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."

Comments

Re:Is excessive plurality really useful?

[Arcturax]

At the least it will be fun watching M$ run around like crazy trying to mimic every innovation that comes along in 100 different browsers.

It also opens the possibility for more competition, open source style. Look at the Mac for example. On Mac OS X, Chimera is taking off like a rocket among Mac users on OS X because it is fast and beautiful looking since it uses native Aqua, unlike IE 5.2 for the Mac. I for one have switched off of IE 5.2 and onto Chimera for 99% of my browsing, only suffering IE on sites that Chimera can't handle properly yet, which isn't many.

In short, choice is good, more choice is better. Who cares what browsers people use, as long as they conform to standards and work the way they like?

Re:mozilla.exe as explorer.exe

[aao-brad]

Have you checked out the alternative shell scene? You can find cool alternatives for explorer all over. A mozilla-based shell would be interesting, though.

Check out Desktopian for more info.

Re:galeon != xul

[Anonymous Coward]

yes right, GALEON does not use XUL but i am more refering to the GECKO part that gets embedded into galeon. the stuff you see within GALEON while browsing a webpage and the widgets you see inside is XUL. if you enable 'ask for cookie permission' then you get a XUL dialog popped up etc.. its still not perfect as we would like.

Re:dreaming of centralized cookies and bookmarks

[Midnight Thunder]

And here is a link: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/acap/

Free online book

[slothdog]

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.)

How is this different from IE?

[NineNine]

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.

Re:How is this different from IE?

[slug359]

Actually exactly the same is true for the Gecko engine, there is a COM object for it, you drop it into your VB/Delphi project and use it in 30 seconds.

It also uses _exactly_ the same properties, methods and events, so you just change the name of the gecko control to the name of your IE control, and it works, I've done it.

Still doesn't fix the "frontpage problem"

[Vengie]

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? ;)

Re:galeon != xul

[Cardinal]

if you enable 'ask for cookie permission' then you get a XUL dialog popped up etc.. its still not perfect as we would like.

I don't know what parallel dimension you downloaded galeon from, but when I get a cookie prompt, it comes to me in a GTK dialog.

Additionally, the widgets used by gecko for rendering forms are native, and Mozilla can be configured to use a number of different toolkits for them.

One XUL dialog that is still in galeon, however, is the 'accept SSL certificate' dialog, so yes, galeon doesn't have a replacement for everything.

Atlantis Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

Atlantis is the name of a Lightweight full GNOME 2 implemented Webbrowser using GTKHTML2. The binary is around 60kb and maybe it will become a Konqueror like Webbrowser alternative for GNOME 2. Personally I think that this is the better solution on the long run for a GNOME 2 Webbrowser since it doesn't depend on Mozilla at all (look at the pain with the Mozilla GTK+ 2 port that we all are waiting for like mad). But I am not sure if I should continue working on it. Interested people may visit irc.gimp.org #atlantis and we can discuss about it.

Here are SCREENSHOTS Click on Atlantis for Screenshots.

Re:dreaming of centralized cookies and bookmarks

[BroadbandBradley]

go and see ZillaVilla.com for information about roaming profiles and a list of bugs on Bugzilla that are related. Roaming profiles don't work YET, but hopefully will soon.