Note: Announcing the release of
PDQ Ledger,
a cross-platform Personal Finance Application for Linux/Unix, Windows and the Mac.
2.0.0 is the latest version of Browsex.
As usual, there are numerous fixes. However,
the primary reason for the major version bump is the introduction
of Notetab views. This (optional) feature
groups multiple views into a single window with a notetab selector
above. This can dramatically reducing desktop clutter.
You can now use Alt-B1 to open a link in a new tab view and
the Alt-< and Alt-> keyboard shortcuts to
convieniently switch between views.
There is a new feature to popup any HTML table in a page
into a tktable. And, Tkhtml now supports a new
"tktable" attribute for TABLE tags to display the
text of a table in a tktable widget (scrollable and editable).
There are also changes to Tml, but more on that soon.
See ChangeLog for full details.
There are 4 main packages available at this site.
- BrowseX - a Web Browser
- TML - an HTML Script/Macro Language
- TDB - a frontend for Gdb and Make
- dballoc/ - a Memory Debug library
BrowseX is a free Open Source, cross-platform
Web Browser, Mail Program, Talk/Chat client and
more. There is a database interface, SQLite, and BrowseX
is easily extensible via an API.
BrowseX has been written primarily in C and Tcl and clearly
demonstrates that Linux applications can indeed bridge to Windows.
The user can also dynamically configure any widget, even form fields
in web pages, on the fly using Shift-Control-mousebutton.
You may also want to look at TML,
a CGI and Web Script that BrowseX has built-in.
The http://dev.browsex.com/ site now uses the TML CGI to
display the BrowseX documentation as TML directly.
For the user, BrowseX has two principle characteristics: resilience
and responsiveness. The first comes really as a side effect of using
Tcl for all highlevel algorithms. Errors result in popup dialogs rather
than crashes. Responsiveness is probably due to lightweight and
the widget based implementation which forced clean interfaces between parts.
Precompiled binaries are currently provided for Linux and Win32.
The binary is a single standalone executable, but which also contains the
Tcl scripts: See Packaging.
There is also a unified build script for Linux, for rebuilding from scratch.
Some of the new features as of release 1.3.1:
- Faster GIF loading using keepalives with pipelining
- Javascript support with partial DOM.
- Mime types implemented (with builtin and user defined)
- Language bindings for German and French
- A run through dmalloc, elminating Memory leaks
- Command-line arguments, ie -m starts mailer
- A simple application extension API
- The Win32 version is fully functional
- A mime capable Mail Reader with mime attachments
- The addition of an Address Book
- A Dynamic DNS client for registering your own domain(s), free
- A builtin Web Server, both HTTP and HTTPS for file sharing.
- A Peer-Peer Talk/Chat client that additionally supports SSL
- Native-C compiled Tml (an HTML macro language).
- The TML Editor TME is also bundled
Following are a couple of screen shots: 1024x768 and
800x600.
Javascript is still not enabled.
For the impatient, here is the Download page.
But you might want to review Features and Known Bugs first.
There is also a list of Selling Points or justifications
of why one might want to switch to BrowseX , in case you need that.
Overview
BrowseX is a lightweight, but powerful alternative Web Browser written by
Peter MacDonald. It is based upon a modified
Tkhtml widget to provide fast HTML rendering.
The remainder of the browser is implemented in
Tcl.
BrowseX starts out with most of the mainstream features of Netscape,
but without the fat. Then numerous nits or features Netscape
should have, have been added.
Here's the highlights:
Highlights |
o lightweight: starting at 3.8 Meg and works on a 12M/386 (in X!) |
o Packaged as a single standalone binary, that you can modify! |
o improved configurability, and tighter OS integration |
o better fault resilience and crash proofing |
o reliable client side scripting via Safe-Tcl |
o an embedded macro processor: TML. Standalone to! |
o less-mouse, and mouse-less operational support |
o configuration defaults adapt to available resources |
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Features
Following are some of BrowseX features
Features |
- An Open Source Artistic License
- Dynamic DNS support, and free access to the browsex.com domain
- Web Server supports remote access, even to read mail or run commands
- Talk lets you communicate directly and iteractively with others
- ZipView: view a zip archive of html content. (ala PDF)
- A password manager
- Animated Gif support
- A Macro Language: TML
- Mostly finished printing support
- The 72 Tcl language encodings
- Many configuration/control options
- Can view a zip archive of html content: html, gifs. (ala PDF)
- Netscape bookmarks import (in File/Util menu).
- Passman: a password manager for logins.
- A simple editor with Undo, and Encryption support
- Encryption options include either DES, or XOR (aperiodic).
- The NGS Javascript compiler is now included with BrowseX
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