SliTaz Forum

lexeii

Administrator

Registered: 2012-03-21

Posts: 1,853

SlimBoat web browser

It is "yet another" alternate browser you can use in your SliTaz installation.

SlimBoat is Qt based portable web browser.

Home page: http://www.slimboat.com/

Archive size: 16.2 MiB

Direct wget URL: http://www.slimboat.com/release/slimboat_i386.tar.xz

You can extract xz archive with 7z command from current folder: [c]7z x slimboat_i386.tar.xz[/c]

You'll get a .tar archive that you can extract using any favorite archive manager.

Run browser by click/run [c]slimboat.sh[/c] script.

Qt is included. Additionally you need to install SliTaz gst-plugins-base package.

Adobe Flash works. You need to put, as usual, flash plugin here: /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

P.S. Also, you need to install nss package if you want Adobe Flash to work.

Trixar_za

Administrator

Registered: 2011-03-29

Posts: 1,506

Re: SlimBoat web browser

I'm having a Love-Hate relationship with Qt at the moment. It's awesome, lightweight, powerful and pretty cool... until you try porting your QtWebkit code on Windows and discover that they've intentionally broke HTML5 Multimedia support and then just left it broken with a few insane hoops to jump through to get it to work again. So due respect to the SlimBoat devs with their Windows port.

plumtreed

Member

Registered: 2011-03-29

Posts: 115

Re: SlimBoat web browser

Many Thanks......looks great so far! Much quicker than most and easy to use....

michaelbischof

Member

Registered: 2012-01-20

Posts: 536

Re: SlimBoat web browser

Thanks a lot, Aleksej! This browser is actually damned quick and well done. - I wrote here from a very remote place with a shaky WLAN-conneciton which suffers heavy when it is raining, that is: since more than 48 h. So such a thing is a big relief!

lexeii

Administrator

Registered: 2012-03-21

Posts: 1,853

Re: SlimBoat web browser

Frankly, QtWeb browser is smaller, 12.3MB, and do the job too. It don’t need gstreamer with gst-plugins.

You can get QtWeb here: http://qtweb.net/download.html

But, QtWeb sometimes have strange behavior: accidentally tab closing, strange jumps to near/close tab. Maybe, it is mouse gestures? And I’m an ice age man :-)

michaelbischof

Member

Registered: 2012-01-20

Posts: 536

Re: SlimBoat web browser

@Aleksej

I do not need gstreamer as well. But I cannot afford strange behaviours in a browser. Fazit: the browser is nice and quick, but I have downloaded some unnecessary dependancies (bloat). Whatever, slitaz is slim enough to digest it.

@Trixar_za: just for being curious. „...discover that they've intentionally broke HTML5 Multimedia support and then just left it broken...“ - who has done it, the Qt-people or Microsoft?

Trixar_za

Administrator

Registered: 2011-03-29

Posts: 1,506

Re: SlimBoat web browser

The Qt developers with the Windows builds. I have been developing an application for Windows using Qt and QtWebKit which made me run into the issue as mentioned. More than once actually. Try going to http://trixarian.net/demo with the Windows version of Slimboat and you'll see what I mean. The file it's having trouble loading is the mp3 file. There's a reason for it and it involves a bunch of factors including Nokia selling Qt which left HTML5 Video and Audio broken in Qt released after 4.8.0. Earlier versions has other issues like antialiasing scaling and font issues that really makes it a rock and a hard place for developers.

This is just a Windows issue though, since the Linux and MacOS versions still use the Phonon backend. It can be made to work on Windows, but it takes a recompile of Qt and isn't very stable.