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Ask Slashdot: Chromeless Cross-Platform Browser?

Posted by timothy on from the oh-you-want-everything dept.

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)."

2 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Why not create a native application? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Easy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Use firefox with --chrome="path_to_your_homepage"