There is a browser in Étoilé svn which works as you describe, by
simply taking a Gecko X11 view and reparenting it. This is not a good
solution, however, because it means that things like text fields do
not have the same behaviour as other GNUstep text fields, buttons do
not look like GNUstep buttons, copy and paste / drag and drop do not
work in a GNUstep-friendly way and so on.
If you look at any of the GTK/Qt browsers that use WebKit (for
example) you will notice that they all use a branch of WebKit which
uses the native toolkits for the rendering work. There have been a
couple of efforts to port WebKit to GNUstep in the same way that it
has been ported to Qt, GTK, S60, Windows, and so on, but they are not
in a mature state (although Nicolas said he would take a look at
WebKit from this perspective at the hackathon next week, so we may
have some progress soon...)
David
On 8 May 2009, at 10:20, gildororo...@mail-on.us wrote:
I recently learned about GNUStep from blog "Why Did GNUstep Never
Really Take Off?" <pinderkent.blogsavy.com/archives/134#> and begin
to study and try it a bit.
I am trying to figure out why gnustep does not have a browser yet. I
searched google and found this blog post explain current progress of
browser development:
http://multixden.blogspot.com/2008/01/browser-and-webkit-progress.html
The general impression I get is "wait, there are still a lot of
things to do before you can use a GNUStep brower".
I am totally newbie in the browser area so I am confused that it
seems a lot of work on the browser development went to parse HTML,
render pages in CSS etc. As far as I know this is the job of a
browser engine, and we already have many browser engine that is
working pretty well, what is the point to make a new different one?
We have QT browser that uses gecko engine, gtk-based browser that
usese webkit engine, which gives me an impression that a brower does
not have to have its own engine.
In my humble opinion a browser works for gnustep would be as simple
as building user inteface for accessing addressbar, managing
bookmarks, managing tabbed browsing (or, in gnustep with the fact
not all windows have to be on the task bar, tabbed browsing may not
even be a must-requirement), manage user's preference etc. Although
I am not a developer, I couldn't imagine this a very difficult work
because I saw other people did such thing in opensource world as
well as commercical software (where they wrap-in IE and call it
something different with a different user interface).
In short, my question is: is the reason we don't have a browser /
for/ gnustep yet because the developer community want to have a
browser /of/ gnustep, that is entirely built with objective-C and
gnustep tools and libraries? Is there a believe having a non-pure
browser is worse than having no browser? If that is the case, it
would be stupid, because if you don't give user something to use
now, at the pace currently software industry goes, they will never
need something from you, because they are fullfilled with what
others can offer, like KDE/GNOME/Windows/Mac OS/XFCE etc.
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