Chimera 0.4 ReleasedWednesday July 24th, 2002Brian Ryner writes: "Version 0.4 of Chimera, a Gecko-based browser for Mac OS X, has been released. More information can be found on our website." Chimera is one of the more exciting Mozilla-based projects going on right now, and we'll be keeping you up to date on it's progress. New stuff in 0.4 includes a new profile directory, better download progress feedback, and a ton of stability fixes, along with the normal bugfixing. You can download this latest release from ftp.mozilla.org and find out more information about it on their website. I'm incredibly impressed, for a .4 browser (given it's built on all that mozilla work, at least I assume) it acts like a 6.x or more browser. The browsing with tabbed windows is definitely going to get me to switch over from ie. Not to mention the shortcuts handling. And that it's so darn good looking. The one thing (so far) that I really miss from ie though is being able to move around the web page by command-drag, as well as command-arrow keys. I hope that's on a to-be-added feature list somewhere. cheers, Ben http://www.ideacog.net amazing release.... best os x browser out there. great job! I have OS X and use Mozilla 1.1b and Omniweb 4.1 (with Mozilla being my main browser). I don't know much about Chimera but I'm interested to know why would I use it over these two...? If you want a slim and trim browser-only with a native frontend and the fastest and most correct rendering on Mac and you're willing to live without some of the mozilla featureset (you still get tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking) then Chimera might be for you. I use both Mozilla and Chimera on my OS X machine. --Asa Chimera is as fast as OmniWeb, but with far better rendering of everything but Unicode text (there are still a few nagging bugs in Unicode rendering on OS X in Gecko, at least for the languages that interest me; they are in Bugzilla and folks have been working on them). It's free, OmniWeb isn't. I believe Chimera combines a Unix backend and a Cocoa front end, while OmniWeb is pure Cocoa (OmniWeb was originally a NeXT browser), but there are no significant differences in performance that I've seen (then again, I haven't tried the latest version of either). If you use Mail.app as your mail agent, and don't need Mozilla Mail/News or Composer, and want a Cocoa look, but want a good, solid Gecko-based browser, Chimera is a good choice. Here's a summary of all the Macintosh Mozilla products/projects. The original thread is here: <http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback/read.php?f=7&i=279&t=276> 1) Mozilla Suite intended for MacOS 8/9 and not OS X . FTP release file: mozilla-mac-trunk-full.bin. This is referenced on the "download Mozilla" release pages on Mozilla.org. 2) FizzillaCFM -- fully Carbon, mac back-end, CFM based. Mozilla Suite intended for *both* MacOS 8/9 and MacOS X. Release file from ftp.mozilla.org: mozilla-macosX-trunk.smi.bin. This is referenced on the "download Mozilla" release pages on Mozilla.org. 3) FizzillaMach -- mac Carbon front-end, unix back-end, Mach-o based. Mozilla Suite intended for MacOS X only. Release file from ftp.mozilla.org: MacMozilla-MachO.dmg.gz. This is flavor is not referenced on the "download Mozilla" release pages on Mozilla.org. 4)Chimera -- Cocoa-native browser that embeds Gecko through Cocoazilla. This is browser only, but unlike the "standard" releases it uses Aqua isntead of XUL for the GUI. Release file from ftp.mozilla.org: None, this is not part of the current 1.0.x set of releases. This flavor is totally separate from the rest of the "standard" Mozilla suite and is more analogous to K-Meleon but for MacOS X. (Hope I have that part right) And it's far from complete. So, 1) and 2) are the basic Mozilla Suite releases for most people at this point for the Macintosh platform. Okay now I DID enter that link right. Here it is again: <http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback/read.php?f=7&i=279&t=276> If it still messes that up the URL spelled out is: http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback/read.php?f=7&i=279&t=276 May we have some screenshots of this new version? There's some screenshots at http://chimera.mozdev.org/screenshots.html - not sure how recent they are though. Alex Will we ever see native scrollbars in Galeon? That would be so awesome. That's really the single largest visual detraction when using Galeon. You are constantly reminded that it's no native application. :( Luckily the default scrollbar looks very similar to my Gtk theme but that's no solution. I don't know. I do know that the nsITheme work that Brian is finishing (you can build this yourself now and it works quite well) does wonders for making Mozilla widgets pick up the GTK theme. The scrollbar in a gecko window is a Mozilla scrollbar so the Galeon folks could probably compile this new nsITheme code into their embedded gecko widget and then you would get "nearly native" look and feel for the scrollbar. Note, I'm just guessing here. I have no idea whether or not this is a feasable option for embedded Gecko. I've been testing it on Mozilla and it's great. --Asa What really annoys me is that the scrollbars attached to combos in web forms are native and the one outside the client srea is XUL ! One would expect the reverse, no ? |