[ros-general] Mozilla (was Re: Browsers)

[Filip Navara]

Hi!

Martin Fuchs wrote:

>  > We should take Firebird (since its only the
> browser (not mail, IRC, 
> >composer, etc.) and its faster than IE) and add in the ActiveX control 
> >plug in (which you can get at: 
> >http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/plugin.htm) and also make a COM wrapper 
> >for the Gecko rendering engine, between those two we should have a full 
> >replacement to IE for the OS.  I think that there was some Netscape 
> >employees working on making a COM wrapper for Mozilla, but I can't 
> >remember the website, and development seemed to be pretty inactive, but 
> >its better than starting from scratch.
> >    
> > 
I agree with it, but actually the COM wrapper of Mozilla doesn't 
inplmentent the MSHTML interfaces (although it's planned) and only 
supports the SHDOCVW interfaces (IWebBrowser, ...) now. A few weeks ago 
there appeared patch for Wine that implmented mshtml.dll by calling the 
Mozilla ActiveX control. Since then it was discovered that it doesn't 
work yet, because of the incomplete Mozilla ActiveX implementation, but 
this code can be taken as start for implementing our MSHTML and SHDOCVW 
in future.

>  I installed Firebird this week and have to admit I also
> like it.
> But why do you think, it's faster then Internet Explorer?
> It feels a bit more sluggish for example when resizing the windows.
> But not really much, it's acceptable.
>   
>  
It's comparable fast for me, but it's UI speed is theoretictly a bit 
worse because it uses it's own control toolkit and supports skins.

>  What I really like is it's popup window blocker. 
> :)
>   
>  
Me too ;-)

>  Then I downloaded it's source code and unpacked it
> onto my drive...
> This are 184 MB of source code in numerous subfolders!
> Is this really anything needed just to display HTML and a few other
> protocolls?
>  
There a lot more to that like test applications, source for the ActiveX 
control, installer, editor, mail/news, ...

>   I did not try to compile it - reading the Howto has
> been
> quite disgusting. You need cygwin, perl, and a few other special tools.
>   
>  
If you would like some help with this, contact me. I've done this a few 
weeks ago and it took me a almost whole week to just setup the build 
environment correctly. Since then I was trying to get it working on 
ReactOS and fixes numerous bugs in many ROS components. Some time ago I 
got the winEmbed example working and now I've made test for the major 
blockers that prevents the Mozilla (winEmbed, Firebird, Seamonkey, ...) 
from working on ReactOS. It's located in apps/tests/moztest in the ROS 
tree. I would appreciate some help from the persons that understand the 
"broken" parts better than me... Now I'm working on WSAListen to make it 
work non-blocking.

>  I think we should try to install it as binary Active-X
> control without
> interating any source code into the ROS tree. (if that's possible)
>
>   
>  
Agreed.

Regards,
Filip