by George Staikos

It seems like whenever KDE developers get together for a meeting or conference, great things happen. For instance, in the past we've seen developments such as the creation of DCOP (one of the building blocks of KDE), or thousands of fixes in only one short week. The recent KDE conference in Germany was no exception. One of the most notable outcomes of the conference was an impromptu project to port Mozilla to KDE.

Mozilla, the second most popular web browser in use today, has always run well under KDE. However, it has never been tightly integrated with KDE, making it feel more like a second-class citizen. The importance of Mozilla on the corporate desktop, however, is not to be understated. Therefore, two notable KDE hackers, Lars Knoll and Zack Rusin, took it upon themselves to turn Mozilla into a first class KDE citizen. In as little as 4 days, they not only managed to make the Mozilla browser integrate cleanly as a native KDE application, but also turn the HTML engine of Mozilla, Gecko, into a component that could be reused in KDE. This means that if a user with this engine installed selects Gecko as their preferred HTML rendering agent in the KDE Control Center, all KDE applications will use Gecko by default.

For KDE, the existence of a "native" Mozilla and Gecko engine means that organizations which have standardized on Mozilla as a browser will be able to easily migrate to a KDE platform and retain a native browser interface. While Konqueror is a perfectly capable browser, and my own browser of choice, it is unfortunately not an option for some users. Perhaps more interesting, however, is the ability to use Konqueror with the Gecko engine, thereby getting a fully Mozilla-compatible browsing agent running in the powerful Konqueror shell. With the new KDE-compatible Gecko component, Konqueror can transparently use Gecko just as it now uses the KHTML rendering engine. This is a consequence of one of the original design decisions of KDE and Konqueror, that is to be a component based architecture. Konqueror will be none the wiser that KHTML is not being used!

Since the announcement of this work, people have been asking if the end is near for KHTML. It's important to point out that KHTML is a very capable HTML renderer, and is actually the foundation for more web browsers than Gecko is. As Apple works on KHTML, KDE developers continue to merge changes back into the KDE tree and feed new changes back to Apple, so development of KHTML is not stagnating in any way. Actually the Mozilla work was more of a one-time development in the sense that KDE developers don't have to continue to work on that code as rendering improvements are done in Mozilla. KHTML on the other hand needs constant work. Additionally, KHTML is a much smaller and lighter rendering engine than Mozilla, and is perhaps better suited to embedding, which is of course a major requirement for KDE applications such as KMail. KDE and Konqueror will certainly continue to ship with KHTML as the default HTML renderer for years to come, though I suspect it will be easy to switch to the Mozilla tools if desired. The only place we might see a change is in some of the Linux distributions, who might feel that it is more suitable for their target market to ship Mozilla and Gecko.

People who have been using KDE for more than 5-6 years now may remember that the idea of porting Mozilla to KDE is not a new one. Trolltech originally ported Mozilla to Qt many years ago. Corel also did work on a Qt-native version of Mozilla, and KDE even had a Gecko component for a while. Will this new project have a longer shelf life than the previous attempts? Probably. There is now quite a bit of momentum for this project, from the KDE project, the Mozilla Foundation, and end-users alike. Most importantly, it seems like this time the Mozilla Foundation and developers are prepared for it, and the work was done "right" - it won't require tedious reworking and refactoring over time.

The code for the KDE native Mozilla and Gecko component is mostly available in Mozilla's bug tracking system at the moment. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] Once the changes are approved they will be integrated into the next Mozilla release. This will prove to be a great tool for adoption of KDE on the desktop as organizations can migrate from legacy platforms more easily than ever before.

George is a software developer from Toronto, Canada. He has been actively involved with the KDE project for over 5 years, developing KDE code and attending conferences to discuss and promote KDE and Linux on the desktop. He is presently the North American press contact for KDE, and is still an active developer. George has contributed to many different areas of KDE including the libraries and I/O subsystem, Konqueror, KMail, and various other applications.