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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."

29 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. Security by JohnHegarty · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Security by mnordstr · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Mozilla is not a web application. Slashdot is a web application...

  2. 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 Golias · · Score: 5, Funny
      Tonight on DIY: How to make your own browser, using only Mozila!

      Tomorrow on DIY: How to make a working automobile, starting with nothing but a brand new Nissan Maxima.

      Friday on DIY: How to make a Pizza with nothing but a phone and $15.

      --

      Information wants to be anthropomorphized.

    3. 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.

    4. Re:my 0.2� by be-fan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Cross-platform similarity is only useful for a very limited range of applications. For the most part, its just annoying to users who want all their apps to look the same.

      --
      A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
    5. Re:my 0.2� by be-fan · · Score: 3, Funny

      Because consistancy is important in asthetics. I'd really hate to see what you're house looks like...

      --
      A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
    6. Re:my 0.2� by SoupIsGoodFood_42 · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Yeah, great for develoopers, a total nightmare for GUI designers, users, and usability experts.

      *sigh* when will programers ever learn...

    7. Re:my 0.2� by SoupIsGoodFood_42 · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Because consistancy is important in asthetics. I'd really hate to see what you're house looks like...

      Not just that, but consistantly is very important in design and usability.

      When grandma just gets the hang of all the widgets on OS-Whatever, then fires up Mozilla, only to be greated by a set of widgets she has never seen before, how do you think she's going to react? She probably won't understand it, and close it.

    8. 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.

  3. 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:dreaming of centralized cookies and bookmarks by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 3, Informative

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

      --
      Jumpstart the tartan drive.
    4. Re:dreaming of centralized cookies and bookmarks by digidave · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah, all we need is some kind of centralized login system to do this. It could hold all of our browser data, credit card number, etc to make browsing the web easier.

      Now all we need to find is a company that wants to write software to control all online transactions, profide centralized login and store our private information.

      --
      The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
    5. Re:dreaming of centralized cookies and bookmarks by BroadbandBradley · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      "The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
  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?

    1. Re:mozilla.exe as explorer.exe by aao-brad · · Score: 4, Informative
      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.

      --
      "What kind of chip you got in there, a Dorito?" - Weird Al Yankovic
  5. Is excessive plurality really useful? by hobbs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Is excessive plurality really useful? by Arcturax · · Score: 3, Informative

      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?

      --

      --Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
  6. why is that... by g0st · · Score: 5, Funny

    why is it that all alternative browers sound like topless dancer names? opereta, phoenix, aphrodite..

    1. Re:why is that... by BlueGecko · · Score: 4, Funny

      Well, at least on my OS X system, it might have something to do with the fact that if you type "top" in the terminal, Mozilla is always listed as having really big numbers...

  7. Free online book by slothdog · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.)

  8. How is this different from IE? by NineNine · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:How is this different from IE? by kalidasa · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

      Try doing that in any non-Microsoft operating system. THAT'S what's different. You can get Gecko for nearly anything.

    2. Re:How is this different from IE? by slug359 · · Score: 5, Informative
      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.

  9. Still doesn't fix the "frontpage problem" by Vengie · · Score: 3, Informative

    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)
  10. Re:galeon != xul by Cardinal · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.