Embedded Linux tools vendor Trolltech has announced a strategic partnership with web browser software vendor Opera through which the two companies will develop Linux products for the mobile communications and home entertainment markets. Elsewhere, Opera gets BitTorrent support.
Anyone surprised?
Opera being built on QT (IIRC), Opera being perhaps the most widely used browser on handhelds, and Trolltech trying to puch Qtopia into the handheld market, this kind of cooperation is a completely logical step for both.
Interesting though, if there could be a KDE-GNOME war on mobiles now with Nokia using GTK for their Internet tablet, and having ported WebCore to use as a browser.
In any way, this is good news for OSS on mobile devices!
> if there could be a KDE-GNOME war on mobiles
imagine if instead of a “war” there was mutual aiding and abetting? Linux is not the leading OS on handheld devices right now, just like it isn’t the leading OS on the desktop. we’d be much better off if each technology worked hard on servicing the segments of the industry they are best at servicing and tried to openly compete with the non-Free status quos.
while competition at the technology level is great, fighting each other in the market is stupid and IMHO ethically askew at this point in the game.
Yes, of course it was not war as in war that I meant, but as in friendly competition. The way it works with KDE and GNOME right now is that there is friendlyness (fd.o), but also a competition for the best Linux desktop.
People have argued endlessly on whether it would be better to merge KDE and GNOME, and even though there are obvious gains in doing so, I believe it isn’t bad to have two separate desktops with separate focus points.
Again, I didn’t say I’d like it if there was a KDE-GNOME war on mobile devices, but that it’d be cool (as in interesting). The fact that two separate Open Source platforms are growing steadily is a good fact to me!
If you check out the embedded space, you’ll find Qt/Embedded that Qtopia/Opie uses, and Gtk that GPE uses, so in a way, the competition has already started.
ziggamon, Opera is not built on Qt. It used to use Qt a lot in older Linux versions, but now it just uses it for some system dialogs and such. Opera for Windows and Mac don’t use Qt at all.
Opera is a very nice browser. It feels smaller, faster, and cleaner than Firefox, and has many nice features that Firefox does not have.
But one good thing about Firefox is the plugins extention system, which gives you things like Adblock and Greasemonkey and Bugmenot extentions. If they could work on Opera that would be excellent!
I think I read that Safari is going to implement the some parts of the relevant Mozilla framework, so that they can run the extentions too. If that is true, it shows that they recognise that the Firefox extentions are a good feature too!
But one good thing about Firefox is the plugins extention system, which gives you things like Adblock and Greasemonkey and Bugmenot extentions. If they could work on Opera that would be excellent!
Actually Greasemonkey scripts do work on Opera. Opera v8 has UserJS (user javascript) support, which can execute both Greasemonkey and Opera-specific scripts. (This made me start coding in javascript lately, btw:)
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About Trolltech, Opera and BitTorrent – all good news.
Interesting, will IE next version include something like this – Avalanche for example? Or needs Firefox implement BitTorrent first and then MS has nothing to do but must include it either.
(Imagine next gen MSN toolbar – you cannot use BitTorrent if you don’t have MSN search box visible;)
ziggamon, Opera is not built on Qt. It used to use Qt a lot in older Linux versions, but now it just uses it for some system dialogs and such. Opera for Windows and Mac don’t use Qt at all.
I beg to differ:
laplace:~> ldd /usr/lib/opera/8.01-20050615.5/opera | grep qt
libqt-mt.so.3 => /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3 (0x555a3000)
Does this make Opera the only browser w/ built-in torrent support? That’s awesome!
I currently use Opera as my default browser on everyone of my systems. I do wish it had the extensions support like Firefox, but the built in features handle most of my needs. I was going to d/l a torrent app today but now I’ll just get the latest Opera version.
Honestly, as long as I don’t have to use IE, I’m happy. FF, Opera, Safari are all better than IE. They’re faster, don’t require a plug-in to block pop-ups, and aren’t as vulnerable to exploits. And they all add features faster than MS updates IE. When IE7 comes out, it will still be far behind everyone else.
> I beg to differ:
>
> laplace:~> ldd /usr/lib/opera/8.01-20050615.5/opera | grep qt
> libqt-mt.so.3 => /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3 (0x555a3000)
Did’t you read the comment you answered to? Of course it’s dynamically linked to Qt: Because it uses it for basic window handling and nothing more.
Very nice about BitTorrent, hopefully this will lead more browsers to support torrents and, in turn, more widespread legitimate use of torrents.
Did’t you read the comment you answered to? Of course it’s dynamically linked to Qt: Because it uses it for basic window handling and nothing more.
I’m not one of the opera developers, and so I don’t have access to the source, but it seems to me that QT is used for the user interface. It may not be used for the actually html rendering to the screen — I don’t know — but the menus and windows and such look like QT to me. It also wouldn’t make sense not to use QT for the user interface on Windows…
If you’re one of the developers, then you could explain yourself better…
> […] but it seems to me that QT is
> used for the user interface.
I doubt it! It looks completely different from any other application on the desktop.
> […] but the menus and windows and such
> look like QT to me.
Have you ever changed your Qt theme while running Opera? All applications like Skype and so on change their look, only Opera doesn’t. Opera doesn’t even use the fonts from the local Qt configuration in the menus, even if you use the dynamic build. It’s clear that the static build doesn’t do that, but the dynamic one doesn’t either.
Are you using a staticly linked or dynamicly linked version of Opera for linux? If you are using the staticly linked version, the only themes that are available are the ones that are staticly compiled into the binary.
there is one left which is kernel when they start to develop desktop and server seperatly that will be a big step for all.
To the anonymous user that says that they are not using QT – according to you what are they using then?
Maybe while imporving their browser they’ve had the time to write a complete cross-platform GUI toolkit. If they’ve done so maybe they should dump the browser business and start seelling the toolkit