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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Thursday, May 12, 2005

Open-source divorce for Apple's Safari?

CNET:

Two years after it selected open-source rendering engine KHTML as the basis of its Safari Web browser, Apple Computer has proposed resolving compatibility conflicts by scrapping that code base in favor of its own.

In an e-mail seen by CNET News.com, a leading Apple browser developer suggested that architects of the KHTML rendering engine--the heart of a browser--consider abandoning the KHTML code base, or "tree," in favor of Apple's version, called WebCore. KHTML was originally written to work on top of KDE (the K Desktop Environment), an interface for Linux and Unix operating systems.

"One thing you may want to consider eventually is back-porting (WebCore) to work on top of (KDE), and merging your changes into that," Apple engineer Maciej Stachowiak wrote in an e-mail dated May 5. "I think the Apple trees have seen a lot more change since the two trees diverged, although both have useful changes. We'd be open to making our tree multi-platform."

Ah. Hmm... Woo!

[Rubs eyes.] Does this say what I think it says?

I've written this before, but I'll do so again here just for completeness: If Safari somehow found its way to Windows, I'd be all over it. All over it.

I understand that KHTML and KDE are really designed for Linux primarily, and not Windows. But a KDE port is (sort of) in the works. You never know.

[ Posted at 8:56 AM | Permalink ]