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Ask Slashdot: Chromeless Cross-Platform Browser?
blakieto writes "Mozilla has the Prism project, which turned into Chromeless, which seems to have died [Note: last update was May 31]. I'm seeking a no-interface-what-so-ever cross-platform browser for use as a 'user interface host' to a self-hosted web app. Slight background: I've a professional market web app, with a large portion of the customer base unable to access public Internet connections. So, I want to make a version of my product self-hosted, with the web server and web app and everything necessary to run the web app locally installed on a user's machine. I have everything except a chromeless browser. Oh, and my customers are local police & highway patrol type organizations, most likely running an aged Windows box (probably IE6, too)."
I'm not sure I understand. Prism still exists, and it sounds like what you want, so I don't understand why you say it "turned into Chromeless."
It's also very easy to embed Internet Explorer in things. A friend of mine once "wrote a Web browser" in Macromedia Director using about six lines of code.
Breakfast served all day!
While web applications are often a bad idea, this takes it to a whole new level of bad. Your users get none of the benefits of a web app, but many of the drawbacks.
If you care even the slightest about your customers and their experience, why not just provide them with a real native application that has the same functionality, in addition to a sensible UI and architecture?
Use a mature, cross-platform toolkit like wxWidgets or Qt, and you'll be able to support all sorts of Windows systems, in addition to many other platforms.
You can build a bare bones web browser in less that 100 lines of code with Python, GTK, and Webkit. If you google around you can find examples of it on sites like pastebin.
Use firefox with --chrome="path_to_your_homepage"
You can always use Java and it's Java display HTML. A single file (.jar) containing everything: server & browser. http://www.devdaily.com/blog/post/jfc-swing/how-create-simple-swing-html-viewer-browser-java. // timtux.net
Super easy to create an app that's nothing but a webkit instance. Unbelievably easy.
Just use Adobe Air. It's just a wrapper around Webkit that provides all the native integration bits you'd want (like systray notifications, drag and drop, native menus, etc.) The Air compiler is free and open source too.
Are you more interested in the HTML/CSS rendering engine or in the JavaScript engine? That may determine whether you want to use something like Prism or Chromeless vs WebKit. My gut tells me you might find WebKit easier to embed and work with, but I don't know if Google or Apple are sharing their fantastic JavaScript engines, and your needs for speedy JavaScript will definitely play a role in your choice.
it depends on your code. You hardly gave us enough information. Is your web app something simple that relies only on html4/5? Then yeah, your suggestion along with the other current posts will all work. (Most seem unprofessional though considering your target market)
BUT if your code is remotely complex in that it uses server side code and possible a db (which posters here are obviously overlooking here nor did you mention much on it), then, NO, there is no easy way to port it to a local application. You will have to go the extra mile in actually porting it. If you would like the least work, that means programming in a language of your choice (python?), embedding a db library if you use one (sqlite, firebirdsql, mysqlembed), and using a easy framework for the gui. Using all this, port as much code that compatible if possible (Like php to c++ might allow for easier code transition). That said, it's not an easy solution and requires you to have some programming background.
There is one exception, however, if you use a database but only use a server side code to connect to the database. You can still do what other posters commented on as long as you convert your storage from the db to html5 local storage. Of course, this limits your choices packaging a recent browser with a local cache of your website.
If you already have IE on those machines, go in to group policy and remove the interface. Done.
Don't be one of the Slashfools who say Windows can't do something it's been doing for over a decade.
We're doing this at work, and we've weighed many options. Chrome's app mode, Prism, custom xulrunner app, embed IE, custom QtWebKit app; they all work, and with little effort. It's great how many options there are.
Why would you think chromeless was dead? It looks like a project that started last Oct with a new release every few months. It's only been a few months since their last update, and the forums have recent activity. They also have commits up until the end of last month? Are you trying to motivate the devs?
We are happily using prism for our customer's (also in law enforcement) whose IT department refuses to let them install "firefox". Right now prism is great but it would be nice to eventually get those ff ver 4 and ver 5 faster javascript interpreters (engines?).
I'm not sure if using --chrome would help us because I suspect I would have to use the firefox setup.msi file which would give away our secret as usually the IT department is the group going around installing our software on our user's machines. Unless creating my own ff installer is simple (I'm experienced creating an msi file but the prism one is so simple because all it does is copy files - no registering of dlls or registry changes).
I don't mean to plug anything for anything else, but on my 486 I use OffByOne in Windows. It's the FASTEST browser i've ever used, and I mean that, and not 'marketing fast' like kmeleon / firefox.
It comes at a cost of lack of CSS, source and no update since 2006, though.
Prism didn't actually evolve into Chromeless, it lives on in a project called WebRunner: http://www.salsitasoft.com/webrunner/ Prism was originally called WebRunner, funny fact. I wouldn't expect Chromeless to die just yet.
People like yourself, who were apparently born after 2000, aren't aware than for decades we used networked native applications quite successfully. In fact, most users of those apps who are now stuck using web apps will say that they'd love to go back and use real applications again. Their productivity would rise immediately.
Sure, those systems didn't consist of "web browsers", "web servers", "HTML5", "JavaScript" and all of the other buzzwords that the ignorant today consider to be the only way to create networked applications. But these native apps did run on many different systems, and they could communicate with server software running locally or remotely. It was quite trivial to implement auto-update functionality, so that users always had the latest version. It was more than possible to ensure that the communications were done securely. Basically, anything a web app can do today could be (and was!) done using a native app in 1975, if not earlier.
You guys don't even need to look any further than your dear web browsers like Chrome and Firefox to see how all of the supposed benefits of web apps are just as easily realized when using native apps. Then there are the many benefits that only native apps offer, like much better data security and significantly better performance.
I think the idea was to create a proper networked application, thus getting all of the benefits of web applications, but without the drawbacks that are clearly causing the submitter grief. Then the inferior web application would be ditched. Only one development team would be needed.
No serious application uses JavaScript, and any existing functionality can be implemented in basically every other language in existence. So that's not an issue.
They'll need to test this re-packaged web app just as much as they'd have to test a native application, if not more so. So that's an issue that's likely worse for the web app approach, given how fucking convoluted his whole idea is.
Only somebody who'd spell SQLite as "SqlLIte" wouldn't be aware that most other database implementations, be they commercial or open source, have some way of embedding or distributing a server with native applications. Again, this isn't an issue.
The "issues" you've found just don't exist, I'm sorry to say.
HTML5 has a huge section dedicated to making offline applications.
It is sort of Work-in-progress though. Google Gears has had some support for most of it for a little while, but it is dropped now.
It has some simple web-server support that replicates server-side fairly well.
Of course, server-side languages are another issue.
Unless you used SSJS, there will be headaches ahead in emulating the server-side in JS.
But if speed isn't an issue, you could do it with no problems at all. Quite a few languages have emulators of them in JS.
If not, Prism, chromeless FF, chromeless Webkit, chromeless Chromium in fact, you are free to port it for your own needs if I remember correct. (not sure if profit may be an issue or not)
Of course, try as much as possible to stick with HTML5 if you can. It isn't too hard to setup offline apps with it, server-side emulation will be the only hard-ish part depending on how well you are with programming.
And it uses the browsers they already have installed, seamless too. Sync operations can be done in the same code if it detects a connection.
Then you could provide a separate offline install if they have no recent browser.
Depends who your target audience is. If the majority use recent browsers, best bet is with HTML5 since most of them will likely hit have ones that support most of it, or IE9 soon which supposedly, and quite shockingly, has decent support for HTML5 this time around.
"The âoeChromelessâ project experiments with the idea of removing the current browser user interface and replacing it with a flexible platform which allows for the creation of new browser UI using standard web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript." ...What about XUL?
If they what they have now is IE, why not use IE? I mean, besides the horrible incompatibility.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Oh, and my customers are local police & highway patrol type organizations, most likely running an aged Windows box (probably IE6, too)
It seems like you need to code something using MSHTML (or hire someone who can do that for you). Almost all modern standards compliant HTML/JS engines have quite indecent memory requirements - and from your words I can conclude your clients PCs may have very weak configurations.
I can't think of a good reason to help the cops do anything at all.
I imagine their money spends well.
UNIX [...] allowed multiple users to use the same physical computer, and as part of this it gave each user their very own isolated "home directory".
It also allows the administrator to mount /home noexec.
Rather help the drug dealers setup a contact database.
They're at least honest about being scumbags.
Even if your clients don't have access to the internet at large, if everything is installed locally a normal browser is still perfectly reasonable... Why does it have to be a no-UI browser?
First, why not just install the app and put a URL link on the desktop pointing to http://localhost:7777/? Second, are you really sure it makes sense to have a self hosted web app? I, for one, absolutely despise when companies ship some tool that installs a web server on my machine and makes me use it through a web browser. IIRC, HP did this kind of garbage for managing their printers. Write a god damn native app if it is just going to install on my local machine!
I realize that you probably want to save some money and not write two pieces of software that do the same thing, but how hard can it possibly be to make a UI in .NET that is at least as good as your web interface? Share code if you have to. If you've written the software correctly, you should be able to share the model level functionality between the two apps. Or install the web app on the local machine but create an API that the native app can hit.
It really sounds like you are approaching this problem from the completely wrong angle.
We're doing something similar where I work, and one of the things we're considering is using QtWebView for the majority of the UI. It means you can use a web server, or simply embed everything into the app, and redirect all your links to HTML pages on the disk.
Lastly, using a custom interface allows you to break the (deliberate) limitations of the web browser when it's appropriate to do so (this is reasonably safe, since the app is only capable of serving pages that the developer created).
Don't forget, when looking for an innovative browser feature that you need implemented, look no further than Opera, because they already did it.
http://www.opera.com/support/mastering/kiosk/ Opera kiosk mode has plenty of features that would work great for you.
insight through the mind
On Win32 you can easily embed MSHTML with a little bit of COM glue. Of course for other platforms YMMV. You could consider using WebKit and writing a simple shell for it. Alternatively, if you don't mind a bit of Windows pollution on non-Win32 platforms you could use WINELIB to compile your MSHTML shell so that it functions just the same. Wine embeds Gecko in quirks mode so there is a surprising amount of compatability support.
I'm not sure I understand. Prism still exists, and it sounds like what you want, so I don't understand why you say it "turned into Chromeless."
I think he meant this announcement, that focus is shifting from Prism to Chromeless.
But, OP is wrong about "[Chromeless] seems to have died [Note: last update was May 31]" - yes, the last blogpost was May 31, but the last source code commit on github was less than a month ago. That doesn't sound 'dead' to me.
So Chromeless sounds like the way to go here, for what OP is looking for.
I built a simple app using http://www.kirix.com/labs/wxwebconnect.html . Since I was using wxwidgets anyway, it was a no brainer.
For those of you who question the approach, it enables you to develop a a single UI, that can easily be used both locally and remotely. In my case, for an embedded medical product, I have one set off CSS that is used when run locally and using a touchscreen, and another set of CSS that is used for remote on any web browser.
Look at CEF: http://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/
It lets you self-host a HTML widget(s) and works on Win32, OSX and Linux. Its a wrapper around the Chromium browser, I use it in the Steam client for showing web pages in our thick app.
Chromium (open source Chrome) has an option to run any site as an "application". The result is the web page only, no back or forward buttons, no address bar. Nothing but your site. Obviously, you can also hit F11 to get into full screen mode to remove the window manager's chrome...
Simply run it like so: /usr/bin/chromium-browser --app=your.apps.url
There you have your open source, fast, cross-platform, standards friendly browser.
Webkit-based, free, allows you to create desktop and mobile applications.
https://github.com/mozilla/chromeless
Webkit is the layout engine behind Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome browsers. What you probably want to do is embed webkit into a native application to display your web content. This is the approach used by the Steam client (Valve's online game store) which is probably the world's most widely deployed example of what you're talking about. A little googling will tell you all about it.
Also, it's worth noting John Cook, Director of Steam Development at Valve, saying:
"We swapped out the Internet Explorer rendering engine with WebKit, which gives us a bunch of size, stability and performance benefits,"
It also gives them easy portability to OSX and Linux.
Server2Go is a nice WAMPP stack, customizable, auto-starting, etc... Run Prism or Chromeless on top of that: http://www.server2go-web.de/
It's about as portable as any "browser" library I've ever seen. It even runs on 8" insignia infocast or "Chumby 8".
I personally have a personal project I developed as a web app. I then changed direction and it eventually evolved into a media center platform using Nginx, php w/fpm and a customized version of Surf. basically just stripped out all the UI widgets and set it to fullscreen on a Linux box connected to my TV.
Thats not the point though. What I am saying is no matter what you are trying to accomplish you will probably have to find something open source and customize it to your needs. I dont need anything other than Linux support for what I am doing, but I think there are unofficial Win builds of Surf.
You will no doubt have to do customizations though.
Replace %windir%/system32/userinit.exe with webkit.exe and a custom config file
Build your client side app out of Qt, and you can use QtWebView
Right, as someone suggested it's very easy to embed the customized browser component into your own thin frame. Many browsers provide these components. Just put it up together with integrated web server, database or whatever you need to run the application. It can be easily automated using custom installer. If I were to write something similar from the scratch I'd think about separately supporting offline and online modes with transparent synchronization. There are plenty of pseudo-HTML5 libraries emerging these days that try to use the best facilities available in your system.
While I agree with the majority here that the design could use some thinking through, one browser to check out is uzbl.
Its what all the annoying anti virus apps use with those sleek eye candy AJAX button etc.
If they have IE 6 it will work as well as up to IE 9 perfectly. It may not be eligant but it works. Stream used to use it too before hackers used IE flaws to install malware when peoeple selected levels. Since your app wont access outside data the security wont be a problem.
Another option which possibly meets the requirements of the poster better is to sell a web appliance to these clients - a server box with a simple web server serving only this webapp on it which can be put inside any firewall on a local network - they just plug it in, and it serves pages on the intranet to any and all clients which need them. That would address the problem of clients without internet access, without trying to turn the web app into a desktop app and losing all the convenience of a web app. Easy to roll out updates, doesn't matter what device config is accessing it or what software runs on clients, handle all new devices automatically with no changes, central store of information which only has to be updated once, users can collaborate on data, etc, etc. All those things are much harder with a desktop client.
Otherwise when clients roll out platform x mobile phone for example which his cross platform browser app doesn't support, he's not completely out of luck, as he just deals with the server appliance, and all clients just need a web browser of some kind, not to run his specific binary. Trying to support an app which is in fact a browser *and* his software on umpteen different client platforms which are constantly changing at different clients is going to be way harder than supporting one server machine with known config which he can replace/update as necessary.
You will still need to lock down the machine to now allow access to the majority of the computer, and unless you replace explorer with something else people will still be able to access many things you wouldn't want them to.
You could look into the Netstop kiosk software. I used it a few years back on some kiosks in a coffee shop and it worked quite well. It locks down the machine, replaces the explorer with its own explorer (no start menu, tab, etc, etc), and lets you use a web-based interface as the "main menu". So the machine boots up, netstop takes over everything and then loads your web app as the interface. And now people can access your web app while not being able to download, change settings, etc. IIRC netstop uses whatever version of IE you have installed on the machine and the security settings set for it. And I think the software costs around $100 for a license.
There are plenty of other windows-based kiosk apps out there too, but I never found any that were Linux based. And it if needs to be Linux based be prepared to spend thousands of dollars in research and development time.
In a native app. If your web app already supports most browsers, just pick the most convenient one for each platform - mshtml/trident on windows for example. Otherwise just host a webkit variant. The steam client from Valve has done both at various points in time.
Geez....
Pampered, aren't we?
http://webian.org/shell/
That could easily be changed into what you need..
The Vimperator extension allows turning almost all GUI elements off, including tabs. It is also quite configurable, and a solidly cross-platform solution. I suppose the UZBL project, which by default provides just Webkit and extremely few UI options, could suit your needs, although it probably demands a lot of work and might be difficult to prepare for all platforms.
"While web applications are often a bad idea"
Could you expand on that? Our company has several applications, both native and web apps, all written specifically for the company. I'm responsible for overviewing their development. I see several advantages of web applications:
- platform independence. We can move from PCs to Macs.
- OS version independence. We can upgrade to another OS version with no fear that the web application doesn't work.
- no time wasted installing stuff on user's computers.
- no crashes with loss of data. Bug fixes are done quickly at the server's end.
- we can easily find another company to continue the development if we're not satisfied with the current one.
At the downside,
- there's speed, but I that's not a problem we have. And as we can change computers easily (both server and client), nothing a newer computer can't fix.
So, what are your arguments (or anyone else's, who agrees with you) against web apps?
Look at http://www.appcelerator.com/
An example of its use is wunderlist (http://www.6wunderkinder.com/wunderlist/)
It is heavy on the RAM however.
If you go to any page you can click the wrench toolbar, go to tools, create application shortcuts. This will create a link that does what you want.
You may have OS and OS version independence, but you may not have web browser indepedence. And you can get quite a degree of OS version independence at least, and some OS independence and ease of installation/auto-update, especially if you use something like Java (which admittedly has its own disadvantages).
Server side crashes or failures can lose data, especially if your develoeprs are stupid. Porbably that's much rarer, but you do lose all your data at once. Client side crashes (or just unexpected browser or server behaviour) can lose small amounts of data, too, as anyone who's made the mistake of typing a lot of text in to a box in a web form rather than pasting it from a text editor can tell you.
I don't see why a web application would be easier for another developer to pick up.
The downside is a bit bigger than just speed, although speed is important (hint: in an interactive application a delay of a second or two is a very long time). The UI is never going to be quite as satisfactory and always a lot more mouse-intensive and fiddly. You're pretty much forced in to a page-based idiom. It's difficult to get the keyboard to work properly in a web application (accelerator keys? shortcuts? tab order? what do return and escape do?). It hasn't escaped users that most of the advantages to web apps are to the supplier/sysadmin and not to them. Web apps are always going to seem like an on-the-cheap alternative to users.
Grr, and this web browser keeps pausing and briefly ignoring my input as I type, leaving out some letters. Firefox appears to keep briefly thinking the page isn't responding because it's too damn slow.
One solution would be to use Appcelerator Titanium: http://appcelerator.com./
I've used this and it's a doddle to create a standalone webkit browser running your app. You can also embed Ruby or Python or (I think) PHP in your app if you want and there's an online packaging service that packages up your app to install as an .msi for Windows or other formats for Mac and Linux. Also, this is a fully featured Webkit browser with full CSS3 and HTML5. It's not the crippled version supplied with Adobe AIR.
It may also be helpful to know that if you drag a Google Chrome App (which is basically a web page zipped up with some metadata) from the browser to the desktop and then launch it from the desktop, it comes up without any chrome. Well, yes it's still Chrome but there's no... oh stop it, you know what I mean.
Years and years ago, Microsoft recognized the need for a standalone application that uses HTML as the UI. They call these class of apps "HTML Applications", HTA for short. You may be surprised to know that HTA lives on, even in Windows 7. The spirit -- if not the letter -- of HTA seems to have been promoted to a first-class UI approach in Windows 8, in which (we are told), the entire Windows UI will based on HTML 5 and CSS 3.
Running as you are on old Windows platforms, HTA might work well for you. One tip I'll pass along: you don't need to limit yourself to JavaScript when writing an HTA. You can use other scripting languages that talk to better to the underlying OS, such as Visual Basic. You'd be surprised how far you can go with this approach.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
As the information on the Mozilla add-ons page regarding the Prism add-on indicates, (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mozilla-labs-prism/), Prism is succeeded by Chromeless at Mozilla, but WebRunner has evolved from it as well. Have you researched it?
Thanks for your extensive reply.
We don't have complete web browser independence (some don't show PDFs in line, for example), but sticking to standards should help to prevent IE6 mess. Also, in some browsers the web app looks ugly (I'm looking at you Firefox, although I haven't checked with the latest version).
Server side crashes might happen with native client as well, I guess. So far we've been lucky in that respect.
We do have a couple of pages that take several seconds to load. They're the rare ones, though. No time/money has been spent to speed them up. Keyboard-short cuts are indeed missed. As to the UI, web-apps do have the advantage in that users can set their own font size (ages of users vary), at the trade off of less in view, of course.
No, that's not an advantage of webapps, to the degree that you'll do at least as much work to make the fonts and such user-defined in a webapp as you will on a native program, probably even more. If you want user configurable, you probably don't want a webapp in the first place.
One trick is to use Google Chrome like this:
chrome --app="http://mail.google.com"
It's of course not fully featured with tray icon stuff etc. but it is supported feature of Chrome.
Using SWT and java it is pretty easy to embed a web browser in your app. it will correctly pick out a native installed browser and embed it. you can even add your own chrome. or use Visual Basic / .NET and IE, or the kiosk idea in opera like other posts mentioned.
Internet Explorer invented the term "kiosk mode" when it was introduced with IE4 in 1997. ;)