Florian Winkler wrote: > thanks for your reply. I did not fully get it. > I thought WinEmbed is the far older sample / test project and that it > was rendered obsolete by mfcembed. At least that is what i had read > here: > http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Roll_your_own_browser_-_An_embedding_HowTo. > > Ok, the page is outdated, but even in the outdated page winembed was > obsolete. > Anyway, since you are the one on whose behalf the nice disclaimer at the > top of that page was placed ;), I would like to ask you some questions. > > Question 1: > what do you mean by "old profile service"? Is there a new one?
Not really. Back in the days, the Mozilla suite supported dynamically switch profiles in the middle of running and had a profile service which did the dirty work. The "new toolkit" used by Firefox and Thunderbird (and now all applications) does not support this mode and has removed that profile service. There is a little replacement that allows advanced users to select a profile at startup, but this is not available during normal runtime. > Question 2: > you pointed out that embedding should be done with a build of XULrunner. > Does that mean that XULrunner comes with all the libs and stuff that you > need to create applications that include a gecko browser engine? > I have difficulties clearly separating the functionality that is > provided by e.g. Firefox and XULrunner on the other hand. I thought > XULrunner is just a runtime environment for XUL apps. XULRunner is the Mozilla runtime packaged up without the Firefox frontend. It can be used to run XUL applications as well as for embedding. The XULRunner package itself contains only the runtime: it doesn't contain headers or link libraries needed to *create* a XUL/embedding application. These headers and link libraries are contained in the XULRunner SDK package. > Question 3: > I would actually like to embed a browser that behaves like Firefox, not > only in the way it renders pages, but most of all, in such a way, that I > can keep using my Firefox extensions and profiles with the embedded > browser. I am not talking about the management (update, download, > installation, etc.) of extensions, but I need an embedded browser that > still reads extensions from a dedicated directory, like Firefox does. So > that I could place my extensions there. > Is that possible with Gecko? If so, do I have to build in any special way? > Or is it even possible to actually embed Firefox, just by stripping off > some GUI or so...? Well, that depends on what you mean by "embed". Support for extensions is currently limited to apps which use the "XRE_main" API to start the application, which is typically XUL applications. This is because getting extensions registered properly sometimes requires that the process be restarted. You haven't really stated what you're actually trying to acheive with embedding, so it's hard to answer the question. Do you really just want webrunner or another minimal XUL application, or are you integrating with some external technology? > Question 4: > There is a lot of information spread all over the Mozilla sites that are > related to embedding. However I find it extremely difficult to find a > good starting point with the latest consistent information. > I read a lot already, about XPCOM, and the many other techs (XPIDL, > XPConnect,etc.). I managed to compile Firefox and even got mfcembed to > compile and run under Visual Studio 2005. > So I know already something, but still feel confused quite often. > Do you have any good hint on where to look at first to get properly > started with embedding? Nobody is actively maintaining the embedding documentation; it is old and outdated (as you have found out) and is very disorganized. I'd love for somebody to step forward and organize it! --BDS _______________________________________________ dev-embedding mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-embedding
