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Roll Your Own Browser
davidwboswell writes "Oreillynet is running an article about how to create your own
browser with Mozilla. This is a follow-up to a previous
article that surveyed many of the alternate Mozilla browsers currently available including Chimera, Galeon, Phoenix and Aphrodite."
It's there alot of security issues with that. I wouldn't use a browser from some guy called 'bob' that i never heard of, becuase he could be sending all my credit card details back to his server.
This is going to help the likes of the people who added all those "extras" to kazza.
Cruise TT
Oh yay, make it eve neasier for ISPs to have their own "customized" web browser. On second thought.. this would promote Mozilla. That's good, right?
the problem is not 'rolling your own browser' the problem is. it's always the same browser. no matter how much i put around the mozilla gecko engine it still stinks because of the XUL crap it uses.
e.g right now we are discussing how we perfectly embedd galeon 2 into gnome 2.4 but the problem is that we still get XUL widgets shown which is really annoying. the best way to have gecko embedable is to have it split up e.g. gecko as own library that you can get as source, unpack, configure && make && make install. but this is more a dream that will probably never come true. it would be cool to have a native gecko library where we can say --enable-gtk2 and it gets native gtk widgets shown whenever it renders page. but the whole mozilla cruft we are dealing with right now makes it in no way embedable. it's like tieing an egg to a hen.
In a followup, Richard Stallman indicated that if you use Emacs or any of a laundry list of utilities in modifying said Mozilla, the resulting browser name must be prefixed with 'GNU'.
On OS X and Linux (and occasionaly FreeBSD) I've used: Mac Explorer, Chimera, OmniWeb, Mozilla, Konquerer, Lynx, and now playing with Phoenix..
If only they could share bookmarks, cookie preferences, and site passwords. Across machines! Securely! Is anybody working on this? Is LDAP the answer?
It's a shame development on Aphrodite has slowed to a crawl. Have you seen the Sullivan skin? It would really look good on my iBook.
2002-09-25 15:02:41 Hackers Fuck with Mozilla, Get Baby Browsers (articles,news) (rejected)
i want to develop for more browsers, really i do.
1) Distribute mozilla-based browser 2) ??? 3) Profit! Why not? AOL did it... wait, bad example. I know! Microsoft did it! What? They don't profit from the browser itself? Ok... bad example... I officially withdraw my Profit Plan.
Can I include ActiveX and VBS in my Mozilla-based browser? I switched from IE to Mozilla a while back, but I miss the viruses, spyware, and privacy issues (that's issues, plural. Mozilla only had one.) Mozilla needs more of that before it can really challenge IE.
All in all, Phoenix is a great little browser especially for a 0.1 release. However if you do use it, it may crash at heavy sites such as Shockwave based sites. Very impressive for a 0.1 release. I'm loving it.
Besides, the spinner and name just kick serious ass.
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Maybe in a few weeks /. should come back to this and then ask what people think.
or am I totally off-base?
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Right now, both mozilla.exe and explorer.exe are using about 25mb of ram on my machine. Are there any projects in the works to use mozilla as explorer? All that would be needed would be a program launcher, taskbar, and system tray system, right?
Is it really useful to encourage more people to create more "forks" based on the gecko engine? I'm not against people playing around or doing whatever they want, but shouldn't we encourage people to consider working together more on some of these alternatives?
It's a thin line to avoid the balloon and bloat of Mozilla while providing functionality that many desire. Many projects are doing this, but each needs more developers to seal the leaks and fix the cracks.
I got the first one right, but since I live under a rock, I missed most of the pop-culture questions. Still, I managed a score of 7.
why is it that all alternative browers sound like topless dancer names? opereta, phoenix, aphrodite..
I plan to do so. Probably in about five years, when all the junk food I've eaten catches up with me.
I went back to windows because i could not get web pages to use readable fonts under any browser in linux. If i want to browse the web, i'll use a windows browser, if i want to do something in a terminal, i may use linux. Sorry, but windows has a better GUI than linux
Go check the Galeon manifesto. It does not use XUL. In fact one of the reasons Galeon was started is because they don't like the bloat of XUL.
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If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
screenshots here: Atlantis Screenshots: Click on Atlantis
I just love Mozilla and I think this is a great way to help create some variety on the net. A little while ago, I started looking at rolling my own with Mozilla, and it looks pretty straightforward so I might try it when I can free up some time. The only question I have is about security. Is Mozilla safe after someone else has compiled their own version, or is this cautum dilato?
I certainly don't suggest installing a custom Mozilla browser from any porn sites!
Does anyone know if the spyware knuckleheads have exploited this feature yet, either?
1. download Opera
Of course, there's the problem of different users on a machine. Is it possible to run a proxy that only a single user has access to?
Bookmarks could easily be managed through a small web app. There's a few things like this, check freshmeat.
I think my dying words will be "I wish I had spent more time getting the first post."
Also related is that O'Reilly has released "Creating Applications With Mozilla" under the OPL, and can be found in its entirety here: http://books.mozdev.org/
(Apologies if this has been mentioned before; I did a quick search and didn't see it.)
I don't think I need a version that has even more bugs (and trust me, a version done by me would have bugs more bugs). I wish the mozilla developers would decide to take a couple of months and just squash bugs. I realize that most are not being paid to do this, and that they pretty much do what they're interested in, but it would be in the project's greater good.
the new CowboyNeal browser!!
I think the FSF is fighting a losing battle with the whole GNU/Linux thing, but the reasons they are fighting it are a lot more valid than you imply.
The Linux kernel is called Linux. It doesn't matter that it was edited in emacs and compiled with gcc. It's Linux.
GNU/Linux refers to distributions. If you package Linux and GNU, in such a way that there is no option not to install the GNU part, it's a GNU/Linux distribution. There may be GNU/Linux/X distributions (maybe Lindows is a GNU/Linux/X/Wine distribution), but I am not aware of any Linux distributions that allow you the option of not installing GNU.
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I've done this several times with IE. All you gotta do is drop the COM object into a VB project. You can literally have your "own" browser in about 30 seconds. How's this any different? If anything, making your own browser with IE seems a hell of a lot easier than using Mozilla. In VB, you can do the whole thing visually, and add code behind the objects and events.
I hate to be the one to point this out -- I am a big mozilla fan (3 Cheers for optimoz!!) but the real problems lie in the crappy html output of Microsoft Frontpage. Besides...has anyone seen volano chat (http://www.volano.com) in _any browser other than ie_ work properly? (Chatrooms dont scroll, etc) In fact, volanochat didnt even work properly on IE for OSX until Jaguar. *sigh*
;)
We need a mozilla-esque frontpage replacement. GNU/Dreamweaver anyone?
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
Platform builder comes with an application called "IESample" which is basically a frame you can tweek to roll your own version of IE. With a few hours of work, I found it pretty easy to modify the beast to match some custom requirements we had to change the page being viewed when an outside stimulus was activated. You can take a look here to see the IE interfaces exposed.
Again, this is entirely in the CE world. I can not speak to embedded XP or the desktop.
PS - Several months ago, I was in a week long CE training class. I was amazed that on the day I learned about rolling a version of IE, I clicked on the TV and saw it in the news. An MS exec was testifying in front of congress (the senate?) about how IE was not modular in any way shape or form. Then one of the committee members brought up CE. A shame the news didn't report the exec's reaction...
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
K-Meleon is one of my personal favorite Mozilla browsers.. small, fast, stable.. but sadly no work has been put into it for a year now..
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
which is why setting style='border: 1px solid gray;' works on ... text boxes and textareas ... but not on checkboxes or drop-downs. wonderful. any other things about styling you'd like to mention? i would -love- for all browsers to actually stylize widgets correctly. but they don't. and my users ask me why it is the checkboxes don't look like the text box. or why the drop-down looks funny. or why the textarea, under mozilla, only does word-wrapping if you specify the number of columns, rather than (as you would expect to do) just specify a width, in pixels ...
yes. i love widgets. i love how they all work alike.
All anybody needs are the headers anyway. Right?
Yeah, well I'd like to see you go on the O'Reilly Factor and make that case against Bill O'Reilly yourself! He'll eat you alive! It's one thing to rant here on slashdot but when you're face to face with one of the most hard-hitting no-hold-barred talk show hosts on TV today, you'll find yourself at a loss for words!
Oh wait...
GMD
watch this
you forgot "uninstall opera when you realize just how much ass it sucks, and install something else"
Do you mean IE?
Oh that was a low blow.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Here are SCREENSHOTS Click on Atlantis for Screenshots.
That's all I have to say about that.
slashdot broke my sig
ok, this is getting as annoying as "imagine a beowulf cluster of these..."
if you are looking for speed, look no further than phoenix.
I hate sigs.
I remember when M$ visual basic came with the stuff to create your own webbrowser, 75K compiled, and you had a basic html browser, no table support, but it did render basic formated text.
When I'm stuck using IE only sites, I use an IE enhancer, Crazy Browser, provides tabs, and other security features that I turn off (cookie/popups/etc), but its free and fills the missing functions.
What a Moron! Gecko is a rendering engine. XUL is a layer on top. Big difference.
Microsoft's HTML rendering engine has been avialable as a COM object since IE4 I believe. It's been usable from VB and C++ on all windows platforms for years. It is in fact the reason that AOL was using IE as AOL wanted to subsume the browsing experience totally and IE's modular rendering engine was the only practical way to go. Mozilla only now has become able to be "effortlessly" integraded into a third paty app. Welcome to the pary Moz!
Once upon a time, fred was a nice text editor under DOS.
It's designed to have same methods as IE component, so it would be easy to port your app to gecko.
That's at least what i read a year ago somewhere...
In fact, winamp3 beta could switch between two.
Saturday on DIY: How to make a cheap, stable, secure, user-friendly operating system from Microsoft Windows.
From the FAQ for "Revol", a distribution of Linux suitable for use on a Psion Revo (a.k.a. Diamond Mako) electronic organiser:
Shouldnt this be called GNU/Linux?
Actually, no. The argument for GNU/Linux is that most linux systems are a modified version of the GNU system which has been around for longer than linux has. However, Revol uses embedded versions of the standard parts of the operating system normally provided by GNU tools (uclibc instead of glibc, busybox instead of the GNU fileutils etc). So Revol is a non-GNU linux system.
As a roll your own browser based upon mozila it should be called MoRizla or MaRizla - a smokingly fast web browser by any standards.
the lizard featured on the cover of the oreilly book advertised off to the side of this article is a frill-necked lizard
native to that land of weird and wonderful animals, terra australis
and this lizard is one little terror australis - have a look at some of the pictures on this page
It's exactly what I need, let's scroll down looking for any useful info.
Other Gecko-based browsers include SkipStone and Q.Bati.
This article was not supposed to be a bookmark list - it's supposed to be "survey", remember? Where is any comparison of SkipStone or Q.Bati to Galeon and K-Meleon?
Other XUL-based custom browsers include Project Piglet, MercurySpider, and Dino.
Again, why to mention it here if you don't compare?
Drawing two groups, XUL and native-toolkit based, is the only thing I can learn from the article. For everything else I should try download every mentioned browser and try myself.
By the way, as a bookmark list the article is also far from being complete.
It missed Mozilla Kiosk - "a kiosk style browser".
It missed Nareau - a collaboration web-based framework.
And it missed many other interesting projects from mozdev.
Less is more !
Can someone please tell me what the hell BLUI is or stands for?
After all, nobody seems to be able to write drivers for Linux, and the only ones are closed-source, buggy, unsupported, and only works on ancient hardware. Buzz3D is here, and Mozilla/Linux will miss the boat.
At my day job I code in VB - and I have played with XUL in Mozilla. The one nice thing Mozilla/XUL has over IE/VB is that the dev environment is the browser - really, you only need Mozilla, a text editor (I prefer NEdit, but vi will work fine too) - and that's it! I don't have to buy some insanely costly VB IDE system in order to code up my application (and really, when you couple XUL with PHP on Apache, and add MySQL for the backend - you are talking web applications). It's cheap! It's Free! It's Open! What the hell more could I ask for? To be anally raped by Bill?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The opportunity to cobble together a fully functional custom web browser with minimal effort has been available to COM and VB programmers in Windows since at least 1996. However, I don't see many IE clones floating around.
... etc will die the slow "market share" death that mature markets seem to develop.)
Seems to me there is not much demand for that kind of thing. Instead I suspect there will be a diminishment of browsers over time. (e.g., Konqerer, Opera
.....Paladin? I hope joe six pack refers to abdominal muscles and not beer, because if you're that stupid, you better be cute.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
There you go then. I can't speak for RMS, but that sounds OK to me.
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E_NOSIG
;P
My two favorite open source projects are Mozilla and AbiWord. Both use cross-platform graphics libraries. The difference is in how they're executed.
AbiWord uses wrappers to compile its XP libraries into native widgets, for platforms as diverse as Win32, GTK/GNOME, QNX, and BeOS. Mozilla, instead, uses those same libraries, but uses XUL widgets; they look the same on any platform, but completely inconsistent with the platform they're on.
Moz should follow Abi's example. Eschew in-browser themes, and just use a wrapper to convert at compile-time to native widgets.
That kind of game, there is no ONE right answer.