Re: Browsers, of the web variety

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

Dave Mason had a pre-M10 version of Mozilla going on Thursday or so and it
was sweet. It renders Slashdot (for example) faster than Netscape, and the
menus are no longer unusable, and it wasn't crashing much. Dave also had
it viewing DocBook XML "natively" i.e. viewing the XML itself with no
conversion to HTML. Of course Mozilla will also have HTML 4.0, CSS, Java
and JavaScript, and probably an out-of-the-country version with encryption
will be available.

The Mozilla beta is scheduled for Dec. 15 or something, and so far they've
been making or nearly making their deadlines. I think it's looking good. 

Our plan is to wrap it in a Bonobo component (very trivial) and stick it
in the help browser and new file manager (the new file manager already
works with Bonobo components).

Another option would be to make a web-browsing-specific "shell" for the
Bonobo component. 

There's work to be done here by enterprising hackers if anyone is
interested. The help browser, file manager, or web-browser-shell work
could be started with a fake Bonobo component that didn't actually render
the HTML, or with a Bonobo wrapper for XmHTML. You can go ahead and write
your whole shell, decide on the IDL for your component, etc. Then when
Mozilla hits beta you just drop it in place and you're done.

Havoc