Sometimes there is progress ...
... but nobody notices. I've been subscribed to kde-core-devel for a while but KHTML development seemed pretty dead. Or have you heard of cool new things in Konqueror for a while? Also the KDE changelogs did not show anything of interest, besides some small corner case and crash fixes every now and then. I'm one of those people that still have Konqueror/KHTML as their default browser. I guess most people meanwhile have switched to something else, either the engine to Webkit or to a different default browser. One day our KDE bugzilla got an upgrade, a new style, and it looked even worse than before (see the footer in the image). I can understand if people have problems with Konqueror, there are way to many things that don't work, e.g. pages heavily using JavaScript (Twitter anyone?). I for my part don't like the Webkit part because it lacks some things like edit autocomplete because of missing interfaces in Webkit. Firefox drives me insane because of the missing clear buttons in edits. And it still does not support "content" in CSS as I found out yesterday. Unbelievable.
Some month back something unexpected happen: I saw a flow of patches for KJS flow in. And from what I see Bernd Buschinski does an awesome job implementing some stuff that has been missing for a while. He is not the only one working on KHTML/KJS these days, but the one who is mostly visible on kde-core-devel through his review requests and the one who made me look at this stuff. In fact I made an offline JS compliance test through CMake possible as the online test wasn't easily configurable to run only specific tests (or omit some that were not working at all). And I even fixed one or small absolutely minor compliance issues.
So even if you did not hear much about Konqueror for a while, there has been some progress. Here are some things I remember from the not too distant past that made my daily web experience better (or will do so as some of the patches are not yet in a released version). Too bad they have not been in the official changelogs, but better those guys keep fixing stuff and forget to write it down than stop fixing it ;)
- the maximum allowed stack size usable by KJS has been raised, making e.g. the twitter log of a person work again (fixed by Martin Sandsmark)
- fix the usage of "short" variable type for position calculation which too easily overflows (fixed by Andrea Iacovitti, will be in 4.8.5 and 4.9.0, would have fixed the layout of e.g. bugs.kde.org)
- after Andrea Iacovitti found out what is wrong Sayak Banerjee and Ingo Malchow fixed the CSS on paste.kde.org and bugs.kde.org to not use text-indent: -99999px which would overflow the short, but smaller values getting the same effect, so this now even works with older Konqueror versions
- the onhashchange event is now supported by Konqueror, adding support to even more JS heavy sites making probably e.g. even more twitter stuff working (done by Martin Sandsmark)
- do not ask if a mailto: link is clicked, but just open the mail program (fixed by Martin Koller)
- patches currently under review from Bernd Buschinski will e.g. add JSON support to KJS