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Browsing in GNOME
Should GNOME adopt a web browser component? If so, which one? Benjamin
Otte takes on this question with a detailed
look at Webkit and Mozilla but comes to no clear conclusion.
"Regardless of which project were to be chosen, my expectation would
be that if we were to start now, it would take 5 experienced GNOME
developers roughly a year to get this work to a point were it would hold up
against today's requirements of the web. For Webkit, this would mostly
require writing source code. For Mozilla, both writing code and
evangelizing inside their community would be necessary." (Thanks to
Paul Wise).
(Log in to post comments)
Browsing in GNOME Posted Mar 4, 2009 18:12 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
I don't get it.
Why do we need yet ANOTHER browser? We have a perfectly fine FireFox and Epiphany is not that much lightweight. Then there's Opera.
And we'll also soon have Chrome.
DE-specific browsers: is it worth it? Posted Mar 4, 2009 19:14 UTC (Wed) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]
And if we look at the situation in KDE to compare: who ever uses Konqueror?
For file browsing the default is now Dolphin, and Konqueror still hasn't moved to Webkit, which I think is the reason why I cannot use Gmail to its full extent yet...
If Konqueror was on par with Safari, then it would be an alternative, but I think most people just use Firefox/Opera, and few are keen on having several browsers running at the same time.
What are the advantages of Konqueror? It uses the KDE libs and thus has a lower memory footprint than Firefox. But would that be the case in Gnome? Isn't there a GTK-based browser already (Epiphany?)?
DE-specific browsers: is it worth it? Posted Mar 4, 2009 19:22 UTC (Wed) by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498) [Link]
I used to be a pretty heavy konq user in kde3, but ever since google rolled out their new gmail codebase which konq chokes on, I've been increasing my firefox usage, especially once ff3 came out and the performance dramatically improved. I've been using arora with qt-4.5 for the past couple of weeks so as to get a browser that better integrates visually with kde4, as firefox just sticks out like a sore thumb. It works pretty well for most sites, although it still doesn't handle google apps as well as firefox.
DE-specific browsers: is it worth it? Posted Mar 4, 2009 19:30 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
I use konqueror. For everything. But then, I don't use GMail.
DE-specific browsers: is it worth it? Posted Mar 4, 2009 20:56 UTC (Wed) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]
I use konqueror almost exclusively, even with Gmail. Faster loading.
Firefox forces me to change the browsing habits that I developed with Konq. Open
Derek
DE-specific browsers: is it worth it? Posted Mar 5, 2009 11:08 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
I think Konqueror's failing is sort-of the same as its biggest strength - it's not a dedicated web browser. I use it for filebrowsing because I can't stand Dolphin, but I use Firefox for web browsing (even though it causes me considerable grief) because Konqueror is missing two things which are about as important to me in a web browser as the ability to render HTML, namely:
1) Decent session saving - there is some progress in this direction in KDE4, so it's hopeful, but there are difficult questions in how this should be implemented when you use the same application for numerous tasks, with multiple windows open.
2) Gestures - apparently you can get basic gesture support using khotkeys, but that's too arcane for me to figure out, and it appears there's no interest in providing support for rocker gestures, the lack of which which makes browsing rather unpleasant.
The effect is that Konqueror is the Linux equivalent of IE to me - I'll use it if I quickly want to look something up without waiting for Firefox to start, and I expect that I'll close the page shortly afterwards without doing any real browsing.
I'm looking forward to the return of Qt4 builds of Opera :-)
However, I get the impression that most Gnome users are the type of person who would use IE quite happily, and I know from experience that most IE users are completely unaware of most of the features I take for granted in a web browser (IE even has several of them nowadays), so I can definitely see a market for a simple lightweight Gnome browser. I can't realistically see that there is any choice other than Webkit, given the relative performance and ease of embedding, and the general hostility of Mozilla devs. (Not that they're hostile in the aggressive or abusive sense, but I believe it's a matter of public record that they are generally uninterested in outside suggestions, especially if those suggestions are related to the use of Gecko outside of Firefox; perhaps their reputation for not playing well with others is undeserved.)
DE-specific browsers: is it worth it? Posted Mar 5, 2009 21:14 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Interesting. Session saving in Firefox has always been a disaster for me
(the *best* I see is restoring all the windows and tabs I had open, *twice*, on each restart: a nice exponential explosion unless you close half of them), while session management in Konqi, as in the rest of KDE, has been nigh flawless.
DE-specific browsers: is it worth it? Posted Mar 6, 2009 13:48 UTC (Fri) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link]
Heh, session management seems to be the only part of Firefox that hasn't failed on me at some point. :)
DE-specific browsers: is it worth it? Posted Mar 7, 2009 7:16 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I've never seen the problem of tabs being duplicated (and I use the session saving _extensivly_, I have a couple hundred tabs open (64 in this one window) and I frequently just kill firefox rather than shutting it down.
I have run into a few cases where there is a site that will lockup firefox and every time you restart it will lockup again.
the other thing that has burned me is when I accidently do something that causes firefox to think that I wanted it to start a new session (loosing track of all the windows and tabs. I've started the practice of having a cron job try to check the sessionstore files into git every min so that if/when something does gowrong I can go back and recover.
DE-specific browsers: is it worth it? Posted Mar 5, 2009 12:33 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
I used to use Konqueror exclusively, for both web browsing and file
management, though not for web development.
In the past year I've had to increase my Firefox usage because some sites
I'm very much looking forward to the day that Konqueror gets WebKit.
DE-specific browsers: is it worth it? Posted Mar 6, 2009 17:04 UTC (Fri) by fyanardi (guest, #57014) [Link]
I use Konqueror/KHTML almost exclusively, it is fast enough and compatible
with 95% websites that I usually browse. FF in Linux is not as good as FF in Windows in terms of speed, not the rendering engine speed, but UI speed, it is like I need to wait for 3-4 seconds to see the actual browser area after switching active window to FF.
Back to the article, a browser component is not only used to build a
why do we need another... Posted Mar 4, 2009 19:17 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] Why do we need another window manager (one that just does full-size tabbed windows), DNS cache, password safe, preferences tool, and software update system? Wouldn't it be better if applications other than the browser could use stuff like Google Gears, or the HTTP cache? If you could write one local script that would both "drive" the browser and do other tasks?
why do we need another... Posted Mar 5, 2009 8:14 UTC (Thu) by felixrabe (guest, #50514) [Link]
I'm researching and interested in serious attempts to break up the monolithic application space. If you have any pointers, I'm interested in them. (You'll find me on Google most likely.)
Browsing in GNOME Posted Mar 4, 2009 19:20 UTC (Wed) by zarcher (guest, #845) [Link]
This is about a browser component, not about a browser application.
Browsing in GNOME Posted Mar 4, 2009 19:27 UTC (Wed) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]
OK, why does Gnome need a browser component?
Browsing in GNOME Posted Mar 4, 2009 20:17 UTC (Wed) by sebas (subscriber, #51660) [Link]
To display web content in applications where a browser is overkill, for example.
Browsing in GNOME Posted Mar 4, 2009 21:57 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
1. Epiphany better integrates into Gnome environment. Firefox, while nice, still sticks out like a sore thumb. Plus I tend to prefer Epiphany. Cleaner interface, faster, uses less ram.
2. HTML stuff is used everywhere. For example you need to have HTML support in Evolution to be able to read emails (and yes while it's fun to be a elitist and say no to HTML email.. it is a internet standard and most people I know will send html email on occasion)
Then RSS readers are another big one. Then the Gnome help stuff is html, I think. Maybe HTML editors, etc etc.
Then there is Gnome on netbooks and gnome on other sorts of mobile devices were the UI for Firefox is much to large and unwieldy to be a nice fit.
There are all sorts of reasons why you'd want to integrate html into applications and it makes sense for Gnome to provide a easy and unified interface for doing that.
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Personally I would like to have Gnome run with Webkit. Why?
Because webkit tends to be lighter and simpler to deal with. It would hopefully reduce the footprint of many applications that need to use html for small stuff and work out better for smaller devices.
Plus it's nice to have a alternative. Gnome needs a integrated browser because Firefox is a bit of a UI and performance hog and it would be nice to have the easy choice between webkit and html on my desktop. That sort of thing.
Browsing in GNOME Posted Mar 5, 2009 3:13 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link] Then there is Gnome on netbooks and gnome on other sorts of mobile devices were the UI for Firefox is much to large and unwieldy to be a nice fit. People keep saying that netbooks can't really run anything, are too small-screened, etc. I really don't get that. For instance, you seem to believe that "Firefox is much [too] large and unwieldy to be a nice fit" on a netbook. This post is posted on an EEE 901 with ffx 3 (ffx 3.1 beta is on here, but doesn't have e.g. flashblock yet). Really, it's not a problem, aside from the few sites (I think I might get one a month) that require me to hit F11 in order to accomodate the bad javascripty crap. I do physics data postprocessing, coding, use inkscape, etc. on this eee and on its predecessor my eee 701. Really, they're extremely versatile if you're running Linux. It also helps to bump up the RAM to 2GB from the stock 1GB that allows them to get cheap XP licenses. (Why vendors should ship 1GB on a Linux load is a rant for another day). High-speed 2G stick was $39.
Browsing in GNOME Posted Mar 4, 2009 20:35 UTC (Wed) by alecs1 (guest, #46699) [Link]
I would really love it developers who give their time to open source desktops would fix other more annoying problems, and possibly less workforce demanding, like:
-solving many of the clipboard glitches that still live;
-using the same default program for opening files. Nautilus and Konqueror and Pidgin and others to just open a file with the absolute default program that I have chosen.
-like once for all agreeing on how to signal pop-ups to the Window manager such that I don't have UI blocked while the pop-up is _under_ the parent window (ok, this more and more rare); the same goes for making focus stealing prevention useful under all circumstances.
-like agreeing on how to use the tray such that all tray icons have the same size and when kicker/plasma/other_tray crashes they go back to the tray.
Browsing in GNOME Posted Mar 4, 2009 22:04 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Right now a HTML renderer is used in all sorts of different applications. Gnome help, Evolution, RSS readers, Applets, etc etc. All sorts of stuff. And in the future as the WWW and internet becomes more and more integrated then your going to find the need for HTML rendering popping up more and more.
It's a bit of a mess currently. You have lots of applications still using gtkhtml (which is a abomination), gecko (which is just shoehorned into place and doesn't work well with many applications), and the webkit-gtk initiative (which is currently languishing).
What is essentially going on here is that people in Gnome want to end this silliness and pick something permanently and get rid of the hodge-podge of renderers (which proves that they should of decided this long ago). This blogger is discussing the pluses and minuses of them in hope of helping the community make a decision.
By getting rid of supporting all these different things then it will eventually free up developer resources in the long run and help to allow people to make Gnome slicker.
Browsing in GNOME Posted Mar 5, 2009 11:24 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] using the same default program for opening files. Nautilus and Konqueror and Pidgin and others to just open a file with the absolute default program that I have chosen.Dear God yes! I have Firefox set to open everything with xdg-open, but I really wish it would use the DE's choices automatically, and it really ought to use the DE's open-with dialogue so it's possible to pick a different choice of application on occasion. It's annoying that browsers always seem to want to create their own entire ecosystem, disconnected from their environment. I actually thought that the reason Firefox works so poorly with KDE was that it was designed to integrate with Gnome, but reading the comments here indicates that it doesn't do so well there either. Just to venture even further off-topic, it's occurred to me that almost all my comments in LWN have been negative in some way. It appears that the software I use and actually *like* never gets any press, except for git. :P
Browsing in GNOME Posted Mar 5, 2009 23:35 UTC (Thu) by kov (subscriber, #7423) [Link]
I believe Otte will post about his idea here, but I just wanted to comment that most of you (including
the poster) probably misunderstood him. He's not talking about creating another browser as a stand-alone application, but about using a web rendering engine throughout the desktop, so that the desktop talks to web applications more "transparently".
Browsing in GNOME Posted Mar 6, 2009 1:02 UTC (Fri) by Company (guest, #57006) [Link]
Indeed, this comment thread reads a bit like "I don't RTFA" Slashdot comments. GNOME writing the most awesome browser will just be an unintentional side effect of embedding the great possibilities of the web into GNOME.
The post linked is discussing if integrating the web would be easier to achieve using Mozilla or using Webkit, and I'm actually very interested in other people's opinions about what browser engine is better suited for the GNOME environment. So if you know something or think I've missed something, please share.
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