I'm typing this. yipee!