DFBBrowser

=Running a web browser through GTKDFB libraries=

Many people showed interest in running a web browser on top of DFB in linux-embedded devices, while i was interested in this too because of my project of a web-installer for the Debian, whose new graphical installer is currently based on top of Projects:GTK_on_DirectFB.

A browser can (roughly) be seen as a combination of many different pieces, among the many we usually find a rendering engine (like the Gecko engine, at the base of all Mozilla-like browser), a browser application that acts as a frame to the rendering engine, an XML parser and a javascript interpreter.

Running a browser on top of DFB depends from both the rendering engine and the framework's capability to operate somehow on top of DFB: many HTML rendering engines use to operate on top of a GUI toolkit like the GTK+, QT ot FLTK libraries, and here is a list of known rendering engines that could be run on top of DFB thru the GTKDFB libarries.

Please note this is not an exaustive list of all rendering engines that could be run on top of DFB: just to name the few, i'm not listing here QT based rendering engines like KHTML, that maybe could be run on top of DFB thanks to the QT-DFB libraries, or the small dillo browser that has recently moved from GTK 1.2 to FLTK toolkit for which a DFB backend exists.

Gecko
Gecko is the rendering engine at the base of the mozilla family of browsers, and it has both WIN32 and GTK backends. Unluckily, the GTK backend is not really a clean GTK backend because it has many hooks to X library specific functions, and this makes it hard running on top of DFB. For specific informations, see the DFBMozilla project page.

GTKHTML2
GTKHTML2 is a fork of the GTKHTML rendering engine, and, even if it has not HTML editing capabilities like GTKHTML has, it boasts CSS support and is a clean GTK rendering engine.

WEB
It's so possible running GTKHTML2 on top of GTKDFB using the web web browser: past experiments i did with the web->gtkhtml2->gtkdfb->dfb stack of libraries proved this combination of software pieces works almost "off the shelf".



WebKit
WebKit '' is an open source web browser engine and is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that's used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. WebKit's HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE.''

Currenty Mike Emmel is working on a GDK backend for WebKit, but it's still incomplete and far from being usable.

Atlantis
Atlantis is a lightweight Web browser based on GTK-WebCore, more info can be found in the project's homepage