[Sugar-devel] [RELEASE] Surf 106

[Simon Schampijer]

Bobby Powers wrote:
> 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

First: Bobby thanks for your efforts.

As a reference: here is an interesting comparison between WebKit and 
Xulrunner/Firefox.

http://blogs.gnome.org/otte/2009/03/03/browsing-in-gnome/

Regards,
    Simon