Browse/Discussion

Feature Requests

Clearing History and Cookies

The ability to clear the history and cookies would be very useful and appreciated.

Bookmarks

While the activities pane is great, access to bookmarks make it easier to pre-load a system with sites a child can go to.

Supporting Firefox extensions

Specifically wanted: a way to get google gears to work in Browse, as a broadly useful open source project that has been well received and that is being used for many new applications online to make them fast offline.

people managed to get firefox extensions which doesn't modify the xul UI to run under epiphany/galeon in the past. I don't know exactly how they did that but something similar should also work

for Browse... Christian (chpe@gnome.org) should know about it. - marco

Note: Getting Firefox extensions working in the Browse activity would allow rudimentary parental controls extensions to be installed. Several of the G1G1 users are interested in this. —Joe 20:16, 18 December 2007 (EST)

Also wanted: a way to block out ads/other contents from some sites. Kids should not be exposed to ads at such an early age.

Privoxy has extremely good ad blocking just with the default configuration

Launching to specific sites from the taskbar

It would be convenient to use the taskbar as a means to launch directly to some favorite sites, such as gmail. This could be achieved either by exposing the Journal entries from the taskbar—so you could resume a gmail session without having to open the Journal and search for it—or by having separate start pages associated with different icons, as per the gmail-activity. The latter is a lot of overhead, but having the icon on the taskbar is quite convenient. But the latter will create a new entry in the Journal each time, when we probably just want to update the existing one—something to revisit when we review the Journal/DataStore API.

Flash in the default web browser

The browser runs Gnash by default as a flash player. You can also install the Adobe Flash Player plugin, see Adobe Flash.

Enhanced support for working with URLs

Would be useful for a URL destination to be shown via tooltip, right click menu, or possibly in some activity space (bookmarks bar or top browse bar). Also, right click to copy URL is requested so that links can be shared without the need to first follow them and then cut/paste from the Browse input box.

For example, I was trying to get RSS links from SFGate.com for News Reader. This site instructs you to cut and paste the link into your RSS reader. Links are images, so text of link cannot be seen. When link is clicked on, it takes you to another site where the feed can be properly viewed from within the browser. The only true way to grab the link is 'copy link' from Firefox (or similar) right click menu. Aaronfeibus 14:00, 8 January 2008 (EST)

Implementation Discussion

Possible alternatives

WebKit

Dan Winship did a quick and dirty build and port of webkit to use in the web browser activity. It did work but the upstream support for Gtk is in its relative infancy and it was clear due to crashes and other symptoms that it will be a long time before WebKit is ready for primetime for our project. It was, however, a good bit faster and smaller. But not an order of magnitude. See post at J5's blog on Dan Winship's prototype. WebKit based version of Browse activity is available at Browse/WebKit.

lkcl: i've since added DOM-manipulation in python via an augmented version of webkit (with glib bindings) and an augmented version of pywebkitgtk that will provide the exact same DOM manipulation interface that you get with XUL. see http://github.com/lkcl/webkit/tree/16401.master

Dillo

The small web browser capable of running in an embedded environment

Dillo website

Opera

has been successfully installed.

Firefox 2.0

It is also possible to install Firefox2

Seamonkey

Seamonkey 1.1.7 can be successfully installed, though a number of dependency .RPMs are required from Fedora 7.