Knee Deep in Browsers

This week I’ve been up to my neck in web browser code.  XULRunner, WebKit, gtkmozembed, you name it.

My main goal was to get an embedded web browser working on windows, so that we can move forward with the widgets program.  The only one I could get working was XULRunner.  I thought XULRunner was a dead end for a long time, because I couldn’t understand the focus issues, but now I finally do and I’m able to get it working pretty much 100%.

When I had given up on XULRunner, I spent a while trying to get WebKit for windows to work, but I was never able to get it working.  I had a couple talks with folks on #webkit, and it seems to me that the windows port is not quite ready for prime time at this point.

There was a time when I was really worried that neither embedded XULRunner, nor webkit was going to work so I started thinking of alternatives.  The main ones I came up with were 100% XULRunner or embedded XULRunner using MFC.  I’m not really interested in either of those, but I guess it’s good to keep in mind.

The other timesink this week was another browser ploblem.  Drag and Drop stopped working on linux with xulrunner 1.9, mostly because they started doing error checking for the bogus values we passed in.  I spent a ton of time trying to get a good workaround, but in the end I ended up just checking in a patch that made our bogus values just a little less bogus.