Re: [gnome-love] GNOME user environment brainstorming

[Matt Aubury <matt ookypooky com>]

On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 04:38:22PM -0500, Jamin Philip Gray wrote:
> 
> > - Downplay web browser aspect; Mozilla/Galeon encouraged for real
> >   browsing. (Alternative: follow Galeon and try to be a full web
> >   browser, but seems like it would cause a lot of clutter.)
> 
> Nautilus, Mozilla, and Galeon hackers could comment on this better
> than I could, but how possible would it be to combine the codebases
> more?  In other words, through the use of components, combine
> features.  Instead of Nautilus using the mozilla component and galeon
> using it too and both having their own set of add-ons and
> configuration dialogs, etc., use the same set of components for
> browsing, menus, bookmark handling, configuration.  

Speaking as a Galeon hacker (but not necessarily for the project as a
whole!) this is certainly a nice idea. At the moment we're
concentrating on stabilising Galeon for a v1.0 release, targeted at
the GNOME 1.4 platform. After that, our next priority will probably be
to make a port to GNOME 2.0.

As far as components goes, I think two things are potentially
desirable:

  1. To be able to use Bonobo components to view things other than
     web pages within Galeon. This isn't an attempt to turn Galeon
     into Nautilus (or Konqueror, or IE), but just a way of being able
     to view PDFs, do print previews, etc, without launching extra
     windows.

  2. To turn Galeon into a Bonobo component which can be embedded in
     other applications (such as Nautilus). I think this would be an
     excellent idea, but have little or no clue about how hard it would
     be.

Underlying this, it would be nice to make a better Mozilla component
than we have at the moment. In Galeon it's been necessary to delve
into a certain amount of C++ to get at the right interfaces (things
like popping up password prompts, for instance). It would be nicer to
divide this code off into a separate re-usable module (personally I'd
like to see a GtkSuperMozEmbed for this rather than a Bonobo
component, but...).

The Galeon hackers will continue our efforts to make Galeon the best
GNOME web browser. The more support we get from GNOME hackers and in
particular the GNOME "management", the better.

Cheers,
Matt