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Mozilla The Internet

Roll Your Own Browser 230

Posted by timothy 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."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Roll Your Own Browser More

Roll Your Own Browser

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  • Security (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JohnHegarty ( 453016 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @01:39PM (#4329024) Homepage
    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.
    • ...there alot of security issues with that.

      hmmm, if only we had some kind of guide [slashdot.org] that would help us to write secure web applications... but where?

    • Re:Security (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by Vengie ( 533896 )
      You or the moron who modded you up?

      What in the name of all hell are you TALKING about?

      Read the freaking article.

      And worse comes to worst, you look at the freaking source yourself.

      Jesus!

      • And worse comes to worst, you look at the freaking source yourself.

        Do you think Grandma can also fix bugs in the source when she finds them? There are non-programmers out there. They need to have some level of trust, and "Bob's WebBrowser and Tackle Shop" is going to be the perfect excuse for paladin.

        This is why Paladin is going to sell. Cant trust those nasty OpenSource programmers, afraid of viruses? Trust our "Microsoft Signed(TM)" programs. Gives you those nice warm fuzzies about buying things on the Internet. Feel secure about your "Trusted" OS.

        Hell, Grandma and Joe Six pack will be first in line to buy a Secure and easy to use OS with all the M$ support included.

        You arnt against Security are you? Damn terrorist.

        -
        A version of Links that does gfx - http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~clock/twibright/l inks/ [mff.cuni.cz]

        • .....Paladin? I hope joe six pack refers to abdominal muscles and not beer, because if you're that stupid, you better be cute.
        • Funny, I feel safer with an unchecked download from some random hacker.
          All the M$ support included *STILL* can't get rid of Code Red.
    • 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.

      That goes for any EXE. If you download an run a game it could patch your browser to do exactly that.

      Ironicly, since the browser is such an obvious place for a threat like that, in many cases it will be a safer than your typical download.

      -

  • Hooray (Score:2)

    by Adam9 ( 93947 )
    Oh yay, make it eve neasier for ISPs to have their own "customized" web browser. On second thought.. this would promote Mozilla. That's good, right?

    • Re:Hooray (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Rude Turnip ( 49495 )
      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?

  • my 0.2€ (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @01:44PM (#4329063)
    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.
    • Crap. Current web standards *require* you render your own widgets. You are supposed to alter any aspect of them. So, designing a web browser today is really the same as designing a toolkit! You have element positioning, form widgets, styling.
    • Isn't it open source? Do something about it then.

      What!?! What have I done?

      Hmm...

      You're right.. they should do something about that thingee..there in that other thingee..

    • Go check the Galeon manifesto [sourceforge.net]. It does not use XUL. In fact one of the reasons Galeon was started is because they don't like the bloat of XUL.

      • Re:galeon != xul (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        yes right, GALEON does not use XUL but i am more refering to the GECKO part that gets embedded into galeon. the stuff you see within GALEON while browsing a webpage and the widgets you see inside is XUL. if you enable 'ask for cookie permission' then you get a XUL dialog popped up etc.. its still not perfect as we would like.

        • Re:galeon != xul (Score:3, Informative)

          by Cardinal ( 311 )
          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.

    • Re:my 0.2€ (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mnordstr ( 472213 )
      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!

      • Re:my 0.2€ (Score:3, Insightful)

        by be-fan ( 61476 )
        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.
      • Yeah, great for develoopers, a total nightmare for GUI designers, users, and usability experts.

        *sigh* when will programers ever learn...

    • Form widgets are XUL because the CSS specs say can be stylized.

    • Re:my 0.2€ (Score:5, Funny)

      by Golias ( 176380 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @02:13PM (#4329349)
      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.

    • How come nobody *ever* mentions skipstone [muhri.net]? It, in my opinion, is better than galeon because it lacks the gnome cruft (especially frustrating on machines where gnome isn't installed, and since galeon requires many pieces of it, you're eating up loads of disk space for just a browser)
    • I understand the desire to streamline, and get XUL out of the browser's own interface.

      However, I also see the promise that XUL has for application developers. It's a dream for distributed applications, especially for corporate intranet stuff.

      So, my question is: even if you remove XUL from the browser UI, as with Galeon, will the Gecko rendering engine still render XUL that I might want to load via HTTP?

      If so, I see this as a Good Thing: we can have a hundred different browsers, but each will correctly render complex GUI widgets, which are a mess to handle with DHTML/Javascript, and each of which can be queried and updated at will. Sounds like a perfect answer to .NET on the client side.

      Anyone with a little more knowledge who can clarify things here?

      Thanks.
  • In a followup, Richard Stallman indicated that if you use Emacs or any of a laundry list of utilities in modifying said Mozilla, the resulting browser name must be prefixed with 'GNU'.
    • I think the FSF is fighting a losing battle with the whole GNU/Linux thing, but the reasons they are fighting it are a lot more valid than you imply.

      The Linux kernel is called Linux. It doesn't matter that it was edited in emacs and compiled with gcc. It's Linux.

      GNU/Linux refers to distributions. If you package Linux and GNU, in such a way that there is no option not to install the GNU part, it's a GNU/Linux distribution. There may be GNU/Linux/X distributions (maybe Lindows is a GNU/Linux/X/Wine distribution), but I am not aware of any Linux distributions that allow you the option of not installing GNU.

      • 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.

  • dreaming of centralized cookies and bookmarks (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dr. Awktagon ( 233360 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @01:46PM (#4329095) Homepage

    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?

  • It's a shame development on Aphrodite has slowed to a crawl. Have you seen the Sullivan skin? It would really look good on my iBook.
    • Aphrodite Development slowed down because of the constantly changing APIs while Mozilla was being developed. It was rewritten several times without adding any new features just to keep up with the APIs. Right now Aphrodite is on hold because the primary developer (Me) has picked up a free lance job in addition to his day job. 16 to 18 days don't leave much time for Aphrodite, and of course software you are being paid to work on takes precedance over free software like Aphrodite. I'm hoping to resume development on Aphrodite later this year when the project I'm working on ships.
      Thales aka John Dobbins

  • Rejected submission. You bastards. (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    2002-09-25 15:02:41 Hackers Fuck with Mozilla, Get Baby Browsers (articles,news) (rejected)
    • I hate it when people are so immature. Anyways, Aphrodite is a shame, it was so nice. Anyways, lall the DEvs listed on www.mozilla.org seem to be dead, except for Chimera and maybe to more. This article is a little weird, but may help. Kudos to them.

  • Phoenix rocks (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by bytor4232 ( 304582 )
    I am running Phoenix right now, release 0.1. For such a low release number, it sure is stable. I was able to play Java games with the Java plugin for Mozilla at Yahoo Games [yahoo.com], as well as look at several heavy flash sites with the Mozilla Shockwave Flash plugin. It did crash twice at Geddy Lee's solo album site [myfavoriteheadache.com], and at ST:10 site [stnemesis.com]. To be completely honest, those sites crash sometimes with Galeon and Mozilla with the same plugin, so I dont actually think its Phoenix's fault, and the sites didnt crash every time with Phoenix either.

    All in all, Phoenix is a great little browser especially for a 0.1 release. However if you do use it, it may crash at heavy sites such as Shockwave based sites. Very impressive for a 0.1 release. I'm loving it.

    Besides, the spinner and name just kick serious ass.

  • This article seems to be one that can't be truly discussed until people mess around with the information the article gives.

    Maybe in a few weeks /. should come back to this and then ask what people think.

    or am I totally off-base?

  • mozilla.exe as explorer.exe (Score:4, Interesting)

    by zeepers ( 550467 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @01:54PM (#4329168) Homepage
    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?

    • Re:mozilla.exe as explorer.exe (Score:4, Informative)

      by aao-brad ( 542582 ) <{ten.tsacmoc} {ta} {p_darb}> on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @02:02PM (#4329242)
      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 [desktopian.org] for more info.

    • I've honestly been predicting that a future version of AOL will do just this. AOL already overwrites several system .dll's when it installs, it wouldn't be unconceivable for them to replace explorer.exe in the future. Most aol users already think that aol is their operating system anyway, and with all the mozilla projects to add X feature that really should be a separate program into mozilla its entirely possible that in the future aol will try and slide something like this in.

  • Is excessive plurality really useful? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hobbs ( 82453 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @01:54PM (#4329173)
    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.
    • 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?

    • Yeah, well I'd like to see you go on the O'Reilly Factor and make that case against Bill O'Reilly yourself! He'll eat you alive! It's one thing to rant here on slashdot but when you're face to face with one of the most hard-hitting no-hold-barred talk show hosts on TV today, you'll find yourself at a loss for words!

      Oh wait...

      GMD

    • 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?

      Be warned: I know nothing.

      Anyway, it seems that the Mozilla project is becoming pretty mature and adding/subtracting features is difficult and time consuming. Mostly because The Project is heavy on administration. I think Moz benefits greatly by encouraging many smaller high-risk ideas to be tried out away from the main project. When that idea is more refined, it should have a greater chance of sneaking back into the mothership.

      No doubt the lobbying and politics within the much larger Moz project would hamper more radical, but possibly better evolutionary changes.

      That it is a brower and not Linux is quite important. Few want to try out a new OS for couple tweaks, but a 10 MB browser doesn't strike me as very hard.

    • Yes.

      No wait, let me think about it <pause for a beat> YES!

      You want to have as many of these projects as you can, and then over the next few years most will be shaken out. Even now, Mozilla is feeling the pressure to work on performance. Why? Because Galeon, Konqeror, Phoenix and lynx (:) are all faster on UNIX and UNIX-like systems. This forces Mozilla to evaluate its place. Do they want to drop the browser as a reference effort and just focus on the "browser-building toolkit"? If not, they need to compete on the performance level or on some other level (e.g. bring the mailer and the browser closer together and make that interaction something worth the slow-down, which it is not right now).

      Mozilla is a great browser, and if Galeon weren't an even better one, I'd use it. Everyone wins because of this competition, just as everyone wins because KDE and GNOME have both worked so had to be at least as featureful and usable as eachother.
    • I think a lot of browsers are emphasizing UI elements more than Technology. I use Galeon more for its UI than its speed -- the tabbing works Just Right, and overall it pleases me.

      You can't take all the UI innovation and just put it all in one Super Browser. That will suck -- UI is about what you leave out, not just what you include. No one really knows what The Goal is for all these -- there is no clear vision of what The Most Usable browser will look like. So we have lots of people experimenting with different ideas.

    • "Is it really useful to encourage more people to create more "forks" based on the gecko engine?"

      Example: on TheOpenCD [theopencd.org] (CD of GNU applications for windows) this was discussed: do we include Mozilla?

      Obvious answer: yes of course. Mix of NPL, MPL, GPL, so we could distribute it.

      Later answer: no. The mozilla team consider it a technology-demo for tecchies only, and do not want to support lusers trying to use it. Their answer: "please don't distribute it without putting your own branding on, or use a derivative [netscape, k-meleon, beonix...]"

      So a slashdot article to show people how to create such derivatives, with links to a book? Great.

  • why is that... (Score:5, Funny)

    by g0st ( 452654 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @01:55PM (#4329182)
    why is it that all alternative browers sound like topless dancer names? opereta, phoenix, aphrodite..
  • I just love Mozilla and I think this is a great way to help create some variety on the net. A little while ago, I started looking at rolling my own with Mozilla, and it looks pretty straightforward so I might try it when I can free up some time. The only question I have is about security. Is Mozilla safe after someone else has compiled their own version, or is this cautum dilato?

    I certainly don't suggest installing a custom Mozilla browser from any porn sites!

    Does anyone know if the spyware knuckleheads have exploited this feature yet, either?

  • Free online book (Score:5, Informative)

    by slothdog ( 3329 ) <slothdog&gmail,com> on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @02:04PM (#4329253) Homepage
    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/ [mozdev.org]

    (Apologies if this has been mentioned before; I did a quick search and didn't see it.)
    • And it's a great book! I'm spending this week inhaling it and practicing the stuff.

      I submitted it as a story to Slashdot and it was rejected. :/ This book is a lot more important than most of the other recent stories on here. Mozilla has WAY more power than you ever dreamed, and this book tells you how to use it. Highly recommended.

  • How is this different from IE? (Score:4, Informative)

    by NineNine ( 235196 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @02:10PM (#4329317)
    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.
    • One word: cross-platform! And open-source! Two words! Cross-platform and open-source! Free! Three words.. Who's next? :)

    • Re:How is this different from IE? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by kalidasa ( 577403 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @02:26PM (#4329459) Journal

      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.

    • Oh, mister fancy-smancy visual man. Just cuz its visual doesn't make it easier.

    • Re:How is this different from IE? (Score:5, Informative)

      by slug359 ( 533109 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @02:37PM (#4329577) Homepage
      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.

      • Anyone know if that could work with Kylix on Linux?
      • But why bother? If you're using IE or Gecko as a COM object in such a manner, you're tying it exclusively to Windows. At that point, why not just use IE, which (to me) seems faster and less memory-hungry than gecko on the same machine?
        • Because Gecko doesn't come with a set of compromised-level exploits every month. Because Gecko renders standards compliant HTML properly. And, just because Gecko isn't a bloated, OS-tied, piece of crap like IE. Oh, and because using Gecko lets you keep the exact rendering engine on any other platforms you may port to.

          But, other than all of those reasons you mean.
    • At my day job I code in VB - and I have played with XUL in Mozilla. The one nice thing Mozilla/XUL has over IE/VB is that the dev environment is the browser - really, you only need Mozilla, a text editor (I prefer NEdit, but vi will work fine too) - and that's it! I don't have to buy some insanely costly VB IDE system in order to code up my application (and really, when you couple XUL with PHP on Apache, and add MySQL for the backend - you are talking web applications). It's cheap! It's Free! It's Open! What the hell more could I ask for? To be anally raped by Bill?

  • Still doesn't fix the "frontpage problem" (Score:3, Informative)

    by Vengie ( 533896 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2002 @02:10PM (#4329319)
    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? ;)
    • So it's frontpages fault that mozilla can't display the html it generates?

      Maybe the mozilla team could get off their high horses and work with the rest of the world.

      Is something a standard because W3 or the Mozilla guys say so? Or because 90% of browsers on peoples machines say so? Like it or not, you have to face facts sometimes.

      Making mozilla compatible with real life websites is its best hope for the future.
      • "So it's frontpages fault that mozilla can't display the html it generates?"

        In a word, Yes.

        If Mozilla were to code for every quirk that is IE specific, they would be recreating IE, and who wants to do that? You also even if you wanted to can't do this on a crossplatform level, because IE isn't a truely crossplatform browser.

        "Making mozilla compatible with real life websites is its best hope for the future"

        Somehow I think Mozilla is doing just fine. Warping an Internet browser to fit Microsoft's vision of the web is what IE is for, you'll excuse Mozilla if they don't want to contribute to a Microsoft only web.

        It sounds to me like you should just stick to using IE, you'll be a lot happier.
      • Is something a standard because W3... say so?
        Yes! You've got it!

        Many people make a big deal that these standards are called "recommendations," but this is semantic quibbling. It's like saying that you don't believe in the theory of relativity because it's only a "theory."

  • I'm working on a Win CE project these days and have found it a pretty interesting environment to work in (and, yes, I'm a long time MS basher so I find that tough to say that). The fact is that, at least in the CE world, Internet Explorer is modular.

    Platform builder comes with an application called "IESample" which is basically a frame you can tweek to roll your own version of IE. With a few hours of work, I found it pretty easy to modify the beast to match some custom requirements we had to change the page being viewed when an outside stimulus was activated. You can take a look here [microsoft.com] to see the IE interfaces exposed.

    Again, this is entirely in the CE world. I can not speak to embedded XP or the desktop.

    PS - Several months ago, I was in a week long CE training class. I was amazed that on the day I learned about rolling a version of IE, I clicked on the TV and saw it in the news. An MS exec was testifying in front of congress (the senate?) about how IE was not modular in any way shape or form. Then one of the committee members brought up CE. A shame the news didn't report the exec's reaction...

    • I remember when M$ visual basic came with the stuff to create your own webbrowser, 75K compiled, and you had a basic html browser, no table support, but it did render basic formated text.
      When I'm stuck using IE only sites, I use an IE enhancer, Crazy Browser [crazybrowser.com], provides tabs, and other security features that I turn off (cookie/popups/etc), but its free and fills the missing functions.
  • All anybody needs are the headers anyway. Right?
  • "...many of the alternate Mozilla browsers currently available including Chimera, Galeon, Phoenix and Aphrodite."
    Does this sound like a team of superheroes to anyone else?

  • the lizard featured on the cover of the oreilly book advertised off to the side of this article is a frill-necked lizard

    native to that land of weird and wonderful animals, terra australis

    and this lizard is one little terror australis - have a look at some of the pictures on this page [mira.net]

  • My two favorite open source projects are Mozilla and AbiWord. Both use cross-platform graphics libraries. The difference is in how they're executed.

    AbiWord uses wrappers to compile its XP libraries into native widgets, for platforms as diverse as Win32, GTK/GNOME, QNX, and BeOS. Mozilla, instead, uses those same libraries, but uses XUL widgets; they look the same on any platform, but completely inconsistent with the platform they're on.

    Moz should follow Abi's example. Eschew in-browser themes, and just use a wrapper to convert at compile-time to native widgets.

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