Re: netscape 4.6

[Damion Yates <nospam [at] rd.bbc.co.uk>]

On Mon, 7 Jun 1999, Al Hudson wrote:

> On Mon, 7 Jun 1999, Damion Yates wrote:

[author lost]
> > > > Mozilla M6 (the latest version of the 'free' netscape) is supposed to
> > > > be reasonably stable also - I keep meaning to have a look at it.

> > Is that the one that you can compile against GTK+ or Qt making qtmozzila
> > or gtkmozzila respectively ?

> You can compile against a load of things. The Mozilla engine, Gecko, can be
> compiled for Win/32 and used in IE - basically, the GUI of IE with the
> Netscape page layout engine - very odd. There is gtkMozilla, which as I
> understand it is a gtk object which can be embedded into things (i.e, your
> own program - html help files, etc). I've not heard of qtMozilla, but I

http://www.troll.no/qtmozilla/ This is communicator linked against Qt, it's
stunningly fast, but lacks some pretty fundamental functionality making it
useless for my work (doesn't do authentication), and also crashes pretty
often when you find other stuff it doesn't do, such as 'view src'.

I used the statically linked version, as I couldn't be arsed to compile the
version they had on the site (didn't have QT and KDE developement
headers/libs, which I'd have to get). And so even though the footprint was
bigger and I couldn't take advantage of Qt being shared in memory by other
KDE apps, it still started in about 1 second! Compared to 20-30 for
Communicator4.*, the first time round.

> suspect it could be done. Mozilla itself is not a complex piece of software
> - the current browser had two buttons an URL box last time I looked -
> most of the work is going into Gecko, the display engine.

That doesn't sound too good. I was hoping for Communicator linked against
GTK+ rather than Motif.

> > I'd be interested in seeing that as the performance should be stunning.
>
> Mozilla is supposed to be quite small - the download is ~5Mb, IIRC. Gecko,
> the display engine, is supposed to be very small and quick - it would have
> to be to be an embeddable object. It's still lagging behind IE5 in terms of
> html/xml/ecmascript compatibility, and things like that though. But it is
> supposed to be quite an exciting piece of software - the ability to embed
> is good, and I've heard some CORBA related stuff about it too. I suspect
> the GNOME KDE teams will be doing something with the code - KDE's html
> engine already looks nice (unrelated to Mozilla), and they're doing some
> clever stuff too.

I looked at installing it on this Solaris 2.6 SPARC system, but it would have
been hell, as it had zillions of dependancies, things that you just assume
come with UNIX system, are often pretty Linux only. I had to compile gcc
with sun's cc, then get gtk+, which needed other stuff.. etc etc..

If I had a stock slackware/redhat/debian/suse/caldera full install, on intel
hardware it would be trivial.

I've got some HD space issues preventing me playing much with stuff with
Linux at home, once I sort the space I'll have an easier time playing.

Damion

--
Damion Yates - Damion.Yates [at] bbc.co.uk

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