[olug] Chrome

[T. J. Brumfield]

On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 2:26 PM, Will Langford <unfies at gmail.com> wrote:
> spot.  KDE4 fork anyone ?

I'm not sure if that is supposed to be a jab at the QT branch of
Firefox 3 in the works, or the people suggesting that KDE 4 should be
forked.  Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols suggested it, but he is an idiot.
(And not just for this suggestion.  Read his blog and his stupidity
will become self-evident.)  He suggested someone port KDE 3 to QT 4,
and then backport the newer features of KDE 4 to this new codebase at
the same time.  He really doesn't get that the new features of KDE 4
don't work without the KDE 4 underlying libraries (and core changes
that he was so worried about) and that porting all the KDE 3 apps and
features take time.  The precise reason that KDE 4 doesn't have all
the KDE 3 features, despite years of work, is because it takes time.
Starting a new fork means KDE 3 feature parity would be years and
years off, or maybe a few months for the current official KDE 4 trunk.

I really dig QT as a toolkit, and I'd like to see a *good* QT4 based
browser.  The QT4 branch of Firefox is incomplete, but a step in the
right direction.

However, I just read today that while Chrome is intended to eventually
go multi-platform, the coders obviously didn't know what they're
doing, and the UI is very Windows-centric.  All those bits have to be
rewritten, where as writing them on something platform-agnostic to
begin with (like mozilla, QT, GTK, Wxwidgets, etc) would allow
platform independence from day one.  If those bits have to be
rewritten regardless, why not use QT4?

Heck, QT4 already bundles with Webkit, and they play well together.
It seems like a win-win.

If I can fire up a QT4-based Chrome in Windows, and in KDE/Linux, I'll
be very happy indeed.

-- T. J.
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