The Mozilla and Nokia teams have been working hard to port Firefox 3 and the Mozilla Platform to Qt and there are now some solid results available from their efforts. An experimental build of Firefox Qt is available and you can download the sources from Mozilla’s mercurial repository. The plan is to merge the Qt branch into the central Mozilla branch to make the port official.
I think this is great for those who use KDE. Using only one graphical library under one system is great to have for memory, but also for integration. Even with several addons such as gtk-qt-engine, or that “Save As” extension, Firefox wasn’t as well integrated as Konqueror. Now it seems it’s going to look like a KDE application.
I remember Firefox 1.0 had a Qt version, and it worked great in SuSE but then it wasn’t updated anymore. I hope this is going to change now
Kudos to the devs!
Yeah, I believe this also means that we (KDE users) are finally going to be able to store Firefox passwords with KWallet. B)
Why do you believe that that’s being made? So far (as I can see) they only talk abet Qt, not KDE.
Yeah, this is why:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=278343
And this: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Feature_Brainstorming:Platform_Inte…
Perhaps more work is needed though. Or perhaps, I just understood it wrong… 😡
Edited 2008-08-07 13:17 UTC
A feature request on Bugzilla doesn’t mean that it will be implemented. Mozilla has open requests that are in some cases older than 10 years! That one is from 2005.
A brainstorming page in a wiki is no more credible than an open feature request.
Well I meant at least know there is the *possibility* it will be fixed.
Although now that you meantion it… I think I mixed this up with a story about how the Firefox/Gecko engine could be used in Konqueror…
It’s also a great initiative for those of us who don’t use KDE for a desktop, but like things like save and open dialogs with useful buttons and menus, not just pretty breadcrumb nav buttons for the path…a non-GTK print dialog wouldn’t hurt, either.
I will be looking forward to stable firefox-Qt packages in the future.
Does anyone remember the days when Netscape released Mozilla as open source and the first thing some hackers did, was to port it to Qt? Took several nights and large amount of coffee, but it was a sensation at these times 🙂
Here is the press-release from TrollTech http://trolltech.com/company/newsroom/announcements/00000007
Edited 2008-08-07 06:08 UTC
I think the current Qt port is about the 4th attempt. I don’t believe that it will be successful this time until I see a release version shipping.
Wow this is good. QT should become the default toolkit for X.ORG – something like WIN32 for Windows. I just wonder, what will happen to the XUL GUI and apps requiring it including FF extensions?
That $ sign above was a typo and I can’t seem to fix it.
Edited 2008-08-07 06:28 UTC
Basically, this version of Mozilla ports the underlying Mozilla platform (Gecko) to Qt. That includes XUL – so XUL applications (including Firefox) will work on the GTK version, or the Qt version. XUL’s designed to be independent of whatever platform’s sitting underneath it.
Same general idea as the Mac versions of Firefox 2 running on top of Carbon, while the Mac version of Firefox 3 runs on top of Cocoa.
I’ll admit to not reading the article (site’s down) – is this for Qt 4 or Qt 3? I assume 4, so this’d make a nice alternative to Konqueror on KDE 4 systems. As much as I like Konqueror, a version of Firefox that had reasonable integration with KDE (like the GTK version’s integration with Gnome) would be great.
wow this will make KDE4 experience make smooth. Personally I hate few GTK widgets (apparently there are no alternatives for them).QT is the better toolkit but License is not very friendly as the case with GTK. So If somebody wants to build commercial product out of Firefox-QT he have to pay troll tech. Not the case with WxWindows or GTK.
This is the primary reason why majority of commercial and Open Source project goes with GTK or WxWindows and not QT.
Lets hope that the scenario will change.
Sure, but the Trolltech folks need food to write such a great toolkit
.
There are plenty of commercial products using Qt, and as you know one of the two major *NIX desktop environments.
Though, I wonder what happens when Nokia pushes Qt more on mobile devices. Apple, Google (Android), and others don’t require developers to pay fees to use a toolkit to write commercial applications for their smartphones. (Of course, there is a fee for providing apps through the Apple app store.)
I agree with you.
QT is an excellent toolkit and it will need commercial support. I see KDE4 as an excellent example for possibilities around KDE4.
BTW. I have compiled the QT version of the firefox. Working good, excellent port considering this is the pre-alpha version.
http://picasaweb.google.com/kunaldeo2006/FirefoxQT/photo#5231714920…
http://picasaweb.google.com/kunaldeo2006/FirefoxQT/photo#5231714919…
http://picasaweb.google.com/kunaldeo2006/FirefoxQT/photo#5231714920…
I specially love the Save diaglogs. Because I hate GTK Save and Open dialogs.
not so.. people can easily build commercial products with it, and not have to pay trolltech anything..
That is only if there are changes to the underlying firefox or qt code. If your product is implemented as an extension or an add-on, then you’re fine.
I like all these little license workarounds. Can’t have the Nvidia driver link against Linux?…create an open source abstraction layer and you’re fine.
Can’t have ZFS link against Linux?…create an open source abstraction layer and link against that.
Can’t link against a Qt based browser?…good thing that browser has an extension API.
where, exactly, are you getting your data from? because the numbers i have show a lot more commercial Qt apps out there than Gtk+ apps, and scads of open source projects.
if you’re comparing the apps that commonly come to mind to linux desktop users, e.g. “vm ware, acrobat and firefox” vs “google earth and skype”, i can understand how you might come to this perception.
but the reality is that Qt is use a lot more than Gtk is in industry.
I’ll believe it when I see it, of course, but this would mean one step forward towards KDE Desktop World Domination 🙂
I wonder how would it impact FF speed. I have high hopes positively. Where does it position Gecko cairo work?
If they use the qt4 library (for KDE 4), then it’ll probably be pretty darn efficient. From what I understand, qt4 is considerably faster and lighter on resources even with all the expanded functionality.
However, the really important thing to notice here is that Mozilla has decided to work with the KDE community and Nokia (who owns Trolltech, the developers of Qt). This is exciting news, and I hope they stay committed to each other.
Is it me or is http://browser.garage.maemo.org/ bringing up blank pages?
1. If this port is actually merged and maintained then it makes things somewhat better for KDE, as better integration should then be possible. It depends what they do with it. In all honesty, I would have preferred it if they hadn’t bothered.
2. In the long run, it doesn’t have too much of a bearing on KDE or even Gnome. Web browsers are better integrated into the native environment, and the Mozilla people have burned too many bridges with their lack of integration with Linux desktops (even Gnome) and their current preference for idiotic pestering of users over non-signed SSL certificates (which is merely to push people into paying money to CA authorities). KDE will eventually have a QtWebKit browser, and Epiphany already has a WebKit port.
The page (chached version: http://72.30.186.56/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=http%3A%2F%… ) says:
So Nokia ports WebKit to GTK and Gecko to Qt? WTF? Why not keeping Gecko GTK and QtWebKit on Qt? Why port the other way around?
Edited 2008-08-07 11:00 UTC
is the only description I can give to my reaction. I feared my Linux Firefox experience was tainted forever by the enforced GTK-ness introduced by FF3. I’ve only ever found one visually-pleasing GTK theme to date (Aurora) and it has a number of visual bugs in Firefox: rounded widgets being ‘boxed’ in incongruous colour, buttons on the toolbar overlapping adjoining spacers, tooltips with text and background *the same colour* (how can that even be permitted to happen FFS?)
And as for gtk-engines-qt, no dice: checkboxes not updating their visual state, text-boxes with no border (therefore invisible in most cases), etc.
I couldn’t dream of better news for the future of Firefox.
– Nokia bought Trolltech (QT)
– Nokia bought SymbianOS
– Nokia is porting Firefox/gecko to QT
Symbian release will use Gecko instead of Webkit for their browser, that’s all.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Why should someone prefer a rengering engine with worse performance than WebKit? On the desktop where it’s not that significant, OK, but on mobiles?
I don’t know, maybe because Apple is too closed from Webkit.
Nokia, even outside of Trolltech, has been contributing a ton of stuff to WebKit, and Qt is using WebKit as its preferred engine.
I’m a bit intrigued by this. So many questions, did they skip Cairo, did they make the ui threaded?
If they did I’ll be looking very closely at what they have done. Either way I can pretty much guarantee that whatever they did is an improvement.
From what I understand, you can create a full blown, history, bookmarks, back, forward, stop, refresh webkit browser with 100 lines of code in Qt. They have made it trivial to create a Qt browser. Why port Mozilla to this platform?
To me that is just as silly as running KDE on Windows which already has a desktop environment, or running Qt in Java which already has platform independent libraries.
No, the version of Webkit in Qt is unsuitable for building a full web browser in. I understand that it’s missing a lot of features exposed by webkit itself that’d be needed for a fill browser UI, and it can’t run plugins at all.
I believe the Qt 4.5 snapshots have support for plugins. But you’re right that the stable released 4.4 does not.
I can’t think of anything else that’s missing though. Arora is already a reasonable browser. If you run it with Qt 4.5 it does pretty much everything you would expect a browser to do.
I stand corrected then. I had thought it was missing some other bits, but apparently it isn’t.
Edit: According to to Arora site, disk cache isn’t implemented until Qt 4.5 either. While you can get by without plugins, a disk cache is kind of important.
Edited 2008-08-08 07:49 UTC
Yup. More info on that here: http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/08/04/network-cache/
so that no matter what web stack you choose (for whatever reason) you can still decide to use Qt. Nokia is evidently working on making Qt a viable option everywhere.
Depends how you define browser. The Arora browser, which is an improved version of the demo browser included with Qt 4.4 is about 10,000 lines of code, and it’s fairly full featured. Getting a simple web view with back/forward is just a few lines of code, but adding the rest is still not trivial.
KDE apps are being ported, not the whole environment (yes, it can be made to run, but I don’t think anyone imagines people seriously using it).
Not for everything. Especially GUI and system integration wise, Qt has some advantages over the Java standard libs.
you’re forgetting something. mozilla itself is a platform. And it is a platform not just for all the extensions that you can only get for firefox but also other mozilla based apps like songbird
So will I be able to get this FF on Kubuntu running KDE 4? now that would be awesome!
Edited 2008-08-07 14:52 UTC
God has answered to my prayers…