[Sugar-devel] [RELEASE] Surf 106

[Bobby Powers]

I am happy to annouce the release of Surf version 106.  Surf is
basically Browse with the Mozilla/XULRunner guts ripped out, and
replaced with the WebKit renderer.

Obligitory screenshot:
http://dev.laptop.org/~bobbyp/surf/surf_1.png

Feeling adventurous? well you can test it out yourself on a Sugar
desktop near you.
First you need WebKit-gtk, pywebkitgtk and gnome-python-gconf:
sudo yum install WebKit-gtk pywebkitgtk gnome-python-gconf  (not sure
what the packages are called on Debian)
or, alternatively, you can get and build webkit and its python
bindings from scratch.  There are instructions elsewhere on the net
for this.

Second, download surf:
http://dev.laptop.org/~bobbyp/surf/Surf-106.xo

what works:
- browsing (gmail crashes the browser with the WebKit-gtk packages in
rawhide and F9, but it works fine from webkit trunk)
- bookmarks (although their label seems to be blank)
- full page zoom
- full screen mode
- page-loading progress bar

what doesn't:
- persistant history - not saved across sessions (or journal entries)
- clipboard/undo/redo - should be simple
- back and forward buttons - you can go back and forward through your
history, but autocomplete and skipping back or forward in the history
is not implemented.  shouldn't be too hard to complete/
- file downloading - just landed yesterday in webkit's gtk bindings.
might need to extend the python wrapper, but the hard work is done.
- im sure there are other things I forgot

I'm typing this in Surf - the most annoying 'feature' so far is that
my arrow keys wont navigate around the textbox.

An informal test showed that Browse in sugar-emulator used 100MB in
opening and navigating to gmail, while surf used 85MB.  That still
seems like a lot, but its a 15% savings right off the bat.


yours,
Bobby