aKademy Hackers Port Mozilla to Qt/KDE
Konqueror Posted by Kecko Team on Saturday 11/Sep/2004, @19:40
from the integrative-desktop dept.
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: Gecko running on Qt. They credited the speed of implementation to the maturity of the respective technologies and KDE's component architecture (though the caliber of the hackers certainly didn't hamper the effort). In their implementation, Qt is just another platform for Mozilla, parallel to the drawing and widget layer for Mozilla's other platforms like GTK, Win32, or MacOS X. Though the work is on-going, the team is close to integrating Gecko into Konqueror, connecting Gecko to the higher level browser machinery in Konqueror such as KWallet and KCookieJar.

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.

There have been previous starts at this idea in the past. Trolltech's QtScape, some initial Corel work, and a Mozilla-based XPart, foundered from lack of maintenance and little advocacy within the Mozilla community. The current team will be full-fledged contributors to the Mozilla code-base, with KDE people and mozilla.org behind the effort. The Qt port will live and develop in Mozilla's CVS repository. The code to embed the corresponding QWidget will live, naturally, in KDE's repository.