Mozilla Theme Builder Released 93
icqqm writes: "The people from AlphaNumerica have released their Mozilla theme builder which, of course, runs in Mozilla itself. Looks MUCH easier to use than the horribly complicated instructions fot XML files on Netscape's site" Note that it doesn't work with current builds, but it ought to once the dust settles a bit. I've been using Mozilla more than Navigator these days... Still want to get Galeon working since it looks to be a lot more slimmed down.
Re:Clue (Score:1)
cylab
How do you use Mozilla? (Score:2)
I don't see how. I've been trying to use the latest (what are we up to now -- M17?), but it's not nearly up to snuff yet. Its worst problem is that it dumps core on a regular basis. It also has other nagging problems, but I could probably live with them if the app didn't die every ten minutes.
On the other hand, I can say that Mozilla is clearly improving steadily; I've seen a marked increase in useability over each of the past three or four milestone releases. I like Mozilla and can't wait to try my hand at skinning it. But it's just not quite dogfood quality yet.
--Jim
Re:where's the grammar nazi when you need him? (Score:2)
Troll? I think you've got the wrong foot-fetishist. I happen to be a Karma Whore.
--Shoeboy
Not lynx, links (Score:2)
Re:Galeon (Score:1)
The backend could still use CORBA though, but I also think the bonobo part should be abstracted from the GNOME project. That would make it even more usable for people not wanting to use either GNOME or KDE and probably form a standard for the unix-world! (not strictly to be used only for X).
There is... (Score:1)
I think this is a big business opportunity!
20MB, true (Score:1)
Duh. When will people learn to read the output of top?
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Mozilla memory footprint (offtopic) (Score:1)
But on another note: Why the hell does the windows binary of mozilla consume over 30Mb of mem while iexplorer takes 7,8Mb? The thing is fucking bloated if you ask me....The old netscape used only 10Mb. And there is no obvious difference in functionality...
Ok...no need to call me a troll because of what I just said. Just frustrated that's all. (Cause I hate to see borg win)
Lothar
Re:Future Of Advertising (Score:2)
naden, you hit on a topic that's been scaring the heck out of me considering who is really running the Mozilla show. Yes, I have read many a lecture and been provided numbers of arguments that pointed out for me how Mozilla was not Netscape or AOL, but a truly independant entity. These were all good arguments mind you, but I still have my doubts.
Clue #1: Netscape home page turned into pop up ad hell, designed to look like the Mozilla default skin.
Clue #2: Why was theming so important all this time? As cool as this is the whole process of plugging it in and making it work (even with XUL in the play) could have waited until Moz 2.0. Unless a certain service provider needed a way to expand what platforms their software ran on. A simple browser couldn't do that.
Clue #3: Moz is going to have a mail client. You can love it or hate it, it's in there. For folks, such as myself, it needed to be in order to fully replace NS 4.7. Thing is, somewhere along the line it was decided that they didn't have time to implement LDAP into the address book. This rather upset me, as I utilize this at my office where folks mostly use NS 4.x for mail. Even being upset I can appreciate time constraints. I'm just wondering why 3 months of development has instead been going into working on AOL's addressing schema. All the while, only one indvidual has been doing any work with the open standard LDAP.
There's a good bit more that's still nagging at me about AOL's involvement with all this. I think I'll save some of that for the next milestone release of Mozilla.
Re:Not lynx, links (Score:1)
Galeon (Score:1)
If this is the best the Open Sores Community can do, then sign me up to buy a copy of Windows, because we've lost.
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Re:Galeon is great - damn well doesn't work but (Score:2)
So much for standards compliance. So much for the quality of open source software. Maybe if they hadn't wasted the last two years on chrome and eye candy, they could have actually implemented something that has been an integral part of the web since its early days.
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Why does Mozilla have themes? (Score:1)
Why can't those themes be good enough or be extended with mozillaisms?
If every application decides it needs it's own themes, that will be fun to configure won't it?
Re:Future Of Advertising (Score:1)
I know that if I was one of the suckers who is running iPlanet's mail/calendar/directory system, I'd be pretty pissed right now. If I wasn't too bogged down with the details of the Exchange/ActiveDirectory migration, that is.
(As a side note, I'll point out that the 'theming' support has always been a pure play for the 'service providers' that abandoned Netscape for free IE a few years back. It is and always has been for adverts/portal/AOL poop.
Outside of a handful of desktop customziation junkies, nobody else wants it at all, especially the last line of corporate MIS Netscape defenders. As soon as the native interfaces on Windows/Unix/Mac stablize, expect folks to forget the XUL chrome was ever put in there to begin with.)
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Re:browser speed (Score:1)
Having Galeon be a only frontend for Mozilla rather than a standalone browser is, uh, kinda lame. Kmeleon has done a great job taking the gecko engine and throwing out the rest of the Mozilla code to create a lightweight browser. It's too bad there isn't a version for unix.
Re:browser speed (Score:1)
I'm not saying create a monolith. Mozilla is already that. So why do I want to install it plus yet another front end (Galeon)? It would be much better to have gecko alone as a shared library with a lightweight gtk+ frontend, for example.
Sure its possible to release code that includes all its own libraries its own UI, it's own widgets, its own version of printf and it will compile anywhere, but aren't you getting sick of them?
Absolutely. All I want is a browser, like lynx is a browser, only I want to see pictures. Just a browser!
Re:Galeon is great (Score:1)
Everyone knows that when the whale swallowed Jonah there was the sound of a great big gulp.
Re:Galeon (Score:1)
Yes, when are people going to get it into their heads that in order to have a browser they need CORBA, goddamnit! I mean, when will they learn that they need drag and drop and components and graphical mail clients and graphical ftp clients and graphical modem dialers and games to go along with the browsing experience? Some people are just beyond me.
Re:Galeon (Score:1)
I use it with Blackbox for a wmanager.
wtf does one need gnome for annyway?
Galeon really doesn't need Gnome (Score:1)
Nautilus *does* use a whole lot more of Gnome and more fully explores Gnome components and bonobo than Galeon. And it is extremely bloated. Of course it's unstable as well being in early stages of development, but even when stability improves the bloat will remain. This will force hardware upgrades for many unix users who are doing quite well right now on mid-range pentiums with 32 - 64 megs of ram.
I also would like to see a gui for Gecko which doesn't require either Gnome or Kde. The original Qt work is now out of date but could be revived, and/or a plain old gtk gui for Gecko would be nice.
Not to just knock Gnome and Eazel, Kde's new Konqueror is also quite nice (roughly equivalent to Nautilus but available right now in a very usable and fairly stable form). However, becasue of all the component stuff it also is a little less responsive in some ways than the old kde kfm or than Netscape. Other things are faster and smoother, though.
The "embedding" buzzword is not the solution to everything, and there is a tremendous tradeoff in slowdown and stability. Why stability? Because components added can destabilize the aggregate, especially those designed by third parties. There is no way to reliably predict how an unknown number and variety of components might interact, especially in situations where components are added and removed while an app is running.
Use of components is just one of many kinds of code reuse. In many cases simply using what's in existing libraries is better - faster and more reliable.
Re:Galeon is great - damn well doesn't work but (Score:1)
Try http://www.solutionsfirst.net [solutionsfirst.net] to see for yaself.
What could be wrong here?
Dave
Re:Galeon (Score:1)
Re:browser speed (Score:1)
Re:This is news... (Score:2)
This is a bit harsh perhaps but it captures my general impression that it takes longer and longer before things get posted on slashdot. This doesn't mean the discussions are less interestng (moderation brought back the fun for me), but it does mean that I no longer use slashdot as a prime source of news.
I occasionally submit news to slashdot, often on days with very little postings (e.g. sunday). Invariably those submissions are rejected after 15 minutes or so. Only to be posted days later by someone else. I understand, slashdot people have to read through a lot of submissions but perhaps they could monitor some sites for new articles. E.g zdnet is a frequently referenced site on slashdot, yet it sometimes takes days before a post is made on a zdnet article.
BTW, I have a slashbox for mozillazine, so I learned about the new tool within hours after it was posted.
Re:Galeon is great (Score:2)
I've been trying to use Galeon for several months. Yesterday, I did exactly as you did: downloaded the M17 RPM an installed it, followed by the Galeon RPM.
When I run it nothing happens. NOTHING. No diagnostic messages, no crash, no whirring of the hard drives - a silence as profound as when the whale swallowed Jonah.
I'm presuming that this isn't what's supposed to happen, right?
I'm running Sawfish 0.30 on Helix 1.2.1(?) on RH 6.2. If someone out there is using the same setup and has had success, I'd be interested in hearing how you managed it. Even more importantly, if someone experienced what I am experiencing and worked their way out of it, I'd LOVE to know your secret! I've heard a lot of good things about Galeon and I'd really like to try it!
P.S. The same thing happens when I run M17 too.
Re:Galeon (Score:1)
Re:browser speed (Score:1)
If I page cannot be viewed with lynx, it cannot be worth browsing.
I personally use w3m-ssl on my FreeBSD box for any text testing.
Re:Galeon is great - damn well doesn't work but (Score:2)
Always a good idea to check your pages [w3.org] for standards compliance.
Not sure why the JavaScript doesn't work (although DOM layer support is rather dicey and browser specific).
Re:Galeon (Score:1)
Re:Galeon (Score:1)
(Guess I am making a fool of my self but:)
Would it be good relying on CORBA as a standard instead of the usual pipes for the backend? (Which will only become true if separated from the GNOME project).
You will then have a clean interface that leaves parsing out - "components" for shell level. Instead of relying on the pipes you would rely on the component interface.
(Is it really an advantage or would you rather use libraries instead of "components" for the shell programs?)
No problems for me (except Java) (Score:1)
Re:Galeon is great (Score:1)
I'm sure everbody can do that!!
Not quite as easy as that for me. Galleon doesn't have an rpm for alpha linux, so I have to compile it on my own. Not too bad until one realizes that it requires header files from mozilla, so the source for mozilla has to be downloaded (which is over 200MB unpacked). Now I see that all the header files aren't in the uncompiled source, so it looks like I'm going to have to compile mozilla. If the source is over 200MB, it's probably going to need several GB's to compile. So now I have to make room on a partition, and let it compile all day (it probably won't compile right either given my luck). Glad it's easy for some people, though.
I -completely- disagree (Score:2)
You should try using the nightly builds.. you will be shocked. I must say that it's running amazingly better now than the M17 build.
I don't know what bug(s) they fixed but I must say I am quite impressed with the nightly builds the past couple of days.
They have also put a new skin on the distribution and it looks GREAT.
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Re:No problems for me (except Java) (Score:1)
Re:Mozilla memory footprint (offtopic) (Score:2)
The end user never sees the difference, as the mem count is roughly the same. Windows shows only memory dedicated to the application, and I doubt it's showing *shared libraries* in that total.
Put it another way, if you could force Windows to load Gecko as a shared library during boot, then you would have LESS ram after boot. Now make a "lightweight" browser that invokes Gecko. You now have a browser that's as small as you want to fake it.
That said, the Mozilla interface is the real bloat. Galleon crashes a lot, and some of those crashes are obviously happening in the UI. I love Galleon but "random clicks" in the UI kill it - I hope they implement a stable/unstable tree.
As for Taco "wanting" to install Galleon - heh - please, we know he's playing Diablo 2 in Windows 98 all day long. Heh.
typo alert! (Score:1)
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Re:Galeon (Score:1)
Re:Galeon (Score:1)
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Themable theme builder? (Score:1)
"Whoops, I forgot the "OK button" widget... uh oh." <reinstalls Mozilla>
Great. (Score:1)
Themes don't work anyway (Score:1)
Whenever I try to install a *.xpi file with the current milestone release, it just times out while connecting to the server. I can download the XPI files no problem with another browser.
There are already quite a few themes available already (see http://x.themes.org/viewresourc es.phtml?type=chrome [themes.org]). They ought to make the ones that exist installable first.
-- Steve
Re:Galeon (Score:1)
browser speed (Score:1)
Galeon seems like it may be a viable solution when it's more mature, but why must it rely on GNOME? That isn't going to fly either. We need a version that stands alone, without having to install Mozilla or GNOME first.
This is news... (Score:1)
Anyways, I tested it with a nightly build and it brought my whole x down. I think they should make a version check and give you an error message if you try to run it with the wrong build.
You might also want to check out the latest mozilla nighlty [mozilla.org] which has now the new modern 2.0 skin, which i, amongst many others think is looks cool. This has also been posted before, but just in case you dont know...
Re:Why does Mozilla have themes? (Score:1)
1.) Mozilla isn't X11R6-specific?
2.) Not everyone uses KDE and GNOME?
3.) You should get the stick out of your ass?
(Note to the humor-impaired: that last one was a joke, not intended entirely as an insult. Please go ahead and ruin my karma rating; it's already pretty low, because I express my opinion.)
Re:Galeon (Score:1)
Re:Great. (Score:1)
http://mozilla.themes.org [themes.org]
Galeon is great (Score:2)
Galeon (Score:1)
Pity it needs the Gnome libs... which I dont install.
Is there a Galeon fork with removal of the Gnome crap? I want straight gtk people
Simon
The app (Score:2)
Very good tactic. Hats off to the Mozilla team for creativity in targeting and tracking to a valid marketing strategy rather than relying on just "Mozilla is cool man, It's open source."
Future Of Advertising (Score:2)
Could in the future, the entire web browser be a huge banner, with the theme being streamed via an All Advantage server in exchange for money.
Similarly could porn sites trick you into using a porn theme complete with Forward and Back buttons that go off to other porn sites rather than the appropriate destinations.
Also, how long before Netscape really does fulfil its goal of becoming the ultimate x-platform OS shell.
Im just dreading the future of the net.
Naden
"Who do you want to geekbone today ?"
- www.it-guys.com
Re:Galeon is great - damn well doesn't work but (Score:1)
Re:browser speed (Score:1)
I have also had performance issues with mozilla, including the M17 release. It's my understanding that mozilla requires at least 64 megs or ram and preferably 128 or more to run well in unix. Also a PIII class processor. Using Mozilla is not feasible for me becaue it takes pages so long to load. It's all due to the XUL gui. With Galeon on the same machine, performance is very good. Even with a high end machine those who say that performance is good with mozilla are fudging a great deal.
Galeon has a way to go because so many features are missing like page scrolling and selecting images with the mouse. But what's there works well so far.
If you don't want to use Gnome then Kde's Konqueror is the browser of choice. Even if you use Gnome. It has all the features and then some, and is fast - a lot faster than mozilla. The latest Beta of Kde 2 is very usable as a default desktop. Konqueror comes with it but can be run separately, with any wm.
With either Galeon or Konqueror you still get themes but better ones. Whatever themes you are using with Gtk or Kde will also be applied to the browser. There is no additional overhead and there is a tremendous overhead with mozilla's XUL.
Note: There are several pure Gtk browsers available but these are very simple and can't render complex pages to spec. Several more are in the works with other unix toolkits. But it takes a lot of work to develop a complete html engine with all the trimmings. For the forseeable future browsers that use the gecko engine, and Kde's Konqueror, will be the only acceptable choices and Netscape 4.x will gradually become less and less attractive.
Re:This could be nice but... (Score:1)
Re:Themes don't work anyway (Score:2)
There's quite obviously more work needing to be done on the follow through on the install, but it is quite possible to get those themes down and switched. You should be aware up front that when switching themes it'll blank out whatever web page you happen to be looking at, so you'll have to re-load. Minor stuff, but a glitch never the less.
more importantly... (Score:2)
The new skin is much, much, MUCH, *MUCH* cooler. Check it out at: http://www.mozillazine.org/jason/newmodern.gif
Re:How do you use Mozilla? (Score:3)
If you're looking for a reasonable snapshot of where Mozilla is at, pop on over to Mozillazine and use the links at the top of their page for the latest nightly download that's functional. Unless you're a third party developer, such as Alphanumerica, the milestones are best forgotten. Pull down a nightly and see what ya think. Love it or hate it, it's generally a much better picture of where this project is actually at.
cool skin? Are you serious (Score:1)
Re:Future Of Advertising (Score:4)
Kind of like Emacs?
Funny thing is since they've ported Xemacs to gtk and are working on integrating it with bonobo and they're working on integrating Mozilla with bonobo, you're going to have two applications that think they're operating systems that can communicate with each other via CORBA. Why don't they just add E-Lisp bindings to Mozilla now and be done with it?
Re:I -completely- disagree (Score:2)
The browser on a whole is getting better every day and especially with Classic and Modern 2, it's very promising indeed.
Re:Mozilla memory footprint (offtopic) (Score:2)
I'd like to know why Mozilla is a 7meg download while IE is something like 40-50meg?
To more directly answer your question, the Mozilla development has shifted gears away from functionality at this point towards memory and performance issues. At the moment on NT Mozilla is taking up about 30meg of memory. After a while this number will just continue to grow. The problem at this point is that they are just now addressing memory clean up details, which weren't getting the same level of attention as functions earlier. I would suspect that by the next milestone we'll be seeing memory usage that is far more in line with what you'd expect to see in a browser.
Re:Galeon (Score:1)
Re:Galeon is great (Score:1)
--
A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
Re:Galeon is great (Score:1)
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A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
Re:Galeon is great - damn well doesn't work but (Score:1)
I turned off java and it cae straight up
think java is still a problem in mozilla
Re:Galeon is great (Score:1)
Re:Galeon really doesn't need Gnome (Score:2)
Sure, galeon _COULD_ remove Gnome dependencies and use just gtk+, but as the previous poster (the one you replied to) noted, it wouldn't be taking advantage of what's out there -- especially considering that Galeon has always intended to be a Gnome web browser.
But you said Gnome isn't a big part of Galeon (sorta), which isn't true. Galeon uses lots of Gnome widgets (the modified gtk+ ones with all the standard pixmaps, the toolbar, customized menus), gnome-libs are used a lot (for configuration, quick dialogs) -- CORBA is used, and we also use standard Gnome libraries like libxml and libglade.
How much would we really gain by removing the libgnome dependency? Not a whole lot, as it would only cause pain and wouldn't play as nicely with other Gnome apps.
This comes up on galeon-devel more and more frequently, I'm thinking of adding it to the FAQ
Re:Galeon is great - damn well doesn't work but (Score:2)
Re:Galeon is great - damn well doesn't work but (Score:1)
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Galleon (Score:1)
Re:This could be nice but... (Score:1)
Re:Galeon (Score:1)
I want a gtk based browser. Thats all...
Simon
Re:Galeon is great (Score:1)
Theme, schmeme. Where's the "Open" button? (Score:2)
Not to mention the way they buried the "don't load images" checkbox in the Edit-Preferences-Advanced submenu (yeah, that's real advanced).
And do the words "incremental rendering" mean anything to these people? The best way to read Slashdot is still Lynx if I don't want to wait for the entire 500K page to load before I can see the first paragraph.
Grrrrr.
Re:This could be nice but... (Score:1)
Whining about software bloat... (Score:1)
Okay, so Mozilla's XPI is slow and unresponsive compared to other GUI toolkits. A bunch of people complained that this feature is "useless and bloated." Mozilla responded by saying "so embed Gecko." The Galeon folks did this, and are doing a great job so far. What's the first thing we hear in this thread? "Galeon is too bloated! They should be using plain GTK+!" Oh for Christ's sake, give it a rest!
If you want a Gecko browser for your favorite toolkit/platform, then write one! But please, stop telling hard-working volunteer developers what they should be doing just because you disagree on what features are useful!
-zack
Re:browser speed (Score:1)
Re:This could be nice but... (Score:1)
Did it ever occur to you that the Alphanumerica developers are mainly designers, and not hardcore C++ hackers equipped to work on a complex project like Mozilla?
Non-coders are always asking what they can do to help with a project. The folks at Alphanumerica are taking it upon themselves to build some very interesting software based on Mozilla. Haven't you ever used beta software for development?
-zack
Theme Builder is *NOT* a part of Mozilla. (Score:5)
There are many other applications that are being developed using the Mozilla platform. A few of note are: a Jabber client, a News Reader like interface for web forums (such as Slashdot), and various games (mostly 2d recreations of classics).
Just keep in mind that these *third* party applications being developed using the Mozilla platform does not slow down, or detract from the development of Mozilla. In fact, they can actually help: these new, outside, developers are actually testing and submitting bugs on the Mozilla platform (Html Rendering Engine, Networking code, etc.) while creating their applications -- which in turns helps Mozilla developers increase the stability of Mozilla itself.
Joseph Elwell.
Re:browser speed (Score:1)
Sure its possible to release code that includes all its own libraries its own UI, it's own widgets, its own version of printf and it will compile anywhere, but aren't you getting sick of them?
where's the grammar nazi when you need him? (Score:2)
It's man-meat you moron. Don't let me catch you leaving out the hyphen ever again.
--Shoeboy
Re:Galeon is great - damn well doesn't work but (Score:1)
galeon renders 2K for me then cancels so its something near the beginning there...
Re:Galeon is great (Score:1)
Re:Galeon (Score:1)
Re:Theme, schmeme. Where's the "Open" button? (Score:3)
But it can be even easier than this! Just select the URL in your xterm, and click with the middle mouse button almost anywhere. (The only places you can't click are places where the middle mouse button already has a different meaning - i.e. text boxes, scroll bars, etc.)
This is much quicker and easier than waiting for a dialog box to pop up, and having to click right in it.
Hello, Galeon World (Score:1)
I got the latest rpm from rpmfind. I initially had trouble getting it to work with SUSE, either via rpm or source compilation (library soup) but the latest rpm installed and ran without a hiccup.
I'm responding with Galeon now. If you can see this post, you know it works.
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Re:Clue (Score:1)
Is Mozilla's composer better than Screem or Bluefish or Dreamweaver? NO.
Is the email client better than Mutt or Eudora? NO.
Does anyone give a shit about an NNTP client? NO.
Sorry, but the earlier posters are correct - there is a market for a small stable lean browser - unfortunately the mozilla folks have missed this completely.
hmm.. sorry :) (Score:2)
Ok, I guess I have not slept enough later.
Sorry for the rant.
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Re:This is news... (Score:1)
Re:Mozilla memory footprint (offtopic) (Score:1)
Re:'Then'? no, 'Than' (Score:1)
Re:Theme, schmeme. Where's the "Open" button? (Score:1)
Your method.
The middle mouse button method.
What could be easier?
Re:Clue (Score:3)
no no, mozilla is not dead...
it comes slowly, but powerfull. what you hear now is the sound of a stampede, just hiding behind the hill.
there are numerous reasons for that:
i had a discussion with a friend about a project, where large amounts of preformatted text must be categorized and made searchable for cdrom publishing. the view application and the displayed text shall have the corporate design of the publishing company.
it all comes down, that we need to categorize the text with xml-tags and make some stylesheets for diplay of the categories and their content in the different search-masks. than we need to find a offline xml-viewer, that runs on all desired platforms and some kind of script language to implement the functionality. nice would be a sdk for changing the viewers look n feel, to match the corporate design... and it should be really cheap..
hmmm... think for your self... mozilla is not only cool, because its ..eh.. cool; its cool, because it implements features, that are really needed by companies... at least needed in the near future (..ok, this is good for mozilla ;) )
cylab