Mozilla + Clutter

I’ve not blogged in a fair while, Intel have kept me very busy (and no complaints, it’s been great!). It’s the end of a tiring day, so cutting straight to the point; I’ve been working on a headless back-end for mozilla (bug #446591) and an accompanying Clutter library that uses it. I wanted to hold off a little longer and have things a bit more polished, but that’s a vicious cycle that could go on for a while, so here’s how it is today:


Click to watch

So, what’s the point in this? Well, with the headless back-end, you now have the power and compatibility of mozilla in just about anything that lets you go from bitmap data->screen. You could start using it in SDL apps, for example, or, theoretically, without X. If you’re a cool cat though, you’ll use it in Clutter ;).

Anything special about clutter-mozembed? Yes – Unfortunately, it isn’t working yet, but I will have hardware accelerated scrolling, similar to what we have in webkit-clutter. What I do have already is out-of-process rendering. If some page or naughty plug-in brings mozilla down, the interface doesn’t need to go down with it. If some slow page or piece of JavaScript slows mozilla down, there’s no need for other pages or the interface to slow down too. Think Google Chrome, but a bit more magic.

The most important question, where’s the source? Well, the git repositories will be public ASAP (I’ll blog again when they are – currently we’re having troubles and I’ve been focusing on coding instead of setting up repositories (or responding to peoples’ e-mails asking for the details to setup repositories for me ;)). In the meantime, you can get (a very slightly out-of-date, but only by a day or so) patch from the above linked bug.

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