[gtk-vnc-devel] Heads up on virt-viewer browser plugin

["Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones redhat com>]

I'm working on the oVirt project (http://ovirt.org) and we've needed
for some time now a console browser plugin.  To this end I wrote the
current gtk-vnc & virt-viewer browser plugins, which embed the Gtk VNC
widget inside the browser.

We've found that unfortunately this is a bit unstable, and has some
other problems too:

(a) Causes the browser to crash occasionally, and we don't really
understand where or why (it happens very deep inside some Gtk code).

(b) Reliably causes the browser to crash if you place any widgets
around the gtk-vnc viewer plugin, eg. a scrolled window.

So to this end we discussed our options[1] and came up with a plan to
produce a browser plugin which simply launches an external virt-viewer
process.  The advantages seem to be:

(i) Less to go wrong, so shouldn't be so prone to crashing the
browser.

(ii) External virt-viewer processes will be more stable, and have some
advantages like it's easier to go full-screen.

(iii) Should be easier to port the whole thing to Windows (note that
Firefox on Windows doesn't use Gtk).

(iv) Should only use NPAPI & some basic Unix calls, so generally
simpler and easier to port to other browsers.

So I'm going to come up with a patch to do this (shortly) ...

Rich.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/ovirt-devel/2008-August/msg00004.html

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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