Slashdot Mirror
Galeon Web Browser: The Best Of Mozilla?
Motor writes: "The very excellent weekly newsletter NTK (Need To Know) tipped me off about galeon - a desperately needed attempt to build a mere browser (as opposed to an entire operating system/xterm/game console) using the best bit of the Mozilla project: gecko." I wondered how long before someone did this. Very excellent looking.
Is this a reason to write Moz off as bloated? How about a "browser only button?"
BTW NeoPlanet added Gecko a while back.
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
Another good text browser is Links, which supports tables and frames (in the 0.9x versions, anyway). It's also got a pretty decent interface, with mouse support and proper menus, but still supports Lynx-like shortcuts for those of us who can't be bothered with menus ;)
Speaking of images, it would be nice to be able to unload an image after it's been loaded, say if it's an advertisement or something.
I have my Internet Explorer rigged to do just that.
Whenever I see an image I don't like (such as an ad), I just right-click the image, then choose "Hide" from the context menu (or press H). Voilá! The image is gone. Very handy when I want to print something sans junk.
BTW, the JavaScript required to implement this is extremely simple: five lines, including full error-checking.
Browser extensions -- I've got a ton of 'em.
--
begin 644
The mozilla widgets themselves aren't deal with. My complaint is WHY THE FUCK are the toolbars blue. Come on, if I wanted bright I'd have bought an iMac. A good cross platform interface shouldn't be too outrageously different. On my Linux Desktop I have QT, Motif, and GTK apps, and while not quite the same the default appearence is similar enough that nothing stands out too horribly to make it flat out ugly.
Mozilla supports themes, but supposedly Netscape 6 will be a pain to get themes in out of the box, and I'd like to have support for things like plugins and Java that may not appear in mozilla in a full featured state for a while. Netscape needs to rethink the default theme before release and consider going with a more muted theme, kind of like the classic theme that shipped with a recent build of Mozilla.
treke
Some of the Truespace UI makes it genuinely more useful. I find it more convinient to have menubar along with the tools, but you CAN switch it. The interface has a lot of touches, especially in the way of allowing you to manipulate the objects very freely with the mouse instead of having to click rotate, rotate the object, then move, and move the object, etc.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Finally some sanity! I'm sometimes left wondering just what's the point of having operating system developers go to the trouble of doing nice APIs. Developers seem intent on destroying their careful planning by implementing new (unnecessary) APIs badly and at great expense to system resources, aesthetics, consistency and responsiveness.
From what I can see, the problem with mozilla is that the developers have put all their energy into producing stupid widget add-ons to the interface and 1000 popup sidebars, buttons that don't work properly and a whole lot of other crap that makes the browser bloated in every sense. Instead they should be putting more time into getting their support of standards right.
On standards, they're on the right track, but c'mon with the XML people! (please!) Get rid of the crap features that nobody needs (email in a web browser? Composer? Inherent frames?!?!) and get your bread and butter stuff polished.
I don't want to seem ungreatful, but we are all placing our hope in mozilla. We want it to save the web platform from being captured by internet explorer, because it affects the flexibility we will have with operating systems into the future. If mozilla fails, we're all screwed, and it's so frustrating to see them destroying the browser with the crap they're bogging it down with.
When slashdot readers bag you, we criticise out of love. Please guys, just get your shit together and get a browser out there which renders the goods in a single, untainted window.
Believe with me, my saplings.
What you said
i cator/preferences/newprefc.html - is to set custtoolbar.has_toolbar_folder to false, but this preference is labelled "For Netscape Internal Use". Bah. At least they gave us Disable_MyShopping and Disable_NetscapeRadio)
:)
I'm still running Netscape 3.01. Why?
- Easy to turn image autoload off, and I can click the "images" toolbar button to load 'em when I need 'em.
- Javascript on/off is two keystrokes away. (Options->Preferences-> and it comes up with "Languages" if it's the last thing I fooled with. No burying the Javashit checkboxen in a 3-layer hierarchical menu that has to be navigated every time.)
- It's a web browser, not a marketing tool for "My Nutscrape", "People who've paid us to tell you where to shop", or "People who paid us to get space on a 'Personal Toolbar'" program.
(Aside on that damn personal toolbar - you KNOW it's designed to be annoyware when the way to turn it off - at http://developer.netscape.com/docs/manuals/commun
What I want:
- Javashite is togglable via a menu button.
- Image autoload togglable via a menu button.
- Cookie control togglable via a menu button.
- Preserve the "bug" for Windoze builds where a write-only COOKIES.TXT results in all cookies, whether accepted or not by the user, being ignored
- Proxying on/off from a menu button. Why? Because the Internet Junkbuster and other banner-filtering and cookie-eating products run as proxies. Sometimes you have to turn 'em off and accept "everything". It should be maximally easy to turn things like this off and turn 'em back on again. As another poster said, lots of these things are dynamic preferences, not static prefs.
It's funny - the only real thing I can think of to improve Nutscrape's feature list that could reasonably be considered "bloatwaresque" would be to build in a banner blocker. I don't want a development environment, mail client, or newsreader. Already got those. The only thing I'm *still* missing after all these years of "development" is a better web browser.
where did you get the start_galeon script? i dont see it anywhere in the source tree, or mentioned on the website thanks -Maldon
Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now.
Sorry, but IE5.5. does not have excellent standards support.
Yes the choice was easy. Given the fact that they'd have to spend the same amount of time debugging multiple widget sets, they should have done that. A good design would minimize the amount of widget specific code, while using native widgets. In the end, they chose to create a custom widget because it made them feel cool. Thus it was better from THEIR point of view. However, it detracts from the USER'S experience. Thus the choice should have been to use and debug native widgets.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You've got a point there
/.
and I still got moderated down coz I'm going against the grain of
sheep.
GUIs are alike enough as it is to allow any reasonably competant person to move from one to another without too much trouble. I dont see why I should be forced to have my GUI behave like one I didn't choose to use.
No; I think you're the one who missed the point. Really.
:^)
:^)
The point is this. Yes, Mozilla has great HTML-processing ability. Yes, it's cool that now we have an open-sourceish browser with Java. Yes, it's cool that this open-sourceish system is based on Netscape code.
The point is that, minus the fancy eye-candy, Gecko is actually not that bloated. So why add the bloat? It doesn't really make sense to me. Do I need an integrated email client? Not really. Instant messaging? No. Kick-ass themes? No. A Web browser? Now you're catching on.
You should have checked out the site. From the front page: "It requires Gnome and MOZILLA M16.
You can download an RPM version at http://people.redhat.com/blizzard/software/RPMS/.
To compile from sources you will also need devel package from this site or gtkmozembed.h from another MOZILLA package. Because of license issue I cannot distribute it."
Anyone know what the licensing issues are precisely?
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Oh come on. Sure internet devices may be the wave of the future, but there is no point in cluttering up the interface for the time being where there ARE no internet devices. This is the 99% thing again. 99% of people will use this thing on their desktop. Why totally ruin the experience (or severely hamper it) for those 99% so you can access that 1%? Also, the Mozilla UI barely runs on a 700MHz Athlon, so you really think it will run on Internet stations with 5X less power? I seriously doubt they can tweek it THAT much!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Perhaps you should try compiling without debugging info if you are going to compare them, you'll get a more realistic comparison.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
they sure tout their "standards compliance" to the point where people think that when something goes wrong, it must be their HTML and not Mozilla.
I see all these "tests" that say how great Mozilla is in this and that, but I try to do a simple table or CSS function, and it croaks on me. All said and told, Mozilla only behaves marginally better in processing HTML/CSS than IE 5.x on average in my experience. There are still plenty of things in the HTML spec I don't see support for.
From galeon.sourceforge.net
I hope that the browser adheres to the spirit of Web standards rather better.
cimlLinuxToday is good for (mostly) Linux news.
I loaded Galeon and Mozilla M16 (got 330 KB/sec and it took about 15 seconds :), but when I went to Slashdot.org, my computer totally froze and even the Alt+SysRq keys didn't work :-(. Probably not related, but just a coencidence, though I always hate the 20 minute reboots to fsck 30GB of storage :-(
Try w3m or, even better, links.
Great Another Browser.....how innovative.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
CoughDropAddict wrote:
Surely that should read "app's using Web technology", not "web apps".
Any developer of user agent software who tries to make the Web look the same to everyone has forgotten what the Web's about, and should go visit the W3C Web Accessibility initiative for a reminder.
cimlAnd I can can write HTML with the best of them so I don't need the composer.
You mean there are "the best of them" in HTML sk1llz?
Seriously, now. It's a bloody mark-up language. And a poor, limited one at that. It's been a long time since I've seen someone gloat at their LaTeX sk1llz, y'know what I mean?
What the heck, at least you're not trying to claim that it's a programming language...
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
> somebody needs a hobby...
What about those of us who's day jobs depend on writing HTML by hand?
It's standards compliant HTML. It should render similarly in any browser which supports the standard.
Saying that a table in a table is a bit of a kludge is true, but claiming I'm abusing HTML is dead wrong. If you want to see abuse of HTML, go look at the homepages which lack head tags, a dtd, have tags missmashed, have invalid entities, etc, etc.
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
HTML sure isn't rocket science... The slim browser is of course sensible,a I wonder how many people enjoy the Mozilla-compliant composer in Netscape?!?! Almost without exception the code is spits out views fine in IE. AT quarter to four,when your eyes get sore...
There's also Nautilus, which will use gecko, I believe to render HTML. GtkHTML, as you mentioned, is simply meant to render simple HTML. It's used in Evolution to render and edit HTML emails.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
While you're at it, add some features.
/dev/null. I might use ones for yahoo mail and slashdot to keep the logins, but really I don't need 500 set by MSNBC, sheesh.
1) do something about those crappy ads, a filter, perhaps like the orbs list would especially be nice. Another nice feature would be a "wipe out" option, where if I find a banner too annoying I could just click on it and get rid of it.
2) do something about those cookies, especially for the sites that don't even need one cookie, but flash you 5000000 before you can see the content. (ps I like the feature on lynx that requests once and allows the option of never accepting from that site again during the session). I really want better and easier control of my cookies other than having to manually edit the file or relink it to
3) give me easier and better font controll, i am sick and tired of sites fonting me to death with every immaginable size and shape, and color, of fonts accept for the type that are easy to read. It would sure be nice if I could highlight sections, and change the font on the fly.
4) give me some more "crap" controll. Have you ever been to a home page and waited for 50000000TB of useless "pretties" to download before you can even so much as click on a link. It would sure be nice if there was a skip-crap button that would just fill in the pretties with asthetically pleasing "blanks" and grab all the juicy content first.
5) take off the bullshit buttons. I don't know who else has netscape, but I don't need a special button on my browser telling me where to shop, or any of the other netscape propaganda - thankyou
6) give me a password and login reminder list. After having 500billion logins and passwords for every immaginable website, it would really be nice to have some simple (encrypted??) id storage file that could show me (or prompt me) for my password and login when I click a button, and even better not half to rely on those damn cookies. (if authentication methods were more standardized, you could even have it login automatically per my pre-settings - but nowdays that would probably be asking too much.
7) allow me a selective delete or select. Have you ever been to a site where you have 50 pages of refferal links and other crap before you get to the one paragraph or so of content that you were really after. It would sure be nice if I could highlight that and click on something that wipes the other crap off the page (if I find i need it later i'll bush the back button).
8) make it so I can get arround easier using the keyboard. I mean, cmon guys. I got TunnelCarpal, if I get 500 field form I don't want to half to click in each field, or continually half to move the focus from the scroll bar to the main page and back.
9) I want better screen/context controll. Have you ever had 20 or so windows open on the same page, and sorta wished they were all consolidated into one screen. or have you ever wanted to click on a link and not wipe out the page you were on (well you can do that, but it would be nice if it was more intuitive. On the same note, i just absolutely hate it when I visit a site and it shoves half a dozen useless piece of shit popups down my throat, please do something about that too. Thankyou, since I know noone's gonna listen anyhow, please feel free to moderate this down to negative infinity.
David
By the 99% thing I was pointing out that 99% of people will use this on a PC. What are they trying to target? Are they making a back-end renderer (Gecko) a web browser for PCs, or a standardized interface for web pads? As for you opinion of the speed, that is very subjective. For example, I feel that even KDE2 runs pretty slow on my 300MHz 128MB computer. Of course, that's after using BeOS for years. Other feel that KDE runs perfectly even on a 100MHz machine.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Now if they'd only come out with a version for Windows I'd be thrilled. It's such a pain having to install a whole application suite just so I can test for compatibility when building sites.
--- Brent Rockwood, Senior Software Developer
BRENT ROCKWOOD, EST'd 1975
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I agree that you shouldn't have to "unfix" anything. I'll see if I can bring this to the attention of the rest of the Mozilla community rather than just a couple of the engineers that want to cover the whole thing up :)
NTK does a good job of consistently reporting the best food products available in the UK as well :-)
That's what Bugzilla is all about. The problem with making any large program are the number of interactions that take place. Time spent adding these features is time that can't be spent hunting for bugs unless OTHER people are helping to find and document those bugs. Remember, you don't have to be a programmer to help contribute!
There is an effort porting DirectX to Linux. It's called WINE.
You need Mozilla M16 to install Galeon,
this requirement probably goes away later
in the development.
It's faster than running Mozilla M16 itself
though, and has a bit less memory footprint.
It is about as stable as Mozilla, which about
equals NS 4.72 for me.
Galeon is an interesting project, but perhaps
it is a bit too late. Nautilus is almost as
mature, and promises a lot more.
Of course, Galeon would be great for those
that doesn't like to run Gnome.
One more thing, Galeon has a very annoying bug,
in that shows the windows behind it through
the main window when you first start it up.
This goes away when you visit the first webpage
for the session though.
www.alphanumerica.com
Their "Total Recall" package works cross-platform IIRC.
Although the Mozilla projects is making a lot of progress, there are a lot of things in there that I'm sure the average person doesn't want/need. Myself, I just want a plain web browser. I already have a mail and news reader with mutt and slrn. And I can can write HTML with the best of them so I don't need the composer. It's nice to see someone use Mozilla to make just a browser.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
Have you file a bug on this? If not could you? If not, would you mind explaining what is the problem and maybe I can file a bug for you?
Basic
Since all the stupid shopping and search for shopping buttons are not there, that leaves room for some real buttons. There are a lot of options buried in the preferences dialog that I think of as dynamic, not static. Load images automatically, accept cookies, accept javascript, font, etc. I like to run pretty small and stripped down, but some pages are hard to read that way, so it would be nice to turn these features on and off quickly, and get a visual reminder of what mode it was in, because I forget while browsing.
as far as browsers go, though, Mozilla is one of the less bloated. Sure, it has mail & news clients embedded in them, and the Netscape-branded version will undoubtedly integrate AIM, but the download size is still very small compared to some other, well-known browsers.
I bet Netscape will release a browser-only version just like they did with the 4.x series, and have the full-featured suite for only a couple of megs more. That should please everybody enough, I'd think. Although it would be nice to also have a custom install routine where you could only install, say, the browser and the mail client, and leave the rest of the functions uninstalled. There are a lot of excellent mail/news clients for *nixes (and I guess Windows too), but I think why the Netscape mail/news client is so widely used is simply because it comes with the browser, has a similar interface, etc.
As I understand it this project is an implementation of the above gtk interface - something that doesn't exist within the mozilla codebase.
The used to be something similar built into mozilla a while back called gnomefe (i.e gnome front end) but it was no where near complete as this. Also it got broke after all the embedding technolgies changed.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I checked your site in iCab and it does report one error/warning in the html on your page:
Warning (20/5): In the tag the attribute "WIDTH" should only contain absolute pixel values.
The page does seem to render fine in iCab, though.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
NOT a flamebait; let me explain my points.
:-). So I don't know how long that will take. Anyone?
- Galeon is nice, but e.g. the scrollbar is a Mozilla scrollbar. While the techie party (including me) wouldn't *really* mind, it is a usability point. If it's an all-GNOME (GTK+) thing, people will understand it better.
- Also, it would make a smaller footprint if Gecko only used the GTK+-toolkit instead of adding its own.
- Additionally, it would be nice to have it GPL'ed. Just nice, OK? No big deal and stuff.
I think the most realistic plot for this to work is, that the ppl of Galeon would take Gecko, make it an all-GNOME (or GTK+) thing and distribute it with their Galeon browser, while making clear that Gecko is a Mozilla license thing. That would make sense, I guess.
Well, and I'd love to see Nautilus off course. But there hasn't been any release except for CVS yet, and the website is also not really informative (like in "good old Amiga gossip"
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Well, Galeon may be a good browser, but to use it, you need to install Mozilla first. So you end up downloading two browsers to use one?? That's ridicolous.
When I saw the last galeon-announcement on freshmeat, I wanted to try it out and downloaded and installed Mozilla and Galeon. Both (or either) took *forever* to start up - I wish there was a good graphical browser that starts up in no time and displays webpages according to the standards.
-- "Tradition is the illusion of permanence."
- Ability to disable ALL html/javascript/etc features, per site/wildcard/regexp, through a blocklist.
- Persistence.
- Keyboard control.
- Useful, configurable, toolbar.
- Custom interface to select websites (esp. searches).
- I don't want themes, I don't want a built-in irc client, I don't want an email client, I don't want a newsreader, I don't want a window manager, I don't want a high-availability database server, or whatever other crap AOL is putting in Mozilla.
Well, that's *my* list. I don't mean to bark demands or complain -- they're just my personal preferences. Anyone else agree with any of that? Anyone have any other ideas I couldn't think of?I don't want images on Slashdot, except for the one slashdot.org logo, I don't want Javascript popups to work on geocities. I don't want Java anywhere, except for two specific sites. I want all font size and color information to be ignored on all sites, except for three specific sites. Etc.
This is direly needed feature for an unstable web browser. If you can't have stability -- and you probably can't with any modern graphical browser -- HAVE PERSISTENCE. When Mozilla crashes -- and it will -- it should start back up exactly how it was last. Every new window or changed URL or text box should be logged whenever it is changed. When Mozilla crashes in the middle of a 450+ word slashdot post (such as this), I want to start it back up with that 450 word post exactly where it was at the crash (or perhaps 5 seconds out of date). And of course all the windows should start up with all the URLs I was at. I have 8 NS windows up right now, and I won't be able to remember all those urls if NS crashes. It'd be a hassle to open them all again even if I could remember.
I want to be able to bind keys to whichever functions I want, and I want functions available that are valuable. Numbered links would be nice, like in lynx. Mouse should be entirely optional for all functionality.
I want to be able to add buttons to the toolbar and bind them to whatever I can bind keys to. Like [add current URL to javascript blocklist] or [disable javascript in this window].
I want to be able to be able to bind a key to pop up a window for a google.com search, another for raging.com search, dmoz.org search, etc, that pop up a window instead of loading the page (fast as they may be, there is no need to load them) and I want Mozilla to convert the information to a format it understands and display it in whatever format I like.
As the AC above said, nested tables with width="100%" somehow makes the 100% bigger the size of the window (which is so wrong, it's not even funny because the top level table is set to be 99% the width of the window). That's what IE does AFAIK (I can't test it here as there's no IE I can safely install/remove without it integrating itself into my 98Lite setup I use for gaming).
Opera mishandles the nested tables such that the inner table doesn't fill the outer table, even though the inside table's width is "100%."
Mozilla's engine does the same thing IE does. I submitted it as a bug, and it is a conflict between the table code and CSS.. which doesn't suprise me.
iCab and Netscape 4.7x seem to handle it fine, though.
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Any truly standards-compliant browser lets you code old arcade games into webpages, because the W3C standards let you do exactly that.
If you want a small, simple, fast browser, you'll have to give up on complete standards support (especially the DOM). That's your choice, and there are browsers like Konqueror and Opera that fill this need.
Mozilla, on the other hand, aims for complete standards support, while still being fast (if not simple and small). It tackles a different, and harder, problem.
9meg for IE means that the GUI alone takes up 9megs. "IE" on windows is just a loader for a cluster of COM objects that microsoft decided to stick in the OS, and load at boot time. my, IE loads quickly, but why does my machine take so long to boot up?
if netscape takes 14megs, and IE's graphical shell takes 9meg, imagine howt hey would compare if you counted in the HTML components, the protocol (http, ftp, etc) components, and all the others that windows doesn't report as part of IE.
Of course, this is not to say that they're not both WAY TOO FUCKING HUGE, but try to be rational here.
I browse with Mozilla all the time and I see very few "obvious" HTML rendering errors. Could you give some specific examples?
One difference might be that I carefully pick the builds I use. Some of the nightly builds are unstable or have serious layout problems; this is inevitable because people sometimes check in buggy code. There is an enormous difference between a "good" nightly build and a "bad" one.
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25707 Seems the bug has been marked as "future". It also only has 2 votes. One of them is from me. It seems that it "isn't critical for Netscape 6". Well, I guess Mozilla IS Netscape after all.
Warning: Resierfs is incompatible with software RAID 5.
You're entirely correct. I don't see it as a major problem though because if you're doing software RAID you're not interested in performance. :-)
I should have probably made that warning as well when I suggested it. Thanks for bringing it up.
Self didn't scale. Their lovely optimization technology was great at optimizing programs consisting of a few pages of code. Point it at something even a fraction of the size of a Web browser, and it would sink into the dust.
That's why the minds behind Self went on to other things, such as Chambers' Vortex compiler.
Adam Lock is doing exactly this. His code is in the Mozilla tree.
It's amazing how on these Slashdot forums, everyone comes up with these great ideas that MOZILLA IS ALREADY DOING. People should take some time to actually look at the project before they comment.
That's what Bugzilla is all about.
That's all well and good, but waiting for bug reports is not a substitute for good testing. I'm not talking about obscure hard-to-reproduce bugs, I'm talking about major rendering failures on common web sites. Like I said, don't the developers use it themselves? If I can find numerous bugs just by surfing major web sites, then the people who maintain Gecko ought to be able to find them as well.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
If this is off-topic, one has to wonder what is on topic when we are discussing light-weight flexible alternative browsers such as the one mentioned in the original article or the one derived from Mozilla described in a response which received a rating of 5. If on the other hand, it is the history of how we got into the present inflexible implementation schema that is "off topic" then all I can say is, "Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
I've never made a meta moderation comment before, but this "moderation" needs some serious meta moderation.
Seastead this.
> The design goal of Mozilla (and IE) was to allow
> these tricks without touching the source. Of
> course, if you run into a bug, it's easier to fix
> with Mozilla.
That's actually a big deal. That's why "Galeon" is actually *good* for the core Mozilla project: because if Galeon becomes popular, fixes and improvements to Gecko will find their way back to Mozilla.
Just installed Galeon and am using it right now to post this message. This browser works great on my P150 laptop - finally have something that lets me browse and not bring my entire system to its knees (Like M16).
****
"I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member" - G. Marx
1) is coming, with the JAR-ification of the chrome tree.
2) is coming, a Mac-alike skin is already checked in, it's being fixed and polished before it's turned on.
3) and 4) will improve over the coming "performance work" milestones.
> Mozilla will probably never match the feature
> set and polish of IE Mac
It will exceed it in some areas, e.g. MathML, XML namespaces, MNG.
As Fearless Leader Taco points out, this idea has been kicking around for a while, and I'd come up with a name and even a slogan:
NoZilla--no newsreader, no email, no bloat, no bull.
Of course, if I wanted someone to actually use it someday, I probably should have mentioned it outloud, instead of just thinking it to myself.
I'm talking about major rendering failures on common web sites.
Are you sure that the errors are bugs in gecko, or are they bugs in the site code due to the designers exploiting IE/NS tricks?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I know exactly what nautilus is. I've played around with the source code, even. And yes, it does use gecko, obviously, since mozilla's rendering engine is gecko.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
It is only compliant in respect to syntax - not semantics.
/mill
If you use tables to force a a visual effect on some user agents this doesn't mean a damn thing on a voice browser.
How do you tell a blind user the meaning of a table (which of course is meant for tabular data) when you are using it for visual formatting? How do you explain to a computer (for searching, indexing, transforming, etc) that your table isn't really a table?
Just because others are worse doesn't make you any less wrong in your abuse of HTML.
I have been using galeon for about two weeks now. In comapaison to mozilla t rocks. Whenever I fire up mozilla (compiled with no mail, news,debugging) it slows my sysstem down to a crawl. With galeon fast and no appreciable effect
Microsoft(tm) - a particular virulent virus that has infected most Pc's.
Has it occurred to you that your desire to control people might be your problem rather than theirs?
I didn't say they were out of my control. They are out of anyone's control, particularly their own self-control. Obviously they have the right to design their browser anyway they want, but I reserve the right to pass judgment on what they create.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
That's what "dogfood" bugs are. Bugs that the developers find themselves from using it themselves.
From the bugzilla keyword definition page,
"... a bug nominated as a blocker to using the product as dogfood. Dogfood is the ability for internal Netscape development to use the Seamonkey product for daily use. The Product Delivery Team at internal Netscape reviews these bugs daily for a PDT+ (approval for immediate fix}, or PDT- (non-urgent keyword addition)."
OpenGL is a better choice. It's being used in a variety of markets all the way from gaming up to complex scientific visualization, CAD, etc. OpenGL is the standard for the scientific/engineering marketplace. Linux has the better chance of making inroads into this market than it does general desktop & gamer markets. Why? Because people in those areas are used to working on Unix workstations and to them, Linux would be very similiar to what they've already been using, just on cheaper hardware with zero licensing costs. Given that OpenGL is available on PCs, Macs, and Unix workstations, developers who want to have something that can work on a wide variety of platforms will use OpenGL.
The reason OpenGL is slow is due to poorly implemented hardware drivers or it being implemented completly in software. With the efforts of the XFree team, SGI, and others, this won't be a problem for much longer. SGI recently announced a new graphics system that's been developed with NVidia to provide hardware accelerated graphics to linux.
Besides, do you really think Microsoft is going to provide a DirectX linux port anytime soon? Don't hold your breath.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
You really have to wonder what the guys at Sun were thinking when they abandoned Self for Java as Sun's initiative for Web programming. Probably something similar to what Tesler/Atkinson and Jobs were thinking when they abandoned Smalltalk for Object Pascal in the Lisa/Mac, I suppose, since there had been a good deal of work done in dynamic compilation by Hewlett Packard in their Basic interpreter back in the 70s and early 80s -- as well as type inference work that had gone on at Xerox PARC. But surely Jobs was aware of his mistake by the time he went with Java's progenitor, Objective-C, in his NeXT station.
Anyway, not to worry too much -- a lot of things are going to be changed by this year's open source conference. :)
Seastead this.
How many times do the mozilla people have to say this before people actually listen? The vast majority of the work on Mozilla IS the browser. The HTML engine doesn't just render webpages, but the editor, the IRC client, the mail client etc. etc. Most of the work IS on the browser, and there is no evidence AT ALL that any more work would be done on the browser if they ditched the other parts, either temporarily or indefinitely.
And how is this best of Mozilla? It needs GNOME so isn't cross-platform at all. Wasn't that part of the point?
Agreed. I was watching a friend of mine use Mozilla and I was astounded by how brain-damaged the rendering was. It really made me wonder whether any of the developers use the browser in real life. I mean, if Gecko is supposed to be the "best part of the Mozilla project"...
The Mozilla developers really, really, really need to take a step back and fix the HTML rendering. Otherwise, it will just continue to get a bigger bad name than it has now.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
--
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You can embed Gecko into IE as its rendering engine through an ActiveX control somebody developed.
I'm no fan of Windows, but I do prefer the IE interfact to Mozilla (Those customisable and movable toolbars are absolutely wonderful).
This is not unreasonable.
If Netscape management thinks other bugs are more important than this bug, then Netscape's engineers will fix those other bugs first.
If you think this bug is most important, then you're free to assign whatever engineering resources you have to fixing this bug first.
I downloaded M16, and while it was slightly better than M15, was still flaky, lacking in some features, and crashy. I decided to call it quits on Mozilla, but downloaded a nightly build for one last shot.... what a difference. I can now use it every day without crashing, and it feels much more "together". Still not quite there, but proof that it really is being worked on. My only gripes are SSL (tried running the installer, and gave up when it bombed) and no java. My dependance on java applets is getting greater all the time - examples: vnc remote control of win boxes (check it out if you use vnc but weren't aware of this side of it), my local library uses an applet to renew/review books (hey - it works, but even I thought it was an odd choice), melange chat server.... the list goes on. Java is truly filling gaps, despite performance, it solves problems. Could do with that. Anyway - try a nightly build, and prepare to be pleasantly surprised. Still works like shite on windows though!
because after all they must have intended to build it the way you'd like them to?
Yeah, you're right. You got me! The problem is with my assumption that they wanted to build a browser without HTML rendering errors. What an idiot I am.
Boy, you're smart.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
You "mustn't" anything. It is entirely up to you if you want to abuse HTML to gain your, obviosly, much needed visual effects. Don't blame others for your wrong doings.
/mill
> More specifically, does anyone know of any similar projects based on gecko that have a Windows build?
I'm in charge of a similar project (MozGlade, please look at cvs rather than the last release if you check it out). One could argue that it's more generic. However, it's not generic enough to be built on Windows.
At this point MozGlade requires Mozilla (m15, m16, cvs) and Gtk, but not Gnome. This will likely change simply because I want an easy way to configure things (I like gnome-config ;-). [Gnome, KDE, etc. are designed largely to make application writing easier on the developer, and I would rather use Gnome than duplicate Gnome's functionality... I like gnome-config :-)].
MozGlade doesn't have as many features as Galeon, but it does have a better (in my biased opinion) connection to libglade. My goal was to create an app that could be easily customized by designers and end users, and modular enough that outside programmers could add to it easily. Galeon's objective (as near as I can tell) was to make a nice, lightweight app. I think we both achieved our goals.
Currently MozGlade is more lightweight (i.e., uses fewer resources) than Galeon, but that's because it's missing several of the features that Galeon has (bookmarks, download manager). It is my intention to make such things available for it, but to make them optional. My way of doing this is to use loadable modules (shared libs, ala Apache's DSOs, etc.). Done right, this can be configured by the user for whatever level of power / resource usage he or she wants.
My other reason for using modules is because the mozilla browser annoys me. Gecko may be a lightweight, fast rendering engine, but gecko is not the only thing loaded when you link in libgtkembed.so (try "ldd libgtkembed.so").
Solution? Allow other backends. I have a GtkHTML backend partially done, and I'm planning to write my own widget (don't ask now; there's lots of reasons for creating my own that we need not bring up here). MozGlade will soon be splitting into multiple projects to help accomodate this flexibility. Ideally, one will be able to use the bookmarks, download manager, etc. with the other backends.
I.e., pick your power/size ratio. Everything in bloated apps (Mozilla, MS Word, etc.) is there because it may at some point be used; it's just not used often. With a flexible, modular design, that stuff can be activated when necessary.
- Bob
Actually, mozzila is using lotsof gtk widgets (list buttons) and you can also change the scrollbar not to use gfx (there is conf option in regular mozila)
---
Check out w3m.. It doesn't do javascript, but it does do frames and tables. -- Halfline
Is it just me, or almost all the high-profile OSS projects feature-laden, MS-type, bloatware? The only major project that isn't overly bloated seems to be the kernel itself. Even X doesn't suffer from feature-craze, it is bloated for other reasons. I continually beat my head against a wall thinking about how my RAM is disappearing down the toilet. Not only does my average desktop load dozens of libraries when one or two would suffice (compat libc and libc++ for Netscape, KDE 1 and 2 libraries, Qt 1 and 2, GTK, GNOME, etc) but they keep adding more stuff to it. FOr example, Mozilla has a great rendering engine (Gecko) with a cruddy piece of bloatware wrapped around it (everything else in Mozilla.) Who cares about total customizability through XUL, who cares that everything is tied to a java script. Aren't scripts slow anyway? People bash MS for making active desktop, but this is even worse. Do you really want your programs interpreting XML to do your user interface? This is carried to GNOME (and KDE to a slightly lesser extent) too. One one hand, MS is using the selvte COM, realizing that if people really need network-transparency they can use DCOM or use a custom CORBA extension. However, GNOME is using CORBA for local components! Are they crazy? MS is famous for introducing bloatware. They put in features 99% of people never use, which impacts perfomance very heavily. However, they have to keep selling more versions. OSS stuff doesn't have to do that. They have the freedom to make software that is nice and light with just enough features to please 99% of the people. Why don't they?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Quite frankly, I think the Mozilla programmers are out of control.
The world could really use a nice, standards-compliant browser that actually works (and Netscape is far from that). What really annoys me is that so little effort is going into this supposed "best part of Mozilla", namely Gecko. Watching Mozilla used by a friend of mine was a painful experience. There were so many rendering errors that I personally found it unusable.
Call me crazy, but I would think that the HTML renderer would be the most critical part of the browser to get right. But why isn't anyone fixing these obvious problems? Don't the developers actually use their own browser?
Hopefully having developers focusing on a browser rather than a full-blown development environment (that is butt-ugly, BTW) will give some sorely-needed attention to basic functionality.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Let's see: Memepool and RobotWisdom spring to mind... Also ArsTechnica, Kuro5hin and KernelTraffic (which isn't only about the kernel; the Samba summaries are also very good).
No. I wish I could use CSS properly for all my format output specification. But as you can see, browsers are so horribly lacking in support for this (a standard from 1996!), that I must resort to kludges.
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Oh yeah. It only uses 70MB after startup, vs. 140MB for Mozilla M16 and 14MB for Netscape Communicator 4.73. ;)
Seriously though, I find Mozilla slightly more responsive than Galeon on my 128MB P2 laptop.
Ask a silly person, get a silly answer.
I have heard so many complaints about how IE is inseparable from the recent versions of Windows that I am sick of it. I happen to like how IE renders and how fast it is. But that's not my point.
If someone likes Netscape better, why don't they replace the render engine in windows with a Gecko renderer. Microsoft already publishes everything that is needed to do this. Just look at there MSDN articles on using the HTML interface and wrap the gecko engine to emulate it. Then replace the mshtml.dll and walla, windows without IE.
But that's not the real concern is it?
Wow, I can't beleive how *FAST* it is!!! I agree that it misses a few buttons here and there but this is definitely 100x better than Navigator 4 or regular Mozilla. One area I alway thout Linux was lacking was in web high end web browsers but this... is my new browser from now on.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> non-IE and non-NS usage in the low single
> digits. I'm not going to bust my butt
> accomodating some bunch of hobbyist techo-dweebs
> with a penchant to run every stray piece of
> software that catches their
> attention-deficit-disorder-addled eyes.
What, like all those whimsical sight-impared lynx users using that dweebish text-to-speech interface? Why can't those crazy kids just see things your way?
I would be a paid subscriber if Taco and Hemos weren't such cunts
Warning: Resierfs is incompatible with software RAID 5. From Namesys's own FAQ at http://devlinux.com/projects/reiserfs/faq.html "Can I use ReiserFS with software RAID. Not with raid5, our journaling and their raid code step on each other in the buffering code. Also, you must use the mirror syncing tools with the FS unounted. Otherwise, yes, you may do striping and concatenating and mirroring." I found that nasty little surprise while trying to setup a honking big but low cost raid 5 box (currently 4 60 GB IDE drives, each on a separate channel, maybe going to 6 drives) and hoping to find something safer than ext2fs. Email to the JFS guy that writes for Byte went unreturned, so for now I'm sticking with ext2fs and a ginormus UPS.
Tastes Like Chicken
To all the people who complain about open source/free software by pointing at Mozilla, here is something to point back.
:). And if this were a commercial product, it just wouldn't happen.
It's a fork but not a fork (uses the same code base) and solves problems people have (big web browsers, ugly Netcenter skin on Mozilla
It will exceed [the feature set of IE Mac] in some areas, e.g. MathML, XML namespaces, MNG.
When I say "feature set" I mean the feature set of the browser, not the rendering engine. Mac IE has stuff like the scrapbook, print preview -- a lot of stuff that is really useful that probably won't find its way into Mozilla anytime soon.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Now gnome has another choice for a browser.
that some of the developer effort goes into making Gecko properly render completely standards compliant HTML (such as my homepage) which is sadly misrendered by Opera 3.6x and Mozilla M16, even though Netscape 4.7x renders it just fine.
The gecko module may let you have a nice browser, but if it can't handle nice, standards compliant HTML, then it needs to be fixed. There are a lot of warts in the interpretation code (especially related to CSS1 and tables) that come out when you try to do serious browsing with the Gecko component because the Netscape/Mozilla crew are busy also working on a UI, a skin component, a ported GTK+ widget set, etc, etc, etc...
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Galon is very very cool. Not very usable for me now, `coz I often browse iso-8859-2 webpages and I can't set proper font up. But then it'd must be my default browser
Add Javascript, https, cookies and better stability and ie 5.x can go to hell...
I have an alter-ego at Red Dwarf. Don't remind me that coward.
./
cpeterso
yup mainly, which is a great pleasure to me, having tried many licit and illicit products and settling on sherbert as the finest...but I did notice that there was a mention of green ketchup this week. Each and every to their own but even I don't go as far as to call ketchup a sweet :-)
"Mozilla provides a very heavy-weight, cross-platform user interface which is highly extensible, works on a huge number of different architectures, is skinnable, uses loads of XML and snazzy technologies, and stuff like that. This user-interface is built on top of the core Gecko and Seamonkey modules."
"Unfortunately, it's pig slow."
Damn it! Wasn't the point of Mozilla to be LIGHTWEIGHT?
"And like that
Yes, I'll me-too this and also say what a wonderful project this is. It's not ready for prime-time, which will be readily apparent if you hit this link. At the same time, I wouldn't be surprised at all if this project gets stable before Mozilla does, and it sure as heck is more light-weight.
kudos!
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
It's really good to hear about this project. This is exactly what Mozilla needs -- some focus. I hope to see similar efforts on non-GNOME platforms. I really want to like Mozilla, but for me to seriously consider it as a Mac desktop user, somebody needs to fix it in such a way that it is a reasonable competitor to IE5. This would entail:
1) Reducing total number of files (most good Mac apps only have a few dozen, and can be placed anywhere)
2) Providing a default UI/skin that is a little less arcane/obscured
3) Making the thing stop crashing so much
4) Speeding up launch time -- IE5 launches in a few seconds on my G3. Mozilla takes around 15-20 seconds.
5) Cleaing up the menus and panel layout so it actually resembles a Mac app
Mozilla will probably never match the feature set and polish of IE Mac, but if somebody who knows Mozilla (and has time to do all this) can push it into the realm of reasonably usable, then I would attempt to use it as my primary browser. I might even consider paying for it, if it was good enough -- though I may be in the minority there.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Mozilla only includes a very primative program that uses the GTK widget. Galeon is a significantly more advanced program with the similar function of wrapping around the GTK widget and providing a user interface and other features.
I'm quite Impressed that he took the time to make sure the HTML was properly written.
If you don't believe me, read the output from W3C's HTML Validator.
As any decent web designer would know, W3C is where the buck stops for standards compliance.
In addition, his style sheets validate without any warnings or errors.
With this evidence, Mozilla is, without a doubt, the culprit and not quite as up to standards as it claims it is.
I feel it IS necessary to create a sperate interface to Mozilla's web page rendered. What slows Mozilla down so much? Surely not the gecko rendering engine. It's pretty darned fast(at least no slower than Netscape). So what is it? Hmmmm... Maybe the interface? Sure, a completely definable interface is nice, but, quite frankly, this'll be the first 2D application that might spur hardware development in a LONG time. All that configurability simply, and completely, bogs down my computer, and my computer isn't all that slow.
So, will I use Mozilla? Occasionaly. Will it be my main browser? As soon as Galeon(or some other such thing) allows me to accept cookies, use https://, and configure my fonts(bookmarks are already implemented, of course). Only then. As it is, the interface is just too damned slow.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Contrary to some other posts here and some ambiguous text on galeon's website, you do not need to use M16 for galeon to work. The nightly builds work just fine. All I had to do to install was install the mozilla-devel rpms and the galeon rpm. I also moved my nightly build from ~ to /usr/local/mozilla, but I'm not sure whether that's necessary.
There are only two big caveats: it doesn't store cookies (meaning no slashdot login) and it doesn't have any right-click menus for page elements (yet), meaning no saving images or 'copy link location,' etc. These things will probably be added later on.
-JD
I agree.
I'd still like Javascript (for things like Yahoo Mail) ,Java (but not the AWT) and maybe even images rendered via aalib (ascii graphics;-).
Basically what I'd like to see is a Lynx that understand Javascript and handles frames. I've discussed this with the developers at Mozilla on #mozilla, but nobody has done any work yet.
With things like Palms, cell phones, and libraries with VT100's, there is certainly a market for it. But it's not obvious how hard it is to do. Not trivial I'd guess since nobody has tried.
What, like all those whimsical sight-impared lynx users using that dweebish text-to-speech interface?
The sites are designed to accomodate access by those with sight impairment. This can be done without regard to the browser the user is employing.
Or, given that the whole marketplace seems to be moving towards interpreted languages (java, C#, python, pearl etc) perhaps they could have re written it in one of these cool new languages.
Maybe I just don't get it, I admit I am not very "tech-savvy" but it seems to me like another duplication of effort. If we want a lightweight browser we have opera, and lynx already.
Don't get me wrong, Open Source development is always a good thing, I just question the need for yet another browser, when other projects are crying out for a bit of development effort to be spent on them. Imagine the "kudos" from the community for the first group to get DirectX working on Linux for example.
I'm fond of lwn.net and www.tbtf.com. I occasionally visit www.opengl.org to see what's new in the 3D world. I also browse USA Today's web site and techweb on a fairly regular basis.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I hate frontpage as much or more than the next guy. I was commenting on the tone of the post, not on the need for WYSIWYG editors. Any html I've generated using Composer has been hand coded later to correct browser compliance issues...
For the GNOME project, this has got to be extremely promising. The GNOME camp faces extreme competition from KDE2 with it's excellent Konqueror web browser. Their intermediate answer (or not) is GtkHTML, which is actually a rework of the KHTML component of KDE1. GtkHTML is not meant to be a full fledged web browser though. I've heard talk about making a Mozilla bonobo component, and this has already been done although it's in extremely early development. So why not do a dedicated GNOME web browser out of the already existing, open source and quite excellent gecko code? They can "rip off" mozilla but not Konqueror because of it's heavy dependence of Qt. I'm not a GNOME user, but I wish this project all the best luck!
--
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Actually.. Gecko follows the HTML spec much closer than Netscape 4 ever has, which could be part of the problem. See, Gecko is so strict on being standards complaint, it often makes pages look bad, because they've been written for years to worh with the half-assed compliance of NS4 or IE3.
:)
As you'll notice, Gecko and IE5 look very similar in rendering, whereas Netscape 4 looks quite different. There's a reason for this.
I was just wondering...what are the licensing issues referring to gtkmozembed.h?
I'd be grateful if someone could shed some light on that...thanks
Galeon follows some very similar lines as a project a friend had done called MozGlade. Both projects address a problem with Mozilla that he stated quite well at one point, and it's a point that's been brought up here on Slashdot.
Mozilla is much more than a web browser, it's literally a complete application development framework. It's extremely powerful, extensible, and all those other nifty development buzzwords. This is all well and good, but some people don't want to surf the web with an application framework. The answer is simple. Take out the rendering widget (Gecko) and stick it in a good, old-fashioned web browser. That's what we have here, and since it uses the same core as Mozilla, calling it "Yet another web browser" doesn't completely fit. It's simply another way to use Mozilla, and it fills a much-needed void.
More specifically, does anyone know of any similar projects based on gecko that have a Windows build?
===
Hey ass hole, I happen to have an attention deficit disorder and I think you using an handicap to make fun of others is just plain idiotic.
Since when did they claim it was bug-free?
Last time I used Mozilla, the mouse was not optional, or at least use of the keyboard was tedious and unintuitive, if possible. Glad to hear this has changed. Unfortunately, the functionality that I really need to use often (and thus need in the toolbar or bound to keys) is the stuff that doesn't exist, listed under feature #1.
Cookies are implemented, it's just not working as you'd expect. I have tried to log in to Slashdot but it didnt seem to work. Then, I went to some other site, came back and I was logged in. Good thing I noticed it because I was just about to seize the occasion to realize my trolling fantasies! (bad for karma).
:-)
remember to use 'start_galeon' instead :-)
the real at&t mix
mk_add_options MOZ_CVS_FLAGS="-q -z 9"
ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac_add_options --enable-optimize
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --enable-strip-libs
ac_add_options --disable-mailnews
How to build it:
cd ~: /cvsroot
mkdir mozilla
cd mozilla
export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org
cvs co mozilla/client.mk
cd mozilla
make -f client.mk pull_and_build_all
So, was this project REALLY necessary?