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Mozilla/QT needs developers!

Posted by chrisd on from the zaurus-running-mozilla-would-be-cool dept.

strredwolf writes "They need developers to port Mozilla to TrollTech's QT. The origional port is since 0.9.9 and hasn't been updated since. We need that Mozilla for the iPAQ or Zaurus!!!"

19 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. Handhelds? by Xunker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have to question the actual feasability of Mozilla on a handheld.. well, current handhelds. Mozilla, while powerfull and efficient, is also monsterously huge in comparison to the miniscume persistant storage of handhelds and their small execution space.

    I''m sad to say that I think a 32 meg Zaurus couldn't run Mozilla well.. at least, not *stock* Mozilla.

    --
    Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
    1. Re:Handhelds? by DJayC · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Perhaps something more lightweight like Phoenix (or whatever they are going to call it)? But you are right, even Phoenix is a bit chunky for a handheld, but it's nice to know there are people who desire this. I think in order for a Mozilla based browser to work out it would have to be more than a "port".

    2. Re:Handhelds? by Chexsum · · Score: 2, Informative

      You dont understand what theyre asking. The QT embedding widget needs to be ported or else itll be dropped from the distribution IIRC.

      The widget is like a wrapper for Gecko so that Gecko can be embedded into QT programs easilly. It probably wouldnt be too much work *if you were a C++ and/or QT programmer* to port it. =)

      Phoenix is a small and fast browser but I doubt its smaller and faster than a Gecko-based browser which doesnt use XUL *the Mozilla.org portable widget set* to render the layout. Check Galeon out sometime. :P

      --
      Pixels keep you awake!
    3. Re:Handhelds? by npietraniec · · Score: 2

      that's the point. If you could use *stock* mozilla they wouldn't need any new developers. Have yo used Phoenix? Maybe they should have said "we'd like to get gecho on the iPaq"

  2. Link doesn't work ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    ... as bugzilla have disabled referrals from Slashdot.

    Try this one instead, it routes via yahoo first:

    http://tinyurl.com/38uw

    1. Re:Link doesn't work ... by Trevelyan · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I've noticed something else.
      If you follow the link from the front pages it dont work. but if you click 'read more' to bring the article up and follow the link from that page then it does work.

      My current guess is that they block 'slashdot.org' but not 'developers.slashdot.org'

  3. mozilla.org by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The last mozilla.org status update report covered this. It says that January 8, 2003 (scheduled release of Mozilla 1.3beta) will be the deadline to find an owner for the QT Mozilla port.

  4. Not because Mozilla on Zaurus and IPAQ by jki · · Score: 3, Insightful
    We need that Mozilla for the iPAQ or Zaurus!!

    But as I see it, having it work with QT is important because it makes things possible for sub-projects of mozilla (some of which are more aimed into pda/embedded market) and also because having support for it further developed (and not removed from the source tree) might provide many important pieces of code which can be utilized in other open source projects as well... I think QT is very interesting concept from the embedded devices point of view, especially... I don't know but I think this might be rather important from a wider view also :)

  5. Why not konqueror? by PinkX · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Konqueror has been out for ages already, it's lightweight, and free software. And Qt based.

    I don't know if it's tightly integrated into KDE to make it a Qt-only app (I guess it is), but just the browser component of it could be 'stripped out', KHTML is pretty mature. The AtheOS web browser is bassed off it.

    I am not a KDE/Qt developer nor a KDE user, so I might be wrong at this. But I think it would be easier to mantain a stripped-down, kde-less version of the browser component of Konqueror instead of trying to keep up-to-date with a Qt port of Mozilla, which BTW is a bit bloated for PDAs (and please don't get me wrong here, I *LOVE* Mozilla).

    --
    Articulos para gente geek: Poleras, linux, libros y mas
    1. Re:Why not konqueror? by Jagasian · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I am a big KDE fan and KDE user. I used to think Konq was the best browser for Linux, and it truely was... until Mozilla 1.0. Yes, for years I swore that Mozilla was going nowhere, but once 1.0 was released, and I could see how stable it was... how well it rendered sites. It was then that I realized that Mozilla did it.

      Netscape is back! It reminds me of that Obi-wan quote:
      "You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."

      How is Netscape more powerful than ever? Well technology wise, functionality wise, and performance wise, it matches Internet Explorer... but what truely makes it invincible is that it is open source software. Just like Obi-wan returned from the grave so has Netscape.

    2. Re:Why not konqueror? by perlyking · · Score: 2

      I've got konqueror embedded on my Zaurus at the moment. It is not lean or small though.
      TBH though its not open source (horror!) I'm looking forward to Opera 7 on embedded devices though whether it will run on my Z is a different matter.

      --
      no sig.
    3. Re:Why not konqueror? by perlyking · · Score: 2

      Thats a silly quote though since Obi-wan is hardly "more powerful" when he comes back.

      --
      no sig.
    4. Re:Why not konqueror? by sporty · · Score: 2

      Because, some of us simply have preferences? Otherwise, I'd easily say, why Konq? It's a piece of crap blah blah blah, which is both wrong and unfair, 'cause somebody likes it.

      So why Mozilla/Qt? (vs gnu? :) 'cause someone is interested and are trying to get the other people who are interested to wake up. That's why not. :)

      --

      -
      ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only

  6. Performance by turgid · · Score: 2

    Mozilla's performance is barely acceptable on my humble 500MHz K6-2. It stinks on UltraSPARC. I suspect it stinks on anything that isn't x86, partly because of GCC's inefficiency on non-x86 architectures. Therefore I hate to think what it would be like on a 206MHz StrongARM. I think Mozilla needs a lot of optimization before anyone can contemplate running it on a handheld. On a related note, why is Netscape 7 so much faster than Mozilla on the same machine? I know an ipaq user who runs dillo for his web browser. It seems far better suited to hand-held use.

    --
    Stick Men
    1. Re:Performance by GiMP · · Score: 2

      The performance of mozilla can vary according to architecture and OS. Mozilla is quite fast in Linux/ppc,x86, MacOS/ppc, MS Windows/x86, and *BSD/ppc,x86. However, it totally stinks on Irix/Mips and is adequate but far from speedy on HPUX/pa-risc.

      Performance of mozilla on Irix is terrible, although it is considerably better with Skipstone and Galeon.. Phoenix is probably fast too, but I haven't tried it personally. I believe the irix binaries are compiled with SGI's CC compiler, not gcc.. but I could be wrong. I also haven't tried a release since almost a year ago, so it may be better now.

  7. Need developers by nuggz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is the way the free market/software system works, there will always be dead/dying projects. The time to allocate to such projects is a valuable resource, obviously people have chosen to invest it in something else.

    If someone found it important enough, they would find the time themselves, or come up with money to hire someone else to do it.

  8. What a widget port of Mozilla is. by dbaron · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, it's not just an embedding widget. A port of Mozilla to a toolkit is code that maps the interface Mozilla uses for interacting with native widgets and event queues (the part in widget/src/qt/) and graphics devices (the part in gfx/src/qt/) to the particular toolkit's API.

    The default Unix port of Mozilla uses GTK+. (It's the default in the build system for platforms other than Windows, Mac, OS/2, BeOS, and QNX, and it's the one distributed in mozilla.org release builds for all but those platforms.) This means that many of the interactions between Mozilla and Xlib have GTK code in the middle. (Not all of them do -- some parts of the code, such as the font code, uses Xlib APIs directly, although the Xft builds use Xft2 and fontconfig APIs instead.) It also means Mozilla gets a good bit of look-and-feel information from GTK themes (more recently than it used to).

    In addition to the GTK+ port, there are also a raw Xlib port (no toolkit between Mozilla and Xlib) and a QT port, but the QT port is poorly maintained and will be removed if no maintainer steps up (as the Motif port was a while ago).

    Some of the ports also come with embedding widgets that allow embedding of the layout engine into programs using those toolkits. However, the embedding widget is just a small and optional part of the port. I also don't see any reason that it wouldn't be possible to use a QT embedding widget for Mozilla even if Mozilla is using GTK+ internally.

  9. Re:Oooh... big man! by fault0 · · Score: 2

    Or it'll be removed (like the Motif one was)

  10. Konqueror Embedded by benjamindees · · Score: 2

    Ask and ye shall receive.

    --
    "I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"