Long time that i didn’t felt like to blog, in the past days of storm others have sait way more insightful things that i would have been able to say. I can only say i felt really bad for Aaron and that sometimes the intertubes really can expose the very worst of people, bleach 🙁 (ok, not really an original thing, but still…)
Aaaanyways, this time i wanted to blog on a very embrional plasmoid that i have started some weeks ago just for fun…
a web browser. A what? yes, a web browser.
At the moment it has a basic addressbar and toolbar buttons that works pretty much as expected, the browser window pretty much works apart some qt issues and there is a very embrional support for bookmarks.
It won’t be something much more complex than that, i want to keep it simple (stupid:) as much as possible.
It definitely can have its utility also in a today desktop, since it automatically restores the last url visited when plasma starts it could be useful for instance for a quick check on some website for updates that either don’t have a rss form for updates or the html view is somehow preferred for whatever reasons…
But this thing is more as a research thing on what plasma can do beside the desktop, like, it will be possible to build full blown applications with plasma?
Or, how it should look and what functionalities must offer on devices that potentially could have only plasma as their main interface and for all their functionalities? (yes, the idea comes from the amazing progress of the Marijn’s gsoc about plasma on mobile devices)
Sooo, if you want to check it out it’s in playground as usual (plasma/applets/webbrowser), all the disclaimers about alpha quality of the thing of course do apply (you know, like blowing out the pc or running away after marrying your dog…)
Oh, and btw:
Edit: yes, Pinheiro striked again 🙂
Hi,
I’m just wondering if it uses Webkit or KHTML?
at the moment webkit, since is a widget it’s easier to embed. if this thing will continue making it to embed kparts (so also khtml) would be cool, yeah 🙂
Excellent idea :)! But booking at the screenshot, I immediately thought about scaling the contents. I mean, instead of having scrollbars to move the content around in the case it doesn’t fit the plasmoid, how about scaling the contents so that it does fit? If the user wants to zoom in to a portion of a website, he could doubleclick on that area, and the browser zooms in there.
I have currently used two different web-browsers that handle web-pages in the two mentioned way. Safari in my iPod touch scales the websites so that is shows the entire website. The browser in my Nokia E71 only shows part of the page, and I have to scroll around to see the entire page. Needless to say, Safari beats the broswer in the E71 100-0.
Very cool indeed, would be nice to have an option to hide the toolbar and scrollbars to have an always showing web page widget. 😀
PS.: It doesn’t have a name, does it?
What happens to plasma when your web browser applet explodes?
Cheers
I remember seeing something similar (albeit polished for purpose) on a Steve Jobs Keynote where you could clip a web page and only show that part in an applet and that struck me as being quite useful. Couldn’t we use the Apple one seeing as Plasma runs Apple applets and they are beautifully polished?
I think optionally scaling down the content so it fits the plasmoids geometry would be really awesome. Anyway, nice idea!
“it could be useful for instance for a quick check on some website for updates…”
Indeed, it would be very useful. Even more, if it had an auto-reload in X time feature it would be extreme useful 🙂
Nice work.
Bye.
In the future we won’t need to run programs. They will be embedded in plasmoids! Ha ha!
Seriously, if plasmoids are able to do everything like word documents and spreadsheets then people won’t need to use externel applications. The result? Plasmoids will just become windows that are hard to minimise.
scaling: qt webkit supports only fonts scaling per se, but i think a real zooming could be achieved anyways, another area to experiment, mostly if it could be fast enough
hiding toolbar and auto reload: yeah, cool idea 🙂
safety: yes, if a plasmoid explodes all plasma explodes, another area that needs exploring (probably using several separate plasmaapp)
plasmoids: nah, the traditional desktop applications will remain as is for a long time i suppose, otherwise plasma would become just another window manager (well some kind of plasma window manager does exist by the way :)) what it’s more interesting is trying that for devices that don’t have traditional desktop apps and don’t have windows (cell pones, mediacenters, whatever..)
As for the safety, can’t you fork out to keep plasma from crashing? Otherwise you should perhaps look into using one of the scripting languages, as they are sandboxed better.
Keeping a web page on my desktop is really really useful if i want to track news! Maybe it would be nice to add an option to reload the page every N seconds =)
Great work dude! Keep it up.
I’ve not looked at what’s involved with using plasma+python, but I’m hoping to be able to use it with the twisted irc stuff to put an irc client on the desktop.
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