Browsers

First all let me answer the question as to why I rarely release the code I have and when I do I usually stop maintaining it soon afterwards: when I hack, I do it for fun. There's no deep meaning behind me sitting in front of GNU/Emacs. It's just a challenge of creating something that was seemingly impossible that makes it fun. Once whatever I was hacking on is at the stage where it's working, the challenge is gone and hence it stops being fun. And if it stops being fun I move on. And yes it sucks because a lot of the things I worked on and made publicly available deserves better.

As to why I always have lots and lots of unreleased code, well because if I do release it people think that I'll be maintaining it but I can never ever give anyone such guarantee. Well, actually that's not true. Now I'll start releasing and maintaining a lot of X11 related code because, thanks to Trolltech I'll be doing it during work. So that's definitely really great.

And now what's going to happen with Mozilla? I haven't worked on it at all during the last two months. Unfortunately I don't think I'll get a lot of help from anyone because it's not trivial stuff. Oh, and that's another thing that's pissing me off: all those articles that showed up lately saying that Mozilla isn't getting new developers because the code is horrible. It's really not true. The bottom line is this: writing a browser is not simple. It's freaking hard. And if you think that after two semesters of C++ you can just start hacking on it and be productive you're bound to be very disappointed. Do I prefer KHTML code? Yeah, sure, I feel at home there, but that doesn't make Gecko code bad by any means.

So anyway, getting back on track: probably very soon I'll start commiting code again and will be finishing KDE integrated Firefox because some of the KDE folks asked me for it. I'm just contemplating whether I should still use Qt3 or just go straight for Qt4. The latter would give me a product for embedded market right of the bat. And yes, people are already emailing me saying that they want a Qt3 version. But to be honest I really don't care. If you need it so much you hack on it. The only reason I'm even considering Qt3 as an option is because some of my KDE friends need it. And when I say "need it" I don't mean that they want to "browse p0rn more efficiently". I'll do whatever I feel makes more sense. Which either way is going to finish with a fully KDE integrated Firefox sooner rather than later. So please stop emailing me, I'm on the case, I know you want it, you will get it. The official word on the status is: soon...