Re: why gnustep doesn't have a browser for it?

[David Chisnall]

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, gildororonar@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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