AOL Time Warner's Mozilla project is facing new questions about quality after Apple Computer's release of a browser based on rival open-source code. Apple last week unveiled its own browser, called Safari. The company said it was based on the KHTML rendering engine that is the core of Konqueror, an open-source file manager and Web browser for the K Desktop Environment (KDE).
In an e-mail congratulating KHTML engineers on their work and its selection by Apple, Safari's engineering manager touted the technology over Mozilla and its rendering engine, Gecko.
"When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out," Safari Engineering Manager Don Melton wrote. (KJS is KDE's JavaScript interpreter.) "Not only were they the basis of an excellent, modern and standards-compliant Web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open-source projects."
Despite its diplomatic tone and anonymous reference, Mozilla veterans read between the lines of Melton's message. In a Web log, Mozilla founder and former evangelist Jamie Zawinski said Apple is bad-mouthing Mozilla.
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News source: ZDNet
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