I was as shocked as everyone else over Apple’s decision to base their web browser on the KHTML renderer. Unlike most, I actually knew what KHTML is and spent some time upgrading one of my VMware’d Linux installations from KDE 2 to KDE 3 to see if KHTML has improved.
The good news is that KHTML has become vastly better than it was. My site did not render well under Konqueror 2.2.2, but it looks fine with 3.0.5a. Others aren’t so lucky: Mark Pilgrim has already reached wit’s end, his site has problems under Safari, Konq 2.2.2 and 3.0.5a.
The bad news is that KHTML has no marketshare, even if you narrowly define the market as “Linux desktop users running KDE.” Once upon a time, Konquerer had momentum amongst the Slashdot crowd which was desperate to get away from Netscape 4.7x, but that momentum shifted once Mozilla shipped.
The really bad news is that there were already too many renderers in play on the Mac OS X platform. Apple is guaranteed to dominate that market eventually, but it will take a year or two to play out.
I’m going to continue to favor Gecko and IE/6 while ignoring KHTML and other minority renderers, and I suspect that most web developers without a strong interest in supporting the Macintosh community will do the same. That might change if KHTML is ported to Windows and sparks a new browser project, but I’m not going to hold my breath. Konqueror itself will never be ported because the Qt/Win licenses are not GPL-compatible.
