Troy

In circa 2003-2004, it was as close to on par with browsers at the time as it would get. I think the WebKit fork did damage to the momentum. By 2008 with KDE4, the rework that split it and Dolphin into to products was basically the final nail I think, as development work effectively stopped.

The irony is that Chrome’s rendering engine was a fork of WebKit, which was a fork of KHTML, a free and open source rendering engine created by KDE for Konqueror. They basically took something free, used Microsoft’s “embrace, extend, extinguish” tactics on it. Now KHTML is vestigial, only found in the UserAgent string.

But we could have had a truly free open source cross platform browser with Konqueror.

Best we have now is Firefox, but the bulk of Mozilla’s development funding comes from setting Google as the default search. So it is also hijackable.

I think it was still called Phoenix when I originally dropped it. Before it got renamed Firefox. Came back around last year after adblock stuff in chrome finally chased me away.

Do you have a program to help you count sheep to fall asleep? Asking for a friend

Prediction: this will be considered Apple’s biggest product flop in decades, and may even unseat the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_5300 for worst in company history. The whole product line will be scrapped before 2027.

Fortunately they have the cash to burn on projects like this to see what takes.

I’ll post this in !prediction@lemmy.ca so someone can call me on it one day ;)