Meet Uzbl — a Web Browser With the Unix Philosophy 318
DigDuality writes "Dieter@be over at Arch Linux forums, a release engineer for Arch Linux, got inspired by this post. The idea? To create a browser based on the Unix philosophy: 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well, programs that work well together, programs to handle text streams because that is a universal interface,' among other points. The result? A fast, low-resource browser named Uzbl, based on WebKit, which passes the Acid3 Test with a perfect score. The browser is controlled (by default) by vim-like keybindings, not too dissimilar to vimperator for Firefox. Things like URL changing, loading/saving of bookmarks, saving history, and downloads are handled through external scripts that you write (though the Uzbl software does come with some nice scripts for you to use). It fits great in a tiling window manager and plays extremely well with dmenu. The learning curve is a bit steep, but once you get used to it, it's smooth sailing. Not bad for alpha software. Though built for Arch, it has been reported to work on Ubuntu."
Really fun browser (Score:3, Interesting)
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I'm still trying to work around with the cookies scripts, myself.
So, it really doesn't work "very well" yet.
Re:Really fun browser (Score:5, Interesting)
You missed the part about the Unix philosophy, which is "Do one thing, and do it well". It browses the web, apparently very very well. But storing cookies for later use isn't really browsing, now, is it? Neither are favorites or bookmarks or history and all that. If you want that stuff, you have to write scripts for it.
Neat idea, I'd never use it though. Too lazy.
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All it takes is having someone release a program dedicated to bookmark management, etc. If the browser gets more popular it is likely you will not have to write your own scripts.
Re:Really fun browser (Score:5, Interesting)
You missed the part about the Unix philosophy, which is "Do one thing, and do it well". It browses the web, apparently very very well. But storing cookies for later use isn't really browsing, now, is it? Neither are favorites or bookmarks or history and all that. If you want that stuff, you have to write scripts for it.
Until you want to implement something like a privacy button. It needs to clear the disk cache. It needs to clear the cookies. It needs to clear the autocomplete for the navigation bar. It has to delete the page history. But you don't want it to nuke your bookmark database, so you can't just make a "purge all". What's one thing for the user isn't one thing for the developer, which is why you end up building monolithical applications.
And the UNIX philosophy is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Worse is better!
Re:And the UNIX philosophy is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if few people use it, the world's always better when someone writes an interesting app.
Re:And the UNIX philosophy is... (Score:4, Informative)
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Wow. I can understand why you are getting modded flamebait, but damn if this isn't one of the best comments I've seen in a long time.
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Trolling troll is trolled.
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how is designing software to do more things badly superior to focusing on creating software thatdoes its one and only job better? The more things software is asked to do the higher the chance that it will do at least some of those things poorly.
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focusing on creating software thatdoes its one and only job better
I think you agree more with the Unix philosophy than you realize. From the summary:
Unix Philosophy: 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well...'
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Dude, we're in a world of shitty phones that are also shitty music players, shitty still cameras, shitty video cameras, and shitty PDAs. And you're surprised that people don't understand the idea of a well-designed, single-function device?
It takes more pockets (Score:2)
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And that's great if your goal is to experience shitty phone calls, shitty pictures, shitty video quality, and shitty audio quality. But if your goal is to perform one of those tasks well (like, say, web browsing), then it makes sense to sacrifice convenience for quality.
'course, that isn't most people's goal. But, again, given that, one shouldn't be surprised when someone doesn't understand a philosophy where it is.
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how is designing software to do more things badly superior to focusing on creating software thatdoes its one and only job better?
And what's the "one thing" a web browser is doing, exactly? In the last week, I've used a web browser to:
* RSVP to a event invite
* Send/receive email
* Watch TV shows
* Share photos with relatives
A "do one thing and one thing only" philosophy is fundamentally incompatible with the web. Unless you define your "one thing" as "view the web," which is so all-encompassing as to be useles
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Re:And the UNIX philosophy is... (Score:4, Insightful)
A browser should implement HTML4/5, various XHTML versions, Javascript, support various multimedia protocols and that's it. Everything else can be integrated as a plugin.
The Unix philosophy would demand separation of the code that implements all of this from the actual UI.
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Why should the rendering engine have to implement JavaScript or a multimedia protocol? A real Unixish browser would be composed of one component that only renders HTML, another one that fetches files and caches them, plug-ins to implement scripting languages and multimedia, and a shell that wraps everything in a GUI to manage bookmarks/history.
In other words, it would be implemented like IE.
dom
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Worse is better!
how is designing software to do more things badly superior...
Whoosh [jwz.org]
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The more things software is asked to do the higher the chance that it will do at least some of those things poorly.
Interestingly, this browser also demonstrates this. Vim-like key bindings? Really? Show me one person who uses the keyboard for browsing and doesn't expect F5 to reload the page.
They quite clearly broke the Rule of Least Surprise.
Re:And the UNIX philosophy is... (Score:4, Insightful)
if some people want a simple browser as bare bones as this one they can use it, if other people want more than that they can use other browsers.
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Close, but not quite. It's "less is more", and if you knew anything about software development you'd know how productive such a philosophy is.
Browser name should be changed (Score:5, Funny)
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Web Browser? (Score:3, Insightful)
So it's not a web browser, but rather a HTML rendering widget you can use to write a web browser, or use in other programs? I think .NET has one of those based on the I.E engine...
Re:Web Browser? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's somewhat in between, like most Unix-style tools. It's usable as-is as a basic web browser (you can browse the web in it). It's also usable as a tool to build other things out of, but in the "app that other apps can talk to" sense, not the .NET or Java "a class library that you can link your apps to" sense.
It's partly a philosophy of general- versus special-purpose end-user programming, monolithic vs. interlocking-parts design, etc. No real right answers, but I see a space for this. In particular, those of us who like a particular window-manager approach, and heavily use its scripting, have long complained that the web is sort of a black box out of our reach--- either you make do with what you can do with wget or links or something, or you've got to relinquish control to Firefox. Sometimes you really do just want a one-window X11 app that renders a modern web page.
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WebKit is one of those (and it's cross platform). And this thing is based on WebKit.
Reinvent the browser again? (Score:2, Insightful)
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I think it's pretty clear the creators are not much into this "common sense" thing when they decided to make "a web browser with the Unix philosophy".
Re:Reinvent the browser again? (Score:5, Insightful)
The goal isn't to gain popular market share.
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Mod +1 informative. Why do people seem to think the only reason developers create something is to get market share? Seems about as sensible as bashing an artist's work because "it will never become as famous as the Mona Lisa"
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Re:Reinvent the browser again? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think they're looking for standard users, and kind of the whole point was to create a learning curve. This implies that it's targeted at powerusers and developers. With the script-integration, this could be useful for quickly churning out a limited-use kiosk with a few helper apps or something (e.g. a novelty photo booth with web integration).
Anyway, the price is right.
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Yes, but you could say the same about the Chrome developers - the best thing they could have done is work with an existing product that already had market share and works great like Firefox.
and I guess we could say the same about Firefox..
No, if this has some additional features that makes it better, like being as tiny as you can get, drivable through a text stream API, being able to fit it into windows so you can have your web browsing embedded into your desktop window manager, then it might yet become a
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Re:Reinvent the browser again? (Score:5, Informative)
but you could say the same about the Chrome developers
Ahem. Chrome was based on webkit which was derived from the Konqueror browser for KDE. Maybe not a huge market share but probably in the hundreds of thousands of users globally at the time.
and I guess we could say the same about Firefox..
Firefox was based on mozilla which was the open sourced version of the venerable and at one time market-dominating Netscape Navigator.
No, it doesn't matter if the browser has useful features to YOU. it matters if they are useful to someone. And apparently someone out there wanted a modular browser with vi keybindings out there bad enough to write the damn thing. If it's not for you? Don't use it.
Re:Reinvent the browser again? (Score:4, Insightful)
Novel ideas usually don't live on by themselves unless they become useful. The worst thing the developers did (besides the name) was create a "steep learning curve" for the common web browser. The best thing the developers could do is work with an existing product that already has market share and works great like Chrome (also based on Webkit) and make their additions to it in support of better key bindings.
That depends on whether the goal is to obtain the largest possible marketshare. If that is the goal, or if that is your sole definition of "useful," then what you say does apply. If they don't give a damn about competing head-on with the likes of IE or Firefox then what you say is completely irrelevant. What I don't understand is the (usually) unstated assumption that marketshare numbers are the only reason why anyone creates any piece of software. While it's important in terms of attracting developers and, in the case of browsers, for putting pressure on Microsoft to make IE more standards-compliant, there are many reasons why someone might write a browser and this includes reasons that wouldn't personally motivate you.
I see the same sentiment shown when some people discuss Linux as though its only purpose is to compete with Windows. They then act like Linux is a complete and utter failure if it doesn't bust up the Windows desktop monopoly. I disagree with this; Linux just "is." If it happens to displace Windows, that's great. If it doesn't, that's fine with me too. Though I have happily introduced folks to Linux who showed an interest in it, I'm not out to win converts; I just want something that works for me. There are those of us for whom Linux is a good solution, who have no dependency on any Microsoft products, and who are able to do our computing completely aloof from Microsoft, unaffected by any decision Microsoft makes. It's abundantly possible that this is intended to be a niche browser, designed for the relatively small number of users who are technically inclined and willing to tinker with something like a Web browser and its supporting scripts.
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The issue isn't better key bindings, but the external controllability and API. Some proportion of us don't like the monolithic black-box approach, where the web browser is this big thing that does everything internally, and if you want to automate or customize anything, you have to do it via the browser's own internal scripting or customization hooks. Some of us like the idea of doing things at the WM and CLI scripting levels.
This is admittedly a sort of radical approach to that. It's possible there are in-
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Personally I'd like to see the Uzbl features made available as advancements to existing browsers instead of creating a new one which has inherent GUI limitations.
This is written in python. If they bolted the functionality on ff/chrome, they would have needed to deal with js and c++. I guess it was just easier this way.
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The worst thing the developers did (besides the name) was create a "steep learning curve" for the common web browser.
Except this fits into the whole unix philosophy bit: unix tools tend to have a steep learning curve but be extremely easy and fast to use once you know a certain number of arbitrary assignments. I know "steep learning curve" isn't part of the philosophy, it just tends to be part of how things play out. Examples: vi, sed, hell even the switches for something like ls.
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"The guy had an itch and he scratched it, there is nothing wrong in that. Not everything that is made has to be useful."
That's true, and so is the fact that Uzbl is about as attractive and useful as a dirty stranger scratching an itch.
A www browser controlled by vim-like key bindings? Well that isn't unique, there are other browsers which do that already, in fact you can do that even with Firefox or Opera, as well as some of the console based browsers. It's the kind of throwback 'feature' that excites impressionable students, idiots, and people who write desperately bad distro/free software reviews where they claim they "fall in love" with "wonderful" "awesome" "elegant" "smooth" "integrated" applications and distros (visit LXer.com for acres of that kind of inane verbiage).
The point was not to have vim-like keybindings. They can be changed easily. That is the point. Change is easy.
And the UNIX philosophy is "do one thing and do it well", not "duplicate something badly for no useful purpose" (c'mon, everyone knows that's the Arch philosophy).
You, sir, are the biggest fucking idiot I have met all day.
It doesn't dupe FF, IE, or Chrome. It displays web pages. That is ALL. Firefox displays them in tabs, along with having bookmarks, skins, downloads, and addons. All internally! IE has nearly as extensive a list (no skins) While Chrome does it with just tabs, downloads, and bookmarks. None of those things are necessary. I like slim. Slim i
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"ou, sir, are the biggest fucking idiot I have met all day.
It doesn't dupe FF, IE, or Chrome. It displays web pages."
It seems you didn't visit your parents today.
At no point have I suggested it's a dupe of any of the graphical browsers. If you want to believe that's what I wrote so you can sound off like an asshole the morning after curry night...that's your problem. Meanwhile there's the plain text right above, easily understood.
There are other browsers whose only mission is to display web pages, it's ha
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And the UNIX philosophy is "do one thing and do it well", not "duplicate something badly for no useful purpose" (c'mon, everyone knows that's the Arch philosophy).
I thought that was Debian's. *rimshot*
New name (Score:2)
They really really need a new name. There's no way that thing is going to be marketed successfully. Not even if the software itself was able to power web4.0 apps, skipping web3.0 alltogether.
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It sounds like 'blue sky' development. I imagine someone wondering "What if I just..."
The more of that happens, the more things are tried out and the advantage od OSS is that everyone can find out how it is done and nobody can stop others from improving on it - apart from by saying it's a stupid idea.
Of course, it could also be the result of using mind altering chemicals - which is also not always a bad thing
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If you care about the name, you're not part of their target market.
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vi? (Score:5, Funny)
MODERATOR HINT: I'm guilty of attempted humor, not flamebait.
Re:vi? (Score:5, Informative)
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There's no constraint that says you need to use python. You can you /any/ programming language that can read/write text files.
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I'd be happy to help, but AC, you have an annoying fickleness. I'm not really sure I can trust you to follow through.
About damn time (Score:2, Interesting)
I've been working on some scripts to use with uzbl
50 tabs? (Score:3, Funny)
What are you doing that requires 450 or even 50 tabs for that matter? You sound like an RMS nutjob.
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For the past few years I have browsed the web with hundreds of tabs at a time. Firefox tends to crash after 50 tabs. Opera tends to crash at about 450 tabs.
No offense, but that's truly idiotic. Seriously. As the doctor once said, if it hurts to do that, *don't do that*.
Honestly, let me introduce you to two concepts: Bookmarks, and Read It Later [readitlaterlist.com].
System Resources (Score:2)
Let the window manager do its job: tabbing is for losers.
Firefox became popular back when Windows 98 was still supported. In Windows 98, there was a concept of "System Resources", involving two 65,536-byte heaps called "user" and "gdi". A new window took a lot more out of each heap than a new tab.
rsrcmtr (Score:2)
I wouldn't be surprised to find that a tab required almost as much system resources as creating a new window
I seem to remember that with rsrcmtr open to show the percentages, opening five new tabs in Firefox 2 took noticeably less resources than opening five new windows in Firefox 2. I can't give you exact numbers anymore since I converted my old Win98se laptop to Puppy Linux and my old WinME box to XP.
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> Have you ever had a few hundred applications open at once like that? It
> doesnt work there either. I will wait while you try it in unix or windows
> with say paint. You will quickly see what I mean.
Soooo, just for the kicks, I held Mod4+Z (my keybind to open an urxvt) for a couple of seconds, waited for all the windows to appear, and issued "ps aux|grep urxvt|wc -l". Over 200 terminals + one zsh for each. System load went from about 0.2 to about 5.8, then quickly dropped down and has been around 0
Yes, but (Score:2, Interesting)
"The Unix Philosophy" (Score:5)
The learning curve is a bit steep...
Yup, say no more - that's the Unix philosophy in spades.
Re:"The Unix Philosophy" (Score:5, Insightful)
But that's a faulty comparison (Score:2, Insightful)
Notepad is, and was designed to be, an extremely basic text editor. It doesn't have lots of features not because those would necessarily make it hard to use, but because they'd take resources to develop. It is just a simple program to display a text file, little more.
Now compare Vim to something like UltraEdit. Here you have a tons of features. Maybe even more than Vim has. However it is still simple to use the basics. You can fire it up and open up a file and edit it with no more effort than notepad. It is
Re:But that's a faulty comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
How about use it to edit a remote file over ssh, from an Android phone? Or do complex things without using the damn mouse? Or write macros in a usable macro language?
More generally, with commonly used software, some of us just don't care about the learning curve. With the tools I use daily, I don't even remember what the first hour of using them was like, because it was so many thousands of hours ago. I even find it interesting to learn about new ways of doing things, so I don't resent an hour or two of getting up to speed, even if I don't end up using the tool. I could see if I had to learn a new tool an hour before a deadline I'd be annoyed, but the simple solution to that is not to schedule your new-tool experimentation an hour before a deadline. =]
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How about use it to edit a remote file over ssh, from an Android phone? Or do complex things without using the damn mouse? Or write macros in a usable macro language?
You make requests in a way that predetermines the answer. For example, what's a "usable macro language"? And, obviously, there's no Notepad (or UltraEdit) on Android, but a clone could be easily written, and yes, it could also work over ssh - there's nothing specific about Vim design that enables it to work better over ssh than any other text-mode editor.
At the same time, any decent editor these days lets you do fairly complex things without using mouse. Even though for a large number of such things, using
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Your rant makes a strange number of assumptions, and is weirdly defensive. I don't fix or otherwise administer servers for a living. I do, however, sometimes edit text files on computers that aren't physically located in the same room as me, from a number of devices, and for a variety of reasons. If you never need to edit a textfile located on another computer, that's fine, but don't pretend that it never is useful to anyone.
If you don't enjoy computers as a hobby, that's fine also. I think some hobbies oth
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Some of us have better things to do than be computer dorks, we grew up, have families and other priorities and likely a higher quality of life than those of you glued to your crappy hard to use editors.
Yes, because having a wife, kids, a mortgage, and probably a 16 hour a day job is definitely going to be less stressful and better for your health than living alone, without all that extra weight.
There is no better or worse, my friend. The grass is always greener...
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Grow up.
1. Doing server work from our phones are not optimal, but it is however useful - you are saying that servers only go down when you are at work, good for you, however in the real world the tend to do backflips when the only handful of people with access are on vacation on the other side of the world - this is where having a phone with SSH access is nice.
2. UltraEdit has a steep learning curve just like VI has - yeah you *might* be able to do notepad stuff right of the bat, but so fucking what? You ca
Re:But that's a faulty comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
OK. So Vim isn't the ideal editor today -- it was designed around limitations of earlier computers and when you remove those limitations you can get rid of stuff like modality that's not really necessary when you have a mouse. So lots of people get attached to modality and hjkl navigation because they spent time learning them, just like people get attached to the emacs OS, even though neither are, today, what anyone designing a new editor would make. They are historically notable -- both were more powerful and easy to use than what came before. I don't think either is very Unixy -- they're each platforms unto themselves at this point. Whatever the first Notepad-like editor was, that introduced the basic elements we consider to be standard text-editing controls today, is definitely historically notable also, and a great achievement -- it flattened the learning curve and (mostly) shattered modality.
Vim and Emacs don't have a lot to do with this browser project, despite the red herring of vi-like keybindings. This project is an experiment about building a browser that's really part of Unix, so as far as an analogous editor goes, perhaps Plan 9's acme, which also relied on external scripts for much functionality. The point isn't to be the greatest or most impressive anything, because... really, who cares? The point is to be a useful tool within the Unix system. If a more self-contained browser is easier to use in many cases that doesn't make it useless.
Re:But that's a faulty comparison (Score:4, Insightful)
The real challenge to good software is to make things as easy as possible, and make it so the complicated doesn't interfere with the simple.
When they're designed for ease of use. When they're designed for *efficiency*, however, as ViM is, the challenge is to keep the complex possible while making the simple as fast as you can. How easy it is to learn never enters into the equation.
The editor designed for *power* is Emacs, whose LISP interpreter can't be beat in that department.
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When they're designed for *efficiency*, however, as ViM is ...
Vim commands weren't designed for efficiency; like traditional Unix command names, they were designed for terseness [wikipedia.org] to remain usable over slow (think 300 baud) terminal connections.
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everyone has their favourite tool. vi is incredibly powerful and comes standard on dozens of unix variants, the place it has, it has earned.
your challenge is a bit off though, i can think of many things you can do in vi that you can also do in ultraedit or boxer or XXX, the difference being with vi, my hands never left the keyboard.
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Our Solaris guy had to show me how it worked. He, like you, seemed to assume I'd love it once I learned about it because of its power. I challenged him to show me something it could do that UltraEdit couldn't. He wasn't able to come up with anything.
You're correct. Vi(m)'s modal interface is a major design flaw, and it presumably does present a major stumbling block for the number of new users. Is Emacs possibly available for Solaris? It is not modal, and although I haven't delved deeply into it, seemed quite easy to use. There is also GNU Nano, if you want an open source editor. It is quite basic, but can still serve.
The way I see it, for some of us, Vi(m) does have a few good points, however.
- Nvi (that is, BSD vi) has an executable size of 300
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vim is more orthagonal than any random also-ran programmer's editor like UltraEdit.
Is this sort of attitude really necessary?
Nitpicks (Score:5, Interesting)
I like the idea, and I'd love to play with it a bit, but there are a few stupid design decisions:
Why don't you just use a reasonable config by default?
There really is no excuse for this. I mean, yes, I can understand where not everyone would want that "reasonable default", but that's why it's a default.
We don't want to store anything "automagically" in the users home. Some people prefer different file/directory layouts
Uhm... ~/.uzbl? How difficult is that? And if you don't like it, rm -rf ~/.uzbl!
Or just create an example script that sets up the default config, and put it in your FAQ.
We considered the option of having a global '/etc/uzbl' which user specific ones could override but that would overcomplicate things.
I'm sorry, but even mplayer is officially friendlier than uzbl. How the fuck is it "complicated" to read one config file, then another?
Uzbl itself doesn't use much gtk stuff (only the statusbar) so we could do without gtk. But Webkit needs a widget toolkit to create widgets (think javascript popups, html forms etc). Officially, it also supports QT and wxwigdets.
So, why doesn't uzbl also support these options? I'm using KDE, so Qt makes sense.
Uzbl.run( )
command is any uzbl command as defined above
return value: a string, either empty or containing the output of the command. Very few commands return their output currently, including js, script, and print.
They obviously realize that JS runs in a single thread. So the obvious implementation here would be to use a callback, not a return value, so you don't block the entire page while you run that script.
I mean, I want to like it, but that's a number of facepalms right off the bat, so I think I'll stick with Chrome until I have time to fix them.
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Oh, and probably the strangest one: Suggesting a proxy-based adblocker.
Ok, I get that it's practical, for now. However, they seem to be saying this would be preferable to an adblocker built in to the browser, which makes no sense. Being able to right-click on an ad and figure out how to block it is not going to be replaced by editing some obscure config file in privoxy.
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It *is* preferable to have a separate ad-blocker, that should be a no-brainer within the unix philosophy.
Granted. But there are two large problems with it, in practice:
Firstly, while it's not entirely in line with the Unix philosophy, my browser already parsed the page. Why should my proxy have to, also?
And probably more importantly: Maybe this has changed, or maybe I just used the wrong proxy, but I remember using Polipo for a lot of things. I also remember finding out that it would cause certain pages to fail (even when I was just using it as a cache), and that, perversely, it'd often slow down my browsing.
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It is preferable in some ways. It works on all your browsers and can be updated independently. It can offer caching for free. It can block things that your browser doesn't recognize as ads.
But as you point out, it's harder to make a good user interface for it. I used a proxy based ad blocker for many years, but have switched over to browser-based ones recently.
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you just need to copy the example config from /usr/share/uzbl/examples/
Yeah... Why do I need to do that?
lynx is a unix web browser (Score:2)
http://lynx.isc.org/ [isc.org] ---home_page
dupe! (Score:4, Interesting)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=98/02/24/114700 [slashdot.org]
11 year old dupe article.
Hmmm... as an aside... wonder why no posts there.
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Re:dupe! (Score:5, Informative)
It did--- Slashdot's had a discussion system since the beginning (or at least very close to it). Pre-account-system comments aren't archived, though, it seems. You originally just entered a name and a comment and posted it, the way most blog comment sections still work today. Impersonation of well-known users was getting too common, though, so they introduced an account system in mid-1998, requiring that you either post as Anonymous Coward, or register an account to post as anyone else. It seems that the old stories only archive comments made after that switch, so the pre-mid-1998 comment threads are mostly in the bitbucket, except to the extent that the Wayback Machine got them [archive.org].
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It's Webkit (Score:5, Informative)
This browser is simply a wrapper around Webkit - so things like passing Acid3 with a 100/100 score is something that it inherits by default. It's not like the developers of this project did anything in particular, other than chose to use Webkit, to make it pass Acid3 or be standards compliant in other areas...
As mentioned above, Webkit isn't the most unix-like unix software being a big, monolithic program written in C++ .
All this project does is wrap a purposely obtuse front-end around a popular, open source browser engine.
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As mentioned above, Webkit isn't the most unix-like unix software being a big, monolithic program written in C++ .
I was starting to think that I was the only person left who still cared about UNIX design philosophy, anywayz. Ubuntu's developers are all convinced they know better, and the single reason why is because the distro's end users never, for one single second, stop screaming about wanting system complexity to be entirely on the implementation, rather than interface side.
So the interface for Ubuntu which the end-user immediately sees is really slick, sure; but going even a few milimeters under that exterior, ex
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Meh. Your asserted tradeoff has little basis in fact.
There's this particular operating system, where said tradeoff can be observed very clearly.
You might have heard of it. It's called Microsoft Windows.
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Webkit is in a state of flux - it's not a constant at the moment.
There are a number of versions of the Webkit library in use - Safari 3 uses one version, Safari 4 another one. Chrome uses (I'm guessing) yet another one and then there's the latest Webkit nightly builds - http://webkit.org/ [webkit.org]
wget? (Score:3, Interesting)
If it does more than wget, doesn't that mean it already has too many features?
"Unix philosophy" - right (Score:2)
Little programs connected by pipes, right. Back in 1978, that was kind of cool. Anyone remember when you got multiple columns from ls by writing ls | mc ? "ls" originally just produced a one entry per line list; if you wanted multiple columns, you used the "mc" filter to create them. Now, the feature list of "ls" is huge.
Actually, UNIX and Linux are way behind in inter-program communication. Using pipes for message passing is like hammering a screw. Windows at least has a standard way for programs t
I thought that would be called "Emacs"! ;) (Score:3, Interesting)
On a more serious note:
Why is it, that all the GUI desktops abandoned Unix's philosophies completely and instead went the Windows way (which of course actually is the MacOS/Xerox/$otherProductItGotTakenFrom way)?
I mean, imagine how great it would be, if we had all the tools of Gimp, Openoffice, Firefox Add-ons, etc, as separate entities, only bound to a document / data trough its mime type. You could mash up and reconnect everything at will. Pipe stuff trough that wizard, and then trough that.
Or connect a OOo tool and a Gimp tool trough pipes, and then draw with them, etc.
Imagine it like this:
- A global toolbox with all the
- tools (something you "draw" with),
- wizards (something that you apply to the selection/document) and
- views (a view and controller for the model [file]).
- A window for every view of a file.
- A location bar, showing the current position/selection as an XPath.
- A properties box, showing all the properties of the current element/selection.
- The things in the toolbox would itself be normal files -- scripts or libraries implemented in every language with an API for it to be exact -- that you could show in views, edit with the properties box, apply wizards and tools to, etc.
(Yes I got to this ideas a long time ago. I just got no time or money to implement it. If you do, please tell me. )
You could build your own tools like with shell scripts. And because that would make it much easier to create new apps by slowly growing them, we would get much more innovation. :)
Also it would pose no problem for those noobs who dislike the shell for no reason.
Re:Could use a better name (Score:4, Interesting)