Currently, I want to write a new web browser, and i hope it can offer a safer and more reliable browsing environment.

i have been thinking about the functions and the core to be used in the project, but before i started make things in practice, i have to understand what others can do.

So.....
Which one do you currently using?
Which one do you think is the best?
Which core do you think is more reliable to archive the needs of the many on browsing the web?
Do you hope it can have ftp, search system, and telnet console built in?


I hope you can give me more opions.
thanks

My main browsers are Opera 7.5/6.06 with Firefox as a seldom used but damn fast backup for sites that demand that I use it. No IE on this main system, as that was ripped out first thing after installation.

I use filezilla for FTP and never did touch IE for such things, so personally ftp functionality in a browser has meant nothing to me so far.

What problems are you finding that Mozilla/Firefox cannot address? In what way are they not safe and reliable browsing environments? Wouldn't it be more prudent to simply help improve existing solutions as opposed to starting yet another browser project.

Don't take this the wrong way, but it would take you an eternity to write something that is modular and cross-platform, user-friendly, standards compliant, supports the web technologies currently in use, renders pages correctly and efficiently, properly handles net protocols, etc etc. Even with all of the available open-source components, reinventing the wheel is an enormous waste of time, especially when it is such a heavyweight beast.

FYI: I currently use Mozilla 1.7.1 and plan to switch to Firefox very soon.

dsf
At first, I want to say about my project.
I want my project at first plug in only web core, and if the user wants to start telnet, ftp, or any other plugins, the program plugs in them after they are being asked.

I used mozilla onced, and i have forgot it for a long long time, and the major problem is at displaying chinese and the appearance of the website in mozilla was different to the usual of IE.
And now you have remind me about it, so i went to the mozilla's website and downloaded mozilla 1.7.1 and firefox.

But they haven't changed....
here are the pictures.
pcman is one of the browsers that can run telnet and www in the same program and it's compatible with chinese.

Why i don't want to develop the program based on this pcman because the developer doesn't want to publish the source code although the program has been free, and he hasn't kept developing it after he was in college.

firefox

firefox2

mozilla

mozilla2

pcman

pcman2

I have some question about mozilla and other browsers.
Is mozilla and firefox developed based on unicode?
Is mozilla and firefox using the same core?
Is the core based on IE?

After you have seen the images i've attached, are the displaying chinese problem and the problem of strange display in some websites due to my settings?or is mozilla's problem?

I know it will be better if i just develop some plugins or some updates for current projects, but i think the problem is more than that.
I used opera once, and it's also having problem displaying the pcman image.

I know it's very hard to develop a web browser core and want it to become a practicle one, so i'm still searching to browsers that can suffice my needs.

The kind of browser i want is the one can be sufficient to all the world, and i want it to have very good performance in displaying websites.

What do you feel?
I'm not very good in English, but i hope you can understand what i have written.
I apologize if i have written any disrespect.

Yes, UTF-16 is used throughout much of the code.

Yes.

No.

I'm afraid I can't see the difference in between Firefox and pcman for the first site. The second site you linked to doesn't specify a character encoding, so Firefox uses its default, usually ISO-8859-1 (Western). I don't have any Chinese fonts installed on my computer, so this test won't work for me, but try going to View -> Character Encoding -> Auto-Detect and selecting, "Chinese." That should make Firefox guess when a site is using Chinese characters and things should work.

Alternatively, under the General section of the Options menu, there's a button for, "Languages." In the window that comes up when you click that button, you can set the character encoding to use when a page doesn't specify one.

But i feel there is.....
And the worst proat is that I don't know how to describe it.......

Well, I don't know...
Mozilla and firefox seems very much like netscape which i don't like the interface very much.

I like opera more, but i think i used to have some websites that opera couldn't display well no matter which encoding i choose.

Will it be more difficult to add an telnet client?

The differences between Firefox and PCMan on those screenshots are mainly table borders and paddings. Mozilla/Firefox is differently (read: more precisely ) following the standards than IE and that leads to such barely visible differences.
(Both sites display fine in my Firefox btw, using latest branch nightly. I have Auto-detect on.)
I don't think adding a telnet client would be very hard for a developer, but I'm not one so don't trust me about that. But there's already a Mozilla-based IRC client so adding new protocols is definitely possible.

Another web browsing core is KHTML, which is used in the Konqueror web browser in KDE and which Apple has adopted in its Safari browser. According to Apple's benchmarks, Safari renders pages faster than Mozilla's Gecko (in Camino), but I'm not sure about the standards compliance of KHTML.

Personally I use Firefox and find it really speedy

I use Firefox personally and have no problems with it. I also find it nice and speedy. If you want to develop a web browser I would look really closely at Firefox.

I run both Safari and Firefox on here. I'm not sure which one is faster at rendering as they both seem close in speed. I think the UI is probably faster with Safari, but that shouldn't come as much of a suprise.

As far as standards compliance goes, Safari/KHTML is very good. It's definitely better than IE, but probably not quite as good as Mozilla, especially where some of the more cutting edge/esoteric standards are concerned.

I'm pretty picky about compliance and have no problem using Safari. In fact, I'd probably not use Firefox at all if Safari had a few other features that I sometimes miss -- more configurable popup blocking being one of the main ones, though some of the firefox extensions are very handy also like livehttpheaders and the webdeveloper thing.

Running 20040723 Aviary-Branch Firefox.
Don't know why anyone would run anything else...

Telnet passes the username and password in the clear, unencrypted. It is a security nightmare.
I suggest PuTTY, it uses SSH and will support telnet in a fallback situation. I have been very pleased with it, and it is free.

PuTTY home page

Edit: Added below

For file transfer, FTP is also a security nightmare for the same reasons as Telnet. SFTP and SCP are much safer. This is a great client:

WinSCP

If it's possible, can i indegrate these programs into a browser?

I want to ask for another thing.
What goods do you think a good browser has to have?
good functions?fast displaying?properly display websites nomatter in any language.

I'm a chinese.
I still feel pcman displays the discussion board better than opera, mozilla, or firefox.
You said that they displays it more precisely, but i still feel how pcman displays looks better than they do.
I'll discuss this with my teacher in next class.

Do you like opera??
I think opera is good but quite a huge program.
It has some functions i think mozilla or firefox doesn't have.(Am i right? I'm not so familiar with mozilla or firefox... sorry.... )

Are there any websites cannot be displayed properly by opera, mozilla, or firefox?

I'm so sorry if i have make a lot of problems.

BTW, was there any program called "Surf!!"

I know there's a surfit......
but it seems that it has not been developing for a long time........

(will there be copyright problems if there two programs with the same name?)

I like the name "Surf", and i want to named my project on making publishing mathematics formula calculating.

I use Firefox and I can't complain. What I love most is the popup blocker which isn't included in the IE..

I thought opera has the popup blocker too....


But i feel opera isn't faster than mozilla or firefox.

Is it because all its functions, or it's just the core isn't as fast as mozilla's?

I'd suggest you to read through the standards specifications at W3.org.

Sorry for all inconveniences i've brought.....


But, I have a new question.
What do i have to read before starting developing any web browser of any browser plugins?

Do i have to have some hardware background??

My primary browser are Mozilla Firefox. But I also use Safari and Camino regularly!

What's Camino like?

No offense, but if you have to ask this type of question, I think you're going to have a very hard time with this project.

Hell, even if you knew exactly what you needed to do, it'd still be impractical for all of the other reasons mentioned.

I also personally think that writing a new browser because of a rather trivial difference in display is completely the wrong reason to actually work on such a project. If you're that bothered by that small of a difference, you're going to be in for a world of frustration with actually trying to develop your own browser...

Edit: Actually, I just noticed that the second set of screenshots is worse. Still, this is almost assuredly not a browser problem, but a problem with the actual webpage design.

I am using Firefox 0.9.2 and I have no problems with Chinese Display for most of the time...

And yes, I am a Chinese, living in Hong Kong.

One trick for Mozilla / Firefox to display Chinese similarly to other browsers, e.g. IE, is to set the font to "New MingLiu" instead of "MingLiu" (MingLiu is the default for Traditional Chinese in Mozilla, while "New MingLiu" is the default for IE, and maybe others). Also, you may want to change the default encoding to Traditional Chinese too.

You may try the Tradition Chinese version of Firefox, too.

For websites that do not display Chinese correctly, it is most likely because those web sites does not specify the language they used, or even set the wrong language.

Sorry, I missed the point.
But i thought if we're going to develop a project, we have to know everying which is related to the project, don't we?
To know how computer process the www pages, network protocols, and images processing.
Do those who have been developing browsers just simply write programs?

You mean it's impractical to develop a new project instead of inhancing the current existing project?



But I think opera does have more useful functions than mozilla.(Although there are some more useless ones, too...)

But I think the browser should let users decide what kind of skins they want to use, and what functions and plugins such as telnet console or ftp client should be decided by the users whether be plugged in the browser or not.

No, but the people that are writing these kinds of programs should already have a very good command of the standards ands protocols that they need to work with. And anything they don't know, they should know where to find.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with asking where to find this information if you don't know. My point is simply that if you have that much to learn already, you're going to be a long ways off from actually being able to put that information to use in making a competitive program.

Writing a web browser that's good is very, very hard. That's why there are relatively few of them (that are really unique at least) compared to the amount of clones you see for different types of programs.



Yes.



Opera might have more useful features in the default configuration, but Mozilla can theoretically do anything Opera can, and much, much, more.

Besides that, when you are talking about another browser, are you talking about a new browser interface + rendering engine, or simply a new interface for an existing rendering engine?



Umm... Have you actually researched Mozilla/Firefox at all?

Mozilla supports skins, and supports all kinds of plugins. You can do everything you just listed as a plugin in Mozilla. Furthermore, Mozilla provides a complete cross-platform programming environment in the way of the different API's that were developed to make the program. You can write entirely different programs using Mozilla technology, and have the entire thing be cross-platform out of the box. That's how flexible and extensible it is.

Anyway, I suggest checking out the following sites:

Mozilla Plugins/Applications
Mozilla Themes

Acually, i'm still a sernior hight school student, but i'm very interested in computer things.
I want to learn everying as many as i can....
My i ask the they should know where to find suggests where??
RFC?IRC?
I have a major problem is that i what i know is really few.....
When i have problems, i don't know where to go except googling for the most time.......

I would love to learn....


May i ask for few examples??


I think at first i was thinking about making a new browser interface and redering engine.
But now i think writing interfaces for rendering engine.



Is it possible to link programs as plugins in mozilla??

Okay, i'll really focus on these sites....

thanks for everything, and sorry for any inconvenience...

Which basically renders you incapable of writing anything but the simplest app.

Its much like Mozilla Firefox.
Its a Mac OS X browser using the Gecko rendering engine and Cocoa user interface!

For me its faster and more integrated to Mac OS than Firefox, but lacks extension support.

davince:

I would suggest that you investigate (specs, plug-ins, support/community, availability of source code) the competition (Opera, Mozilla/Firefox, Safari, IE) and THEN decide whether to (1) join one (or more) of them and provide plug-ins (that is, use their rendering engine) , or (2) develop your own engine.

The investigation should give an idea of the level of complexity and amount of hard work that would be required.

It should also give you a better idea of what people are looking for (the support forums).

My personal choice is open-source, royalty-free software with a wide development and support community (e.g., foobar, Firefox, SourceForge).

Hope this helps.

Okay....
I'll put much attention on them....

it definitely helps...
thank you very much

Currently,
I'm using Mozilla Firefox 0.92
I'm already quite satisfy what MF has to offer

Just something I'm not very happy with it
the loading speed

on my p4 1.4 it takes ~6 sec to load
its good if someone can just finetune for MF to load in 1-2 sec time

Davince

I can see the difference between the
Firefox image and the pcman image you captured
the gap of each row is bigger in Firefox than Pcman!
am i right?

edit: after looking at it carefully,
I found another difference, the way mozilla draw thetable is a bit different fron
Pcman (IE), but that's nothing to do with "chinese"
the font looks ok to me

I've tried to go to your site...davince.xxking
and my firefox looks like the pcman

have a look at my capture

Firefox 0.92 -1

Firefox 0.92 -2

this is the setting i used
View>Character Encoding>Auto Detect>Chinese

u have to change it to "chinese" the default setting is "off" for auto detect

If you want to know more about web standards you may want to check out relevant RFCs (a good repository is available from http://www.zvon.org/), which (among other things) deal with protocols like HTTP, FTP, SMTP and telnet, and documents from the W3C (http://www.w3.org/), which deal with things like HTML and CSS.

Opera has been my default browser for ages!
Just installed Mozilla and its very good too.(My only complain: it cannot import Opera's favorites).

If Opera can export favorites to HTML file, Mozilla/Firefox will be able to import them.

I like Firefox quite a bit and Opera is OK.
The main issue I have is not with the browser writers.
It is with the webmasters and page builders.
Some sites simply do not display properly on anything but IE.
Ebay is an example. It is simply not usable on anything but IE.
I still find web sites on a regular basis that format their pages such that when printed, the print goes off the edge of the page. These pages must be printed in landscape, wasting paper. This is simply poor page design.
I guess there is a need for a Web pag writing for dummies book.

Just downloaded and tried the latest Opera. It seems to display ebay and monster.com just fine. Nicely done. I sure do like a free browser without ads though. Guess I am just too cheap in my old age.

well, you could always do a quick search for a serial with google.
but google ads arent that bad.

i love opera, but there was one or two little things that annoyed me. so now i use firefox, and miss one or two of the features of opera. its a no win situation.

as long as you dont use konqueror or ie, im happy.

Just made the change to Firefox here, the word that springs to mind is "Professional" .

Just a quick question; how do I stop Internet Explorer from firing up (and make Firefox fire up instead) when I click on the "You have 3 new Messages" on MSN Messenger?

Under the tools menu, select Options. Then in General, there is an option to make Firefox check whether it is the default browser.

I'm perfectly happy with FireFox 0.9.3.
The only thing that bothers me about
it is that sometimes it takes ages to
save an already downloaded picture.
Hell, sometimes it even re-downloads
it! It's plain stupid...

The latest Opera Preview has speech enabled browsing (only for win2k and winxp so far). While not particularly useful (for me at least), you can for sure have some fun with it...

Mozilla Firefox all the way!!