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this sat mellowing in my drafts folder for a day or two... 

On Thursday 16 October 2003 06:23, Michael Petch wrote:
> Phoenix? That code named has been dropped :) Its Firebird Now. The email
> client is being decoupled as Thunderbird.

ah right... they change names often =)

> And I highly recommend Firebird. (I wasn't big on the bloat of Mozilla).
> I have found more pages don't render in Konqueror than with Firebird
> (And Mozilla).

well, i'm using KDE from CVS. when it comes out as 3.2, check Konqueror out.
the rendering and JS improvements are phenomenal, not only in speed
but also in accuracy. there are some minor regressions in CVS right now, but
generally pages that wouldn't render correctly previously for me now do. the 
Safari work + another 9 months of KDE hackers plonking away on it
has taken it quite a ways. and it still does a better job on many "IE
optimized" (*puke*) pages, which is to say it deals with the Real WWW(tm)...

not to mention things like _full_ SVG support. i can only hope that this is
the beginning of the end for flash... Moz really needs to get the Mozilla SVG
project finished up so that Adobes POS plugin can be relegated to history and
further pressure be put on The Other Web Browsers to catch up.

> firebird has a lot less bloat than Mozilla itself.

which is its biggest plus, yes...  not that it's hard to be less bloatific
than Moz. ;-)

<rant>of course, if you asked most Moz fans "back in tha day" they
would've sworn to your face that Moz wasn't bloated at all, nuh-uh!

but now that the project has come out and said that Moz is bloated, its all
politik to talk about the bloat of Moz and how trimmed out Firebird is. this
is one of the common (problematic) traits many Free Software enthusiasts
exhibit; at times I get sucked into it as well (though hopefully not very
often =). reality is what reality is: it's neither worse nor better, and
defending the indefensible in the Free world is as sensible as Bill Gates
saying that MS invented personal computing and that they put out bug fixes
faster than the Open Source community does. (which he did in a recent
interview. feh)

the worst part is that this attitue often holds us back. at best it causes us
to be complacement and not address issues (the Mincraft study leaps to mind
as a good example). and at worse it causes us to divest energies into things
we really would be better not to. right now as a community we're rooting for
a few projects that we really should be running away from as fast as possible,
while we largely ignore others that are, or at least should be, extremeley
important.

3-4 years ago Moz was such an albatross. it isn't anymore as we've already 
wasted enough of our community resources on it to deliver something a buck 
short and a day late. we lost the web browser battle, and now the browser is 
no longer a focus piece of the OS; it's relegated to commodity and viewed as 
largely uninteresting with IE being "the" browser.  if we're not careful 
history will repeat itself again and we'll have more phyric victories for 
nascent "standards" nobody in the real world actually cares about as we while 
away our time on blackhole projects and lose yet another key market or two.

there was a brief period time when Netscape 4.x was the best thing out there
(as much as it sucked), and it was available on Linux. but it fell behind; it
wasn't so bad, though, perhaps "good enough" or a version behind. but it was a
noticeably weak link and that really hurt. then Netscape was freed to much 
fanfare and everyone rejoiced with really no reason to. then it floundered 
while the project around it made mistake after mistake (some of which are 
only now being addressed and some of which are yet to be addressed) while 
various key organizations and people blessed it with sainthood. what a waste.

as a community of users and advocates we REALLY need to think about what we
put our efforts and support behind, because those decisions shape the future 
of our technology.
</rant>

> In comparison the Tabbed browsing functionality of Konqueror sucks in
> comparison to Firebirds Tabbed browsing extension.

tabs in CVS are quite improved, what with the new ktabwidget (which other apps 
such as konsole now use as well). i didn't find Konq's tabs compelling at all 
in KDE 3.1... i actually disliked tabbed browsing in general until i had an 
experential epiphane not too long ago when i discovered that i could drag and 
drop links from web pages to tabs! why, you can even drag and drop one tab to 
another tab to duplicate it! this is so nice when rapidly shuffling about in 
a web application that i now use tabs rather often, though i usually still 
use panes when in file management mode.

> The last release of
> konqueror  if far more prone to random crashing than Firebird is.

yes, gecko is quite stable these days. perhaps i visit different websites than
you, but konq is pretty darn solid in 3.1.4.

On Thursday 16 October 2003 06:30, Dave Lee wrote:
> "smart keywords" try "dict clug", and more.

Konqueror has had this since 2.something. try:

dict:clug, gg:clug, ggi:clug, yahoo:clug, rpmfind:kopete, apps:kopete,
fm:kopete, raa:ruby, fr2en:sacre blu, wp:what's wikipidia,
sf:msn clients, pgp:aseigo, cpan:smtp

etc, etc... i count ~68 presets right now in CVS, and you can define your own.
most features in konq are in moz and vice versa. there are a few things that
one has the other doesn't, and a few things one does better than the other.
but both are constantly borrowing ideas from the other (e.g. firebird's smart
keywords, or konqi's moz-compatible sidebar), which is great...

there are two places that they diverge IME: web dev and desktop integration.
moz/firebird tend to have the nicer web dev tools what with the CSS thingy
and Venkman. konqueror has much better filesystem handling (e.g. saving docs,
browsing local HTML, ioslaves) and quite a few very nice plugins, features
and integration related bonuses. if i were to work on windows i'd use a Moz 
variant, but i don't. if i care to debug some hardcore JS, i use Venkman... 
of course, as someone recently pointed out to me, Venkman debugs JS as Moz 
interprets it, which can make it useless when trying to write cross-browser 
JS. blah, what a mess that web is.

- --
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
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