RE: Proposed: mozilla-bonobo

[Christian Glodt <chris mind lu>]

On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 13:01, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
> > mozilla-bonobo
> > --------------
> > 
> > I really haven't heard anything about this, though some 
> > chatter with Chris Blizzard indicated that there is (or would 
> > be) a better way of doing this based on existing Mozilla 
> > technology. We should probably integrate with that instead; I 
> > don't know. Someone else will have to talk this one through. :-)
> 
> So, exactly what kinds of web pages (examples of popular web sites would be
> nice) will this allow me to view that I could not normally view?

It won't enable you to view web pages that you couldn't view already
before in some way.

>  Let's focus
> on the user goals/tasks.

When I wrote it, my main use case was quick evaluation of documents.
I google for some topic, and whenever one of the results is a pdf file,
I can take a quick look at it with the default viewer component. This is
much faster than the "normal" approach (which is "click link, click
Helper Applications, select app, click open, close app when finished" in
galeon).

Additionally, it has the following goals:

- Close the gap between "system components" (ie bonobo) and "browser
  components" (ie browser plugins). IMO these are conceptually the same
  and should therefore be interoperable.

- Encourage other developers to create a bonobo component of their app
  rather than a custom browser plugin.

- Create an additional incentive for people to write bonobo components.

- In the long term, enable bonobo components to replace proprietary
  plugins like Flash, Real Player, etc.

> If it's just a way of viewing gnumeric documents inside my web browser, then
> I'm not personally very interested. I'm also worried that epiphany might
> start opening arbitrary types of documents inside its own window instead of
> asking me whether I want to download or open them separately.

In the future that should be configurable on a per-mimetype basis.
Currently it is somewhat configurable (in gconf), but some mozilla
limitations prevent that from working as well as it could.

To conclude, I guess it's not yet ready for inclusion. There
has not been enough testing and exposure to the general public.

I'd like for it to behave better, but that may be impossible with
the netscape plugin framework. I should investigate other ways
to provide the functionality (XPCOM components or direct extension of
epiphany). The browser plugin interfaces are too limited for it to
work well.

Cheers,

Christian Glodt