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Roll Your Own Browser

Posted by timothy on from the picture-your-own-throbber dept.

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."

11 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. my 0.2� by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:my 0.2� by mnordstr · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Mozilla provides its own widgets, that's what makes it so great. As a developer it's really good to know that the widgets are and look the same on any platform. That's what makes Mozilla great for embedded applications!

    2. Re:my 0.2� by DrXym · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Perhaps you can but then it's the small matter of reimplementing form widgets for every platform / GUI you wish to run Mozilla. In theory this might be possible but you run into all kinds of mess when dealing with clipping, accessibility, printing, tying GUI events to Moz and vice versa. In other words the kind of hell that drove Mozilla to XUL widgets in the first place.


      A better solution would be to hook the XUL form widgets up to the existing theme engine support in Mozilla. Then if GTK supplies a rendering engine (does it? I don't know) then it can render in the GTK style but not break the CSS standards support.

    3. Re:my 0.2� by rycamor · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'm with you all the way ;-). I personally think XUL is a great thing (shows great promise for distributed apps in general).

      Mozilla performs just fine on my PII 600 (Win2K), my AMD 550 (Win98) and my Celeron 500 (Slackware). Phoenix (lite Mozilla) performs even better, beats IE hands down.

      And I think the skinnable thing is a perfect way to have a little fun, and relieve the gray boredom of computing. My wife (not a computer geek) loves Mozilla. Everyone I know who is not a computer whiz still thinks Mozilla is great when I show them.

      What kills me is this elitist "no fun" attitude I see programmers so often take: as if the interface always needs to be so dumbed down that it's just made for Granny, and there can _never_ be even the slightest deviation from the standardized desktop. Well, if it's only good for Granny, then it's no good to anyone else. People are complex. No one I know is "Granny". My mother is probably the most technophobic person I know, and even she can handle the concept that a button might look a little different. I personally think different things _should_ look different (a little line I stole from Larry Wall).

      And anyway, if you want a browser for Granny, XUL is the perfect way to roll an ultra-simple layout, with big typeface, etc... Granny is hardly the one who is going to care if a widget takes an extra half second to pop up.

  2. dreaming of centralized cookies and bookmarks by Dr.+Awktagon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:dreaming of centralized cookies and bookmarks by bytesmythe · · Score: 4, Interesting

      This is the same issue as the "roaming profile" problem.

      It would seem that the easiest way to implement something like this would be to have a small (probably USB-based) device like one of those USB keyring "drives" that you use to store this kind of basic information. Then have a standard in which different systems (KDE, Gnome, Windows, browsers, email clients, etc.) will check for the device and try to load preferences from it.

      Since you could encrypt the information on the device and require a password to access it, it would be fairly secure, plus you don't have to trust someone else's distributed network.

      --
      bytesmythe
      Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
      -- Scott Meyer
    2. Re:dreaming of centralized cookies and bookmarks by Nicopa · · Score: 4, Interesting

      No, the ansert for that question is a little known protocol called ACAP, which is designed for remote profiles, profile sharing. e.g. In ACAP a client can register for dynamic updates, so all open applications dynamically change their settings at the same time!

  3. Re:Hooray by Rude+Turnip · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It would promote the underlying technology, which is what counts in the end. However, it would now have the support of a large customer base.

    What sounds more threatening to an online store owner...thousands of pissed-off AOL and Earthlink customers who can't navigate the site due to non-compliant coding, or thousands of geeks using some relatively unknown web browser?

    --
    Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
  4. mozilla.exe as explorer.exe by zeepers · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  5. Proxy server? by __aawsxp7741 · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I could imagine cookies being managed by a proxy server. If you install it locally, at least you could share them among various browsers on one platform. Privacy proxies (e.g. privoxy) already have a lot of the required functionality. You'd just have to implement an interface that alerts you when a cookie is set which your policy doesn't cover. Maybe biscuit does this properly?

    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.

  6. Actually, there is a Linux OS that's not GNU/Linux by smcv · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.