Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

KDE's Konqueror Is In Need Of A New Maintainer

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #31
    Ktorrent hasn't seen any movement since april - missing maintainer in this case too?

    Comment


    • #32
      Jack of all trades, master of none.

      Konqueror is not a web browser, it is not a file manager, it is not a text editor, etc... it is all of those. Which is the complete opposite to the unix philosophy: do one thing and do it well.

      Konqueror has a terrible interface for web browsing, terrible for file manager, terrible for text editor, etc. But it kind of has to in order to support all these use cases.

      I think it is a good thing that konqueror has not taken that much maintenance resources, and that this is being acknowledged. Perhaps it would be nice to retire it, or at least not make it such a prominent tool and favor the separated alternatives.

      The kpart component model is interesting and all, but at the end of the day it smells of a solution looking for a problem.

      Comment


      • #33
        Originally posted by paulpach View Post
        Konqueror is not a web browser, it is not a file manager, it is not a text editor, etc... it is all of those. Which is the complete opposite to the unix philosophy: do one thing and do it well.
        So what's the definition of this "one thing"?

        If I look at a file manager it does:
        1) list folder contents (sometimes in multiple views!)
        2) create files
        3) rename files
        4) delete files
        5) ...

        That's more than one thing right?

        Or take a look at "cat":
        1) Open file
        2) Read file line by line
        3) Close file

        Already 3 (three!) things.

        Now look at Konqueror:
        1) Everything

        That's totally Unix philosophy compliant!

        Comment


        • #34
          Originally posted by paulpach View Post
          Konqueror is not a web browser, it is not a file manager, it is not a text editor, etc... it is all of those. Which is the complete opposite to the unix philosophy: do one thing and do it well.

          Konqueror has a terrible interface for web browsing, terrible for file manager, terrible for text editor, etc. But it kind of has to in order to support all these use cases.

          I think it is a good thing that konqueror has not taken that much maintenance resources, and that this is being acknowledged. Perhaps it would be nice to retire it, or at least not make it such a prominent tool and favor the separated alternatives.

          The kpart component model is interesting and all, but at the end of the day it smells of a solution looking for a problem.
          I'd like to take this time to point out that this is yet another perfect example that most people who blab on about the "Unix Philosophy" are non-programmers who don't actually understand it, or how it operates in modern programming. Konqueror is UNIX philosophy compliant EXACTLY BECAUSE OF it's KPart based design

          Comment


          • #35
            Originally posted by Luke_Wolf View Post
            There actually used to be quite a few of those, but then they all transitioned over to webkit or died, I wonder why?...
            Other browsers used to embedded Gecko but Mozilla ended support for that:

            Originally posted by Camino Browser Blog
            Mozilla today announced the end of Gecko embedding, which Camino uses to include the Gecko rendering engine inside of a native Cocoa interface.

            While embedding has long been relatively low priority, being officially unsupported is a significant change. As important parts of embedding stop working, core Gecko contributors will longer be fixing them. Such breakages are unfortunately common?in fact, making sure that embedding breakages were resolved was a significant amount of the work that went into the release of Camino 2.0, as well as the upcoming Camino 2.1. Without support for embedding, releases of Camino using newer versions of Gecko?like the one used in Firefox 4?won?t be possible.
            Though, Jolla uses a different method to make a web browser based on Mozilla technologies: http://blog.idempotent.info/posts/wh...h-browser.html

            Comment


            • #36
              Originally posted by Luke_Wolf View Post
              I'd like to take this time to point out that this is yet another perfect example that most people who blab on about the "Unix Philosophy" are non-programmers who don't actually understand it, or how it operates in modern programming. Konqueror is UNIX philosophy compliant EXACTLY BECAUSE OF it's KPart based design
              Exactly!
              How anyone can describe a shell as "opposite" to the "Unix philosophy" is really strange.

              Cheers,
              _

              Comment


              • #37
                Originally posted by Luke_Wolf View Post
                I'd like to take this time to point out that this is yet another perfect example that most people who blab on about the "Unix Philosophy" are non-programmers who don't actually understand it, or how it operates in modern programming. Konqueror is UNIX philosophy compliant EXACTLY BECAUSE OF it's KPart based design
                Ok, I am going to backpedal. The Unix philosophy:
                "Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface." Dogh McRoll.

                It simply does not apply to gui applications at all. Certainly Kpart is not "text streams" and far from being a universal interface. Neither is any IPC protocol other than pipes for that matter. The "handle text streams" is simply from another time, and we now know a lot more about human computer interaction, than to restrict ourselves to text in -> program -> text out

                Konqueror's modularity is great. No issue with kpart. The issue I was trying to express is that konqueror's user interface is designed to address a large amount of disparate use cases. Because of this, it is not particularly good at any of them. If you want a web browser, rekonq is specifically designed for that, so its UI is tailored for web browsing. For file management, dolphin has a great UI, for text editing, kate has a great UI for text editing, etc...

                Konqueror's problem is not about code, it is about UX. I even wrote several bugs years ago for konqueror's HIG violations (per KDE developer's request), they remain open to this date. I am glad they are looking at a redesign of the UI, but I think rekonq + dolphin + kate + okular + ? is a better approach. You want a shell that can run all those together? that is what the window manager is for.

                By the way, I won the south american regional ACM programming contest, so yes, I am a programmer.

                Comment


                • #38
                  Originally posted by paulpach View Post
                  The issue I was trying to express is that konqueror's user interface is designed to address a large amount of disparate use cases. Because of this, it is not particularly good at any of them.
                  Taking the browser configuration, can you give an example?

                  Konqueror and Firefox are almost identical here, the only difference is that Firefox has the tabs above the address input line while Konqueror has it right on top of the content.

                  Between Dolphin and Konqueror in filemanager configuration the main difference seems to be the missing detailed information side panel on the right hand side and the ability to switch the left hand side panel into tree view.

                  Cheers,
                  _

                  Comment


                  • #39
                    Originally posted by anda_skoa View Post
                    Taking the browser configuration, can you give an example?

                    Konqueror and Firefox are almost identical here, the only difference is that Firefox has the tabs above the address input line while Konqueror has it right on top of the content.

                    Between Dolphin and Konqueror in filemanager configuration the main difference seems to be the missing detailed information side panel on the right hand side and the ability to switch the left hand side panel into tree view.

                    Cheers,
                    _
                    It has all the options of all the things it does. However, many of them are mixed in together, which means for any single task the interface is very cluttered. For example file, folder and web page bookmarks are all mixed in together. You have the download manager in the file manager interface, a ton of file management tools in the web browser right-click menu, and the search bar keeps the web search engine even when you are in file management, when you start typing in the address bar it defaults to using a web address, the web page search and file manager filtering use similar bars but different shortcuts, etc.

                    And that is for two tasks that share many things in common. It is even worse when you start getting into, say, text editing. You end up with a mix of file managements menus and text editor menus, and it lacks a lot of the tools even kwrite has, not to mention kate.

                    That is not to say that it is not good for what it is intended. But it has to make compromises. Its interface can never be as optimized for a particular task as an application purpose-built for that task.

                    Comment


                    • #40
                      Ah.

                      Hmm, I don't have bookmarks in the file manager profile anymore, places replaced that for both Konqueror and Dolphin for me.

                      I don't know what that download manager is but since I can access remote files wouldn't that be useful there as well?

                      Not sure about the context menu, I seem to have pretty different ones in the two profiles. At least I can't see any file manager specific ones in the web profile or vice versa.

                      As for other potential profiles I've never configured any of those, so my experience is solvely filemanager and browser and these seem to work equally well.
                      I do like opening document viewers in tabs in either profile though, especially in browser mode. Like what other browsers can do for PDF, text and images but for basically everything.
                      Basically making middle click on URLs almost always work instead of sometimes prompting for how to open a certain type.
                      My guess is that is because of the architecture that allows each tab to be a different component.

                      Cheers,
                      _

                      Comment

                      Working...
                      X