Making a Web Browser

[shovenose]

I need a web browser for a project I'm working on.
But I can't use Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Maxthon, Avant, or any other premade web browser. In fact, I need to make my own web browser for this project. It actually needs to be a standards-compliant web browser that can deal with standard HTML, JavaScript, etc. Now, the project simply requires a web browser that is full screen ( as in you can't use the underlying OS, which will probably be Linux), however, while I'm at it, I may as well make a full-featured version that works like a normal web browser and can compete with Firefox or Chrome or any of the other well-known alternatives to Internet Exploder.
I'm wondering, since some of them use WebKit, if I can use that?
And I notice WebKit is Open Source, does that mean that my browser needs to be Open Source too?
I plan to provide my browser for free (of course), for Windows first, then Mac OS X and Linux, BUT I don't want it to be open source!! I want to be in full control of my project and I don't like Open Source because I feel that would remove control onto a community, and it would turn into the bloated piece of crap that I feel Firefox is turning into (even though I do swear by Firefox and IMO it's still the best browser)...

Oh and how do I use WebKit? Like I want to make my UI and all that but I really don't want to make something that actually interprets the webpage(because I have no idea how to do that) and I'm assuming that's what WebKit does?
Please fill me in, thanks!

[Uranium-235]

Re: Making a Web Browser

sure, pull a HTML5 compliant browser out of your ass--seriously? Hows your C/C++ knowledge? it takes TEAMS of people to make browsers, or someone with years of programming knowledge.

you might not be able to use firefox, but you can always use gecko, its rendering engine, good luck with integrating it though. If people could easily make web browsers from scratch to compete with firefox, there would be many

[shovenose]

Re: Making a Web Browser

sure, pull a HTML5 compliant browser out of your ass--seriously? Hows your C/C++ knowledge? it takes TEAMS of people to make browsers, or someone with years of programming knowledge.

you might not be able to use firefox, but you can always use gecko, its rendering engine, good luck with integrating it though. If people could easily make web browsers from scratch to compete with firefox, there would be many

I'm not going for easy, just as easy as possible
Hey, I'm working on an OS right now, I'm sure I can work on a browser.
What's the difference between using Gecko or WebKit?
thanks

[mariushm]

Re: Making a Web Browser

It's plain impossible for a single person to write a modern web browser these days.

There's just too much code and functionality to implement and do it securely.. html5, svg, css 1,2,3, xml, javascript, plugins etc

Your only chance is to use Webkit (for example like Steam or others do) or the Gecko rendering engine (firefox etc).

They're open source - you don't have to release your stuff open source as well, just have to publish the source code of the open source components and anything you may have changed and maybe the layer of code that binds the open source module to your application (if this changes the webkit/gecko/whatever part)

As for people stealing your software, firefox is open source but you don't see 100 fake firefox versions out there - that's because while the source code is open "firefox" is a trademark so you'd have to name it diferently.

There are otherwise some variants of firefox, for example "pale moon" http://www.palemoon.org/ which optimizes everything inside firefox for current processors in detriment of p3,p4, athlon cpus.

You're in over your head, seriously, if you think you can code a browser.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Making a Web Browser

Most of the Firefox 3 versions are only 7 or 8 Mb of code.
That's not unattainable for one person - but it won't be easy either.
.
.
As I understand it you don't have to release your Source Code unless you distribute the software and even then you only have to release it to those you distribute it to.
.

[Scenic]

Re: Making a Web Browser

The only "homebrew" browser I know of is OffByOne. And that project was given up on years ago.. too complicated.

And as you can see when you try it out, it's useless for pretty much anything these days.

[shovenose]

Re: Making a Web Browser

I see. Well thanks for the opinions guys and I'm going to see if I can find a premade browser I can use for this task I need it to do (which I doubt I can, in which case I will have to make one)...

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Making a Web Browser

Unless you intend to brand it to sell/distribute it with something I'd consider using an existing open source browser and chopping the crap you don't need out of it.
.
Take an existing wheel and stream-line it rather than inventing a new one from scratch.
.

[ratdude747]

Re: Making a Web Browser

even if you branded it, so what. consider it a fork.

[shovenose]

Re: Making a Web Browser

Unless you intend to brand it to sell/distribute it with something

This is exactly what I plan to do.

[ratdude747]

Re: Making a Web Browser

if it is under GPL, you can use it commercially.

if it is under BSD, IDK.

If it is under a screwy license, then YMMV.

[shovenose]

Re: Making a Web Browser

How do I find that out? (In Firefox for example)...

[mariushm]

Re: Making a Web Browser

Help > About

or type about:license and about:rights in the url.

about:memory and about:mozilla are also fun.

=

If you plan to modify firefox and make it commercial (not free), you would have to remove everything copyrighted or trademarked to Mozilla (icons, logos etc) then go through each license from about:license and see if there are commercial exceptions - if that module allows no commercial use, you'd have to strip the module out of the browser. This is something that's not very easy, there are lots of dependencies between parts of the browser.
Even if you do manage to sort everything and edit everything, you'd have to compile this crap and basically on a dual socket system with 16-32 gigs of ram, it takes a few hours to do a compile... I don't remember what you had, on your system it could take a day or more.

And after all, if you want to sell it, you still need a bunch of lawyers or something like that to go through everything and make sure you follow the licenses.

= anyway, i have a feeling you're approaching the problem incorrectly. I think you're trying to make a device, a hardware thing, and basically want a sort of browser to act like the interface to your thing. If this is the case, it's quite easy to "script" the interface of firefox and remove tabs,menus, context menus, without recompiling or even editing source code. You can make the browser start automatically in full screen, even IE has a "cinema mode" aka full screen without menus.

Your "intellectual property" is the scripts that run within the browser, the browser could then remain open source and if anybody asks, you can just tell people to go get the source code off mozilla's servers and in the worst case, you'd have to provide them the scripts or changes you made to have the browser run always in full screen mode. The rest, the scripts and whatever runs inside the browser, it's yours.

[shovenose]

Re: Making a Web Browser

OK, I can't give you a ton of information, but visit the PHPOS.org website to see what we're trying to create.
We plan to provide two ways to access the web-based OS, at least to start out with:
1. Use an existing browser (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc.) to access the site. I'm going to push really hard to make it incompatible with Internet Explorer, "Sorry Internet Explorer is not supported. The PHPOS team recommends the use of Mozilla Firefox"...
2. A downloadable stand-alone OS, that all it does is include a full-screen web browser that is unclosable. Probably on top of some sort of customized Linux kernel...

I figure while we bother with #2 anyway, may as well take that a tiny step further to provide a fully standalone web browser for Windows, Mac S X, and Linux.

Maybe now you understand why I can't just take Firefox, force it to stay in Full screen mode, and so on and so forth.
And yes, this is going to be a product that will be sold for a monthly fee (of course there will be a free version). I don't want any legal trouble with anything big like mozilla or Google, etc...

[mariushm]

Re: Making a Web Browser

Hmmm

How's it any different than Chrome OS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome_OS) or HP's WebOS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS) ?

With all the backing it had, Chrome OS bombed out... we're just not ready for cloud stuff, and right now it's just a fad, just like 3d movies.

=

First of all, it's a really bad idea to call the project PHPOs - first, php is trademark you'll get sued by php group, second it will be impossible to do what you want with this project with php as it won't scale enough and not be powerful enough for your needs. Even if it's no worries from the legal point of view, you'd be awfully embarassed when you no longer use php for this project when it turns succesful - not to mention it would be a stupid name without meaning to your average user - what would it mean to your mother, for example, if she were to buy into this, how would you advertise it to her?
Google called it Chrome OS for a reason, it's the same name as their browser, which is simple and fast, so they leverage the browser branding to instill the idea that the Chrome OS would be nice and fast and good.


Even facebook started with php as it's very easy to work with, but wrote custom Apache modules in C, Erlang and other obscure programming languages and ended up spending a year writing HipHop-PHP: http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/358/ which is a compiler that takes php and converts it into C which then runs natively on the CPU.

Then, I really think you have no idea how much infrastructure you need - if this becomes popular you would need to scale it up A LOT. Without some investment fund and people believing in the project and willing to give you about $200k minimum just for hardware, you'll fail spectacularly.

Google started the Chrome OS simply because they already had the infrastructure in place, they have tens of thousands of servers in all continents that just stand there - when they're not used by the search system, they can use the spare CPUs for the Chrome OS widgets or can be inserted into a massive cluster to serve the actual widgets and applications to people.
Facebook also has tens of thousands of servers and still had to work on hiphop-php, to reduce the load on servers by about 40%
Livejournal also had to invent memcached to keep up with the popularity, see this presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/vishnu/liv...ory-of-scaling <--- ABSOLUTELY WATCH THIS, it's what every website that becomes popular eventually goes through, nothing is easy.

I'm telling you all this just to demonstrate that it's really hard to scale and you really have to think things thoroughly.

On the software side...

You can modify the Current firefox to only start in full screen without menus and anything but you won't be able to do what you're thinking without doing some sort of custom programming like writing an API that the widgets ("applications") running on your OS would have to follow.

The OS wouldn't matter, you can (theoretically) replace the desktop manager and hide the start menu and restrict user to the maximum, and since you're making the Linux distro you can tune that to the extreme.

[shovenose]

Re: Making a Web Browser

Thank you for the information.
However, How would PHP sue us? That doesn't make any sense? every web server (well, almost, my Dell 233MHz doesn't count), runs PHP-based websites!
Besides, the name can always be changed! Domain names are cheap and it would be easy to change every occurrence of phpos in the system to shoveos or whatever the heck it would end up being...
I sent that link to other guy and I'm reading it right now.
:-)

[ratdude747]

Re: Making a Web Browser

its not that you are using PHP. its that you are using "PHP" in the name...

kinda how Ubuntu EEE's name had to be changed to Easy Peasy because they were using Ubuntu's name.

keep in mind things like GPL and BSD only cover operating code; names can still be copyrighted and trademarked even if the code is under the GPL.

[mariushm]

Re: Making a Web Browser

http://www.php.net/license/3_01.txt

3. The name "PHP" must not be used to endorse or promote products
derived from this software without prior written permission. For
written permission, please contact group@php.net.

4. Products derived from this software may not be called "PHP", nor
may "PHP" appear in their name, without prior written permission
from group@php.net. You may indicate that your software works in
conjunction with PHP by saying "Foo for PHP" instead of calling
it "PHP Foo" or "phpfoo"

Technically, this refers strictly to software programs using parts of PHP - like making a software called "superphp" containing php inside itself. But it wouldn't be hard to stretch it to other things.

Even though it's an open source project, it's a brand and a reputation. For example, at some point they may wish to sell t-shirts or mugs to get money and finance the open source project further. If they'd let any website use php in the domain they may create confusion and dilute their "brand".
It's Ok to use it for some projects like phpMyAdmin.net because there's no chance you'd confuse it but if you'd sell an "operating system" called phpOS, it's a stretch.

For the same reason you don't see domains like "best-stuff-on-amazon.com" or "ebay-jewlery.com" because these take advantage of amazon/ebay branding to gain trust but domains like paypalsucks.com are acceptable because they're for critique not to make money off paypal.

Yes, in theory domain can be changed, but people have memory and a brand/logo etc is very important. Just think at how Netflix screwed up and tried to separate it's businesses into Qwikster and another... fail.
Statistically, few companies survive domain changes.

[shovenose]

Re: Making a Web Browser

Well when 1.0 comes out on 1/1/2013, we'll have a fully new site up and working, on a different domain with a different product name.
I'm glad somebody brought this up

[shovenose]

Re: Making a Web Browser

Oh and any ideas for a new name?
WebOS is taken, CloudOS isn't but the domains are, PHPOS won't work obviously...
shoveOS sounds like crap...