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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.
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...
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.
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...
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...
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
I think you're missing the point. Its NOT another browser.
Its simply an application that wraps the web browsing widget of mozilla so you don't have to run all the crap that comes with mozilla (composer, mail, news.. etc.). It is also a helluva lot prettier than mozilla which is butt ugly.
- 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.
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.
All that is stupid. People don't give a damn if the widgets on different platforms looks the same, because people tend to use one platform, and are used to THOSE widgets. The Mozilla guys may think they're doing something cool by making all widgets look the same, but they're not. They are hurting the user experiance for each person's native platform. Like I said a few posts back, its a question of wether your app deserves a custom user interface. If you're doing a massive rendering package like Truespace, then yeah, the efficiancy of a custom UI will outweigh the learning curve. For almost all other apps however, (even office apps) sticking to the standard UI makes life easier for the USER. And Mozilla doesn't even have a more efficient interface, just a different one. The problem is that the Mozilla guys are engineering for themselves as opposed to their users. Nobody gives a damn if hitting the back button executes a java script. Nobody cares that the whole thing is XUL extendible. Leave that kind of stuff to the SITE designers (in a well designed site, the browser UI should be transparent.) However, people DO care that it is taking 40 meg of RAM and is ass-slow. People don't use a web browser for the hell of it, they use it to browse web sites. Give me a large window, small button toolbar, and some decent bookmarking systems, and then get the hell out of my way!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
He has placed his software (galeon) under the GPL, which would prevent him from including anything non-GPL with his code. Mozilla is under it's own License, the MPL. While quite free, it is not the GPL. In any event, what he needs is the mozilla headers, which *do* come with mozilla (though in a seperate RPM), just as the headers do with every other library. (ie, a program that uses doesn't inclued jpeg.h, it expects libjpeg to have provided that). Galeon is saying that you need mozilla and the mozilla headers installed on your system, at which point he is free to use them (for use, the MPL and GPL are compatible).
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
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
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
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.
The HTML engine doesn't just render webpages, but the editor, the IRC client, the mail client etc. etc.
All things that have perfectly viable (and in most cases, free) alternatives already.
Most of the work IS on the browser,
Maybe in terms of getting it to draw an IRC windows or somesuch thing, but you'd better believe that work is being put into the backend IRC/email/news/spaghetti maker stuff as well.
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.
But we can be reasonbly sure that no less work will be put into the browser, either.
And how is this best of Mozilla? It needs GNOME so isn't cross-platform at all. Wasn't that part of the point?
Maybe to the Mozilla developers, but not to me. Their idea of "cross-platform" is turning out to be "we want the browser to stick out like a sore thumb no matter what OS you're using."
What I want in terms of "cross-platform capability" is the ability to ensure that when I create a web site it will look and function as alike as possible, whether you're viewing it on the MacOS, BeOS, Win32, Linux, Unix, etc. (taking into account differences in the font selections and renderings, etc. for the various GUIs).
I don't care if it has an email client; I have one of those already. I don't care if it does newsgroups or IRC; I don't read those. (And if I did, there's those aforementioned other free alternatives.)
Someone else said it best; the Mozilla developers are out of control. They've forgotten about the people who want to have a simple, fast, standards-complaint browsing alternative to MSIE and are interested in somehow conquering the world by being able to code old arcades games into their webpages.
Jay (=
I believe you are refering to the static optimizations. The dynamic optimizations of the Hotspot JVM are an different story altogether. The basic problem with static optimizations is they have to be very local in scope because as soon as you start trying to find all the combinations during global optimizations, you exponentiate things into intractability. By adding the dynamic information you can go a lot further than the Hotspot JVM did toward less local optimization.
It is feasible to collect dynamic execution statistics and preload them along with the program to let the optimizer tractably produce well optimized code in large programs -- and I believe that is the direction in which most of the offspring of Self are headed.
Seastead this.
The widget set is the foundation for the UI. The UI is rendered through XUL files. Thus the widgets are intimately tied with the XUL layout engine. Also, the problem is that people DO care about the platform. Most people spend nearly all their time in one platform. Thus it is more important to make all apps on that platform similar than it is to make that one app similar on all platforms. What happens more often? A person bouncing from *nix to Mac to Windows, or someone using the app only in one OS? The problem with using the same widget set is that it is not the NATIVE widget set. Thus it is out of place and presents a learning curve to those using it. There is a serious case for making all apps look the same. One of the prime reasons that GNOME and KDE are so popular is because A) Most apps look the same, and B) They look like Windows. Once a person learns one UI mindset (no matter how confusing the UI, it will happen) then it is very easy to learn a new application with uses that mindset. By breaking the mindset, Mozilla is hurting its users.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I was responding to the person above who said it barely runs on a 700MHz Athlon. Also, running great is totally subjective. Some people think that GNOME and KDE (where you can actually SEE redraw) run great. However, after using BeOS, I tend to think that anything that doesn't offer instant response runs lousy. Even some BeOS apps (early version of TaskManager for example) don't get my apporval because they tend to slow the resizing process. In the end, what matters is that does the load make sense for the type of app. Web browsers are relativly simple creatures. I can understand my 3D render using up 128MB of RAM, but my web browser or windowing system doing the same is just ridiculous. (No, I'm not saying Mozilla uses 128MB, it uses more than it should.) Why put up with bloatware anyway? Why run something "acceptably." That's the mantra behind MS software. (It runs okay on the midrange 500MHz CPUs so lets ship it.) Plus, if Mozilla has any hope in the embeeded market, it has to run great on a Pentium classic class CPU. Mozilla definately does not.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
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.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
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
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...
---
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
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.
Well, you can already build the browser-only version with --disable-mailnews, and the 'installer' builds come in seperate packages so that you can install browser, composer, mailnews, etc quite independently (once you've installed the gecko core of course).
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
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
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
The reason they designed their own widget set was to increase the amount of cross platform code. One of the smarter moves they've made.
I think they did too much from scratch, used too many untested ideas. They probably lost a good deal of time creating the widget set, but it was either that or spend the same amount of time fixing bugs for all the different widget sets. Easy choice.
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.
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.
More specifically, does anyone know of any similar projects based on gecko that have a Windows build?
===
In my .mozconfig, I have: ac_add_options --enable-toolkit=gtk
It builds mozilla based on gtk, as well as a seperate bare bones browser even more streamlined than galeon.
It's also possible to build mozilla based on Qt.
This galeon project isn't anything new, there have been a few other similar projects that have existed(gzilla, qfce), but this seems to be the first independant one based on a usable version of the mozilla embedding widget.
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?
While I applaud the efforts behind the Galleon web browser, and indeed any "open source" project, I cannot help but wonder if the effort might have been better spent on improving the Mozzila source code, and eliminating bugs, since we cannot compete with Internet Exploder unless the open source product is equally as good.
This isn't really a code fork from the Mozilla tree, but rather a very fundamentally different approach to the web browser.
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.
By providing a really lightweight, platform specific user interface just for GNOME, this project is going to deliver a simple, clean web browser which renders out webpages. Only on one platform, and without too many features, but it'll do it well.
I sincerely hope similar projects start off for Windows as well, to make the full use of that platform. Mozilla's UI has a bright future, but for the mid to short term, the shining star in the middle is their rendering engine, and it would be a real pity if people were put off Mozilla simply because the UI around that engine was unstable and slow.
Do you have any idea just what a monster Mozilla is?
Mozilla is not just the next version of Netscape. It is completely different beast altogether.
Have you ever noticed that Mozilla looks decidedly different than any other app on your desktop? That's because it doesn't use any standard widget library (in the case of X), or the native OS widgets (in the case of Windows, BeOS, etc.) It's built its own set of widgets, with the goal of making them completely cross platform. Though it looks different than any other app on your desktop, a screenshot from the Windows version and the X version will look basically identical, with the obvious exception of the window decorations. That way people can easily write cross-platform web apps, with the assurance that they will look identical on any platform.
Yes, you heard me right, Mozilla is a complete framework for writing applications. You can write user interfaces in XUL (a language for describing widget layout in XML), change their appearance in CSS and code in JavaScript.
In fact, that's what the core browser interface is written in. Yep, everytime you hit the "back" button, Mozilla executes JavaScript to act on your request. Don't believe me? Go read all the *.js files in chrome/packages/core/navigator/content. If you feel like screwing with someone, take 2 minutes and switch the forward and back buttons, or make the stop button navigate to a porn site or something.
Don't get me wrong, the Mozilla project has ambitious goals, and what they're doing is exciting. But it would be nice to have a native, bare-bones browser too.