Steven W. Orr posted on Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:19:17 -0500 as excerpted:
> I have looked everywhere. I'd like to be able to save files by using
> kdialog in thunderbird and firefox instead of using the gtk file picker.
>
> Inside thunderbird I have the ability to set
> ui.allow_platform_file_picker
>
> to true but if I do it uses the ugly builtin picker. False gets me to
> the gtk file picker. Is there a way to speciffy this in kde somehow? Or
> is this a thunderbird/firefox problem?
>
> I'm running kde-4.3.2.
Here's the deal. Applications on Linux/*ix today normally (normally,
because there are some exceptions that build directly against X and
provide their own widgets, but most newer ones use a toolkit, since it's
easier) compile against a toolkit. The toolkit provides widgets such as
the file picker, etc. On Linux, the Mozilla family of apps chose to
compile against the gtk+ toolkit. Thus, they'd normally use it.
However, in the Mozilla case, they're also cross-platform and use a
Chrome-based (this chrome was before the Google Chrome browser, it's what
the Mozilla XUL based UI is called) UI by default, cross-platform. Thus,
the choice is between the built-in XUL/Chrome based file-picker, and the
"platform" toolpicker -- in the case of *ix (Linux and the BSDs, also
including OSX if it's built using the *ix/X/GTK based framework instead
of the Apple framework), GTK+.
Back in the KDE 3 era, there was an experimental Qt-based (well, kde
directly or qt, I'm not sure) Gecko based browser hacked up at one of the
hack-fests, as a proof of concept, and there's a lot of KDE users that
would have liked to have seen it go somewhere, but nobody seemed to take
it and run with it and that single proof of concept it remained.
Meanwhile, the new popular kid on the block is webkit, which of course
was based on KDE's own KHTML. Apple Safari was the one that took and ran
with it, but they have continued to work with the community to improve
it, and then Google chose it over Mozilla Gecko to base Chrome on, and
there are various other smaller browsers and other misc HTML/web based
users. Qt-4.4 or 4.5 (IDR which) added a webkit-based HTML rendering
widget too, and plasma already uses that for the various HTML/web based
plasmoids. However, as of qt-4.5 the qt-webkit widget is still
apparently somewhat immature and buggy -- plasma is apparently one of the
first big users and they found some bugs and potentially really useful
but still missing bits of the API. (qt-4.6 is supposed to be rather
better, and more kde could convert with it, but that's not going to be
required until kde-4.4, in February, I think, and maybe kde-4.5, I'm not
sure.) It's likely that at some point in the future konqueror will
switch over from the KHTML base KDE still maintains, which as I mentioned
was where webkit started, to the webkit base, very likely the qt-webkit
base. But qt-webkit still has some growing to do first. Meanwhile,
konqueror continues to use khtml, and it simply doesn't have enough
market share on its own to get websites testing with it and developing
for it, so mozilla products still tend to be necessary for many KDE
users, even if they are based on gtk instead of the qt kde is based on.
Meanwhile... Mozilla isn't dead just yet! In fact, their market share is
still growing, AFAIK, tho perhaps Google's Chrome and thus webkit took
some of that (but IE's still the big one, still losing the most ground
last I knew, which is a good thing, as it's unhealthy for /any/ browser,
even a freedomware one, to have the market share it did or people tend to
write to it instead of to standards). Plus, on a very practical level,
once folks get into the Mozilla addons, they often find rather quickly
that they have a hard time doing without them, and the fact of the matter
is, even if webkit begins to dominate the market, as long as the various
webkit based browser makers can't agree on a common extension standard to
match Mozilla's, it'll be a VERY long time before anyone can come even
close to challenging the shear variety and usefulness of all those
Mozilla extensions! Thus, Firefox and Mozilla in general is likely to
remain a dominant force for some time, if only due to their extensions.
One thing's for sure, the next couple years could be /very/ interesting
on the browser side of things! If MSIE keeps losing share, and Webkit
and Gecko can split it between them, we could have a very healthy three-
way race ahead! There has actually even been some talk of Mozilla
switching to the webkit rendering engine as well, altho at this point,
that's probably at minimum, getting the cart before the horse, as they
say. It remains to be seen, but but it's not going to happen in the
immediate future, and actually, there's a LOT of folks that would prefer
all three of the majors end up with 25-35% of the market each, with maybe
10% split between others (not to leave Opera out of the discussion, for
instance, tho I'm certainly not alone in wishing they'd go open source
and not considering them ATM because they're not), with that considered
perhaps the most healthy outcome possible, even if it's unlikely to stay
that way long term because the market just doesn't tend to keep that nice
a split over time.
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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