Web browser fun

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A chance conversation on the Cooker IRC channel about lightweight web browsers (i.e. there really are no good ones) led me to discover that the GTK+ WebCore project is, in fact, not dead.

Yeah, who knew?

GTK+ WebCore is a port of WebKit, Apple's web rendering libraries (used in Safari), to GTK+. (WebKit, of course, is itself a port of KHTML, from KDE). It was started by Nokia a couple of years back, made one release, and appeared to drop dead. However, I poked SVN and the mailing lists and discovered it's actually been resurrected recently, and is getting quite a lot of work done. Someone's even done a very alpha release of a GTK+ WebCore based browser, named Midori.

So I packaged up the current SVN GTK+ WebCore, including the demo browser, and Midori, and put them in Cooker. Cooker people can play with the midori and gtk-webcore-demo-browser packages. Neither browser is really usable, but they're fun to play with, and they sure are light. The actual page rendering is of course pretty good, as WebKit is pretty advanced and mature by now, but it's very crashy and the browser infrastructure is very basic. Don't try opening tabs in the demo browser or closing them in Midori, as crashes often offend =) And there is, of course, no Flash. Or AdBlock.

I also fixed the roundcubemail package not to suck (it was basically just dumping all the files in /var/www/htdocs and not doing anything with them, which isn't very helpful - now it installs to /var/www/roundcubemail and installs a config file in /etc/httpd/conf/webapps.d, as it should), basically for my own benefit because I'm tired of updating the darn thing manually on my webserver.

And I packaged gambas2, then when I went to import it to SVN, realized Funda Wang's been doing exactly the same thing. D'oh. Have mailed him to see how we can reconcile our packages.

The Bug Squad is about ready to begin work: we have a mailing list and bugzilla admin privileges and are generally ready to rock. Now I just have to carve the existing bug pile up into separate workloads. The mailing list is open to public subscription: just mail sympa A T mandrivalinux D O T org with the subject 'subscribe bugteam'. Then you can spy on us.

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