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Meteo · Dec 16, 2002, 02:27 PM

what are the versions of gecko in
chimera 0,6
mozilla 1,2
netscape 7,01?

what are the differences?

Millennium · Dec 16, 2002, 03:35 PM

Mozilla 1.2 uses the newest version of the Gecko engine. The biggest visible difference between this and earlier versions is a thing called type-ahead find. Click somewhere in a page, start typing, and it will take you to the first (or next) link on the page which starts with those letters. Very handy.

Chimera 0.6 uses the version of Gecko from Mozilla 1.0. This is two generations back, and therefore is a bit lacking in features and bugs, as compared to the later versions. Hopefully they will be updating at some point, but no one knows when that might be.

I think Netscape 7.0 uses the same engine that Chimera does. Same problems there. I'm pretty sure that the OSX version of AOL also uses this version of the engine.

alex_kac · Dec 16, 2002, 04:35 PM

Clarification - gecko is just the rendering engine. It has nothing to do with the type ahead URLS or anything. All gecko does is parse the HTML/XML/etc... and provides the parent browser the info to draw the contents.

So Mozilla 1.2/1.3 contains a newer gecko engine, but the rest of Mozilla - the UI, the text fields, buttons, bookmarks, etc... are all Mozilla only - nothing to do with Gecko.

So the Chimera folks are taking the very specific gecko engine and building an interface around it. Its quite nice.

CharlesS · Dec 16, 2002, 04:56 PM

Originally posted by alex_kac:
Clarification - gecko is just the rendering engine. It has nothing to do with the type ahead URLS or anything. All gecko does is parse the HTML/XML/etc... and provides the parent browser the info to draw the contents.

So Mozilla 1.2/1.3 contains a newer gecko engine, but the rest of Mozilla - the UI, the text fields, buttons, bookmarks, etc... are all Mozilla only - nothing to do with Gecko.

Actually, I think Mil is right - type-ahead find is a feature of Gecko, causing it to appear in both the latest Mozilla and Phoenix, which is another bare-bones wrapper around Gecko for Windows.

Millennium · Dec 16, 2002, 06:43 PM

Originally posted by CharlesS:

Actually, I think Mil is right - type-ahead find is a feature of Gecko, causing it to appear in both the latest Mozilla and Phoenix, which is another bare-bones wrapper around Gecko for Windows.

Actually, Phoenix is written in XUL, just like Mozilla is. The whole UI is drawn by Gecko, so it's not really a "wrapper" any more than Mozilla is. It's not officially maintained for OSX, because they think it would compete with Chimera and they don't want to do that.

There is a Chimera-esque wrapper aroung Gecko for Windows, though. It's called K-Meleon. Likewise there's one for Linux, called Galeon (and another one called Skipstone which is even more bare-bones). Yet the Phoenix team doesn't seem concerned about competing with these. Something doesn't smell right about that.

clarkgoble · Dec 16, 2002, 11:58 PM

Hasn't the Chimera team also modified Gecko somewhat? I'd assume these changes were rolled back into the main Gecko code base, although they may not have. I seem to recall them talking about tweaks to get anti-aliasing going the way it is. Further they mentioned problems of getting Aqua/Cocoa text entry into Gecko.