Exactly one year after the release of Mozilla 0.95 based K-Meleon 0.6, Mozilla 1.2b based K-Meleon 0.7 is out.
K-Meleon is a ultra-lite, ultra-fast, modular Web browser based on a stripped-to-the-bones Gecko rendering engine that comes with a fast, minimal and Windows standard user interface. It handles your Netscape, Internet Explorer and Opera bookmark files, features tabbed browsing ("layers"), macros and is fully configurable. If you want the Mozilla browser as fast as it gets (just try Control-N), this is your choice.
If you want the Mozilla browser component in a cross platform solution instead, check Phoenix. Phoenix uses the Mozilla XUL user interface language and may get company by the Thunderbird-called standalone Mozilla mail client later. In related news, osnews.com has a user poll on Gecko's "other browsers".
Meanwhile, the XUL GUI framework has become a serious contender to become the cross platform GUI framework.
XUL? "Basically, you design your interface in XML, glue the events together with some JavaScript, and call binary XPCOM classes (virtually the same as Microsoft COM classes) when you need to do something fast in C++ that doesn't need a UI. And UI's never need to be that fast, so this is a good division of labor. Theoretically, you get cross-platform Nirvana. And thanks a lot of hard work all the little platform-specific touches (like Alt+Space N to minimize a window) are finally right."
Mozilla Calendar is a small, but well known application example,
oeone.com and
Komodo show how far you can go with it. Perhaps I wouldn't say that XUL is
the GUI framework to end all GUI frameworks, as some already do, but I think it's definitely worth a closer look, so I compiled a few ressources:
XUL RESSOURCES
:: oeone.com: The Joy of XUL
:: mozilla.org: XUL Programmer's Reference Manual
:: xulplanet.com: Main XUL Tutorial
:: xulplanet.com: XUL App Tutorial
:: devx.com: The future of GUI development isn't class libraries, frameworks or platforms: it's XML
UPDATE
Found this in the Joel on Software archives: "If I had to start developing a new commercial app I would seriously look at XUL, [...] which seems to be one of the first solid frameworks for true GUI portability (WORA). XUL may well be a real benefit to Apple and Linux, because application developers finally have a way to deliver to all three platforms for perhaps 110% of the cost of Windows alone."
RELATED READINGS
:: oeone.com: Mozilla Developer Ressources
IN THE ARCHIVES
2002-09-19: Creating Applications with Mozilla now Open Source
