My friend and I are college students working on a project for one of our classes. We came up with some really interesting design ideas for browser interfaces and decided to go with them and use an open source browser to implement them. After being scared away from Firefox we came across this browser and really ended up liking it. A lot. The features, design, everything is really solid. We would like to use this browser as the base for our ideas, but finding our way through open-source code is rather difficult.

Basically all we really want to edit is the interface surrounding the web pages. We were wondering if anyone could help us in editing this piece. A dev map, an explanation as to which files contain that part of the GUI, or any other help you could give would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Probably check the toolbar plugin.

Hao

Yes, to expand on that a little further, as Hao said you'll want to look at the "toolbars.dll", and likewise the "bmpmenu.dll", and possibly the "rebarmenu.dll" and "layers.dll" found in the K-Meleon subdirectory of "kplugins" as these .dll files all work to change the GUI of the browser to one extent or another.

You may also wish to look at the "fullscreen.dll" as well if you choose to continue using full-screen in your interface, as this obviously affects the GUI.

I could be all wet behind the ears on this of course, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong here, but I seem to remember old threads and Devlist letters about how these affected the GUI structure, yada, yada...

Bonne chance!

Eyes-Only
"L'Peau-Rouge"

Modifying firefox interface is not that difficult when you have understood how XUL work. But tehee, it's really a clutter and finding your way around is not obvious.

Kmeleon is not cross platform and work only on windows. Using it for your study may not be a good choice. Though I'll glady offer help to seomeone who want to improve it

Like stated before, part of the inferface are mostly in toolbars.dll and bmpmenu.dll. But if you want to make something really different, you could just create a new plugin that will handle the creation of elements surrounding the web page.

Thanks for all your help so far fellas.

To clarify a little better, our project has to be based on the Windows platform, written in the IDE Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, and written in MC++ .NET. We've been looking through the K-Meleon src and are starting to get a feel for where we need to change things up, but there is still a lot of code to go through.

Right now we're trying to break apart the basic Windows interface of K-Meleon from the Gecko layout engine, essentially taking away the "internet" functionality. Since our project is based only on the browser interface, this will give us a good test basis that we can compile without compiling the whole browser each time. Of course breaking these apart without breaking something else is gonna be a challenge in itself. Any help on this would be appreciated as well.

To comment on past posts, we're working with the "kmeleon09src.zip" found on the SourceForge page. We haven't seen any .dll files in the src to look at, but we are looking at the .h and .cpp files for both. If anyone has any updated versions that are more compatible with VS .NET 2003 that would also be very helpful. We've been experimenting with the Forms Design section of 2003 as well. (.resX files I believe.) We know finding K-Meleon in that format is near impossible, but if anyone's got it, I'll have your children. Just kidding.... but not really.

Anyway, thanks for all you're help so far. You guys have been great.

@greeny (---.elon.edu),

breaking away interface from layout engine

could You for example put in the MSIE RenderingEngine?
(afaik k-m derives from a little demo by MS that was passed out with visual c)

AFAIK that would not need recompiling every time - and You (i perhaps too)
could patch it (there is a tool to patch Mozilla GRE into progis that use IE RE)
- and You ´d have a browser that potentially uses two differnt RenderingEngines.

A Plus: one that is potentially independent of a specific Gecko version
(see other patched application that priorly used MSIE engine e.g. Sylera
a Japanese browser similar to k-m but IMHO less developed).

links at Mozilla that You may want to visit - when You temper with an embed
application like k-m: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/faq.html#section-1

and: http://www.iol.ie/%7Elocka/mozilla/mozilla.htm

maybe: http://www.iol.ie/%7Elocka/mozilla/pluginhostctrl.htm

the last is about embed Netscape plugin using capabilty to IE or other such program (just in case You have brocken away something like that).

amicalment

p. s. i am not a programer but found these pages and ideas when reading.