At work, I've been toying with the idea of using K-meleon as a lightweight browser for Windows, and have it reside on CD. Mozilla is way too bulky, and K-meleon supports all the useful plugins we might want to use. The power of this is that we can write demos that don't depend on the version of IE/whatever they might have on their machine. Pop in the CD, and you see the first page of a demo/site fullscreen.

From a dev standpoint, I feel that I'm almost there, but it's an odd thing I'm trying to do. K-meleon is used to a) having a disk it can write to for caching and config saves, and b) knowing its absolute path from a config file so that it can find prefs relative to it [in the CD case you can't, since the CD drive could be any drive letter]. The tries I''ve had so far have a limited K-meleon booting from CD, but only after a lot of waring dialogs saying it can't find config files.

I was hoping for some suggestions from the people who know the code intimately. I suspect there are two solutions. The best would be to find out any configs or prefs I should destroy/edit to make this work on a write-only volume. The next best would be to grab the v6 source and create a build that loads configs from the app-relative path without paths in the preference.

Anyone have some ideas about this? Thanks in advance....

BraveSirRobin

From what I can see in the source, Preferences.cpp is where all things related to this happen. All paths are loaded from Prefs.js for the current active profile. Where these things are located are determined by the settingsDir, which is an absolute path to the folder containing menus.cfg, etc.

The code does something cool with the plugins directory. If not specified in the prefs.js file, it assumes that it is located in the /plugins subdirectory relative to the .exe path. If the code did something similar with the settingsDir, I think we'd be in business.

I'm working on getting the source for v0.6 so I can try this mod out. It might not hurt to place a similar change in the main tree.

From what I can tell, plugins aren't so much installed as they are resident in the /plugins directory. Some require a registry entry for confirmation of a EULA, but after accepting it things should work as if the plugin were on disk. I'll have to test it all out, though.

I guess it depends on what you want to do. Off By One might work for you if you can live with its limitations. It's pretty much plain HTML 3.2, very minimal Javascript support. You also couldn't tinker with the menus as you can with KM. But it's quite compact, just a single 1.1mb executable file. Two extra .dll files are optional if you need SSL support.

I don't know whether there are any licensing issues with the freeware version, but in any case you could probably license its core ("Webster Pro") to customize any way you like. Details at the web site.

http://www.offbyone.com/

It seems that the features that you need are:

* allow defining a configuration file from the command-line (to override the built-in one)

* allow defining an initial URL (already implemented, right?)

* Allow defining an initial window size on startup (or is XUL rich enough for that?)


In that configuration fie you define a certain profile with a disabled disk caching. Is a cache of size '0' enough for that?

David, I have been working on something similar but using xulrunner. I am very curious to know how far you have reached. Is it possible for you to share your source?

This is what i achieved.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3433040/best-way-to-make-standalone-chromeless-browser-with-nothing-else

I can see a KM1.7 working on it.

Just set this to
setpref(INT, "browser.cache.disk.capacity",0);

And this could be set to
setpref(INT,"browser.cache.memory.capacity",0);

Or

setpref(INT,"browser.cache.memory.capacity",65536);


It might work. But it's the profile, that is the hard part.
The profile will have to be the same name like "axvfhr4.default"
because it will be on the CD.

I would put in a blank file called "profile.ini" in the K-meleon program file.
This will keep the profile in the program file location.

Just set up the browser on your PC & copy it to CD.
Your bookmarks will be read-only.

For can do it. Just set up the browser to run on RAM, or none at all!