HTML viewer

[wj313]

Hi forum,

I've been looking for some kind of "help viewer", which displays HTML pages within X11.

The viewer should be capable of Javascript and CSS, and should have the absolute minimum system requirements, that is the hard disk memory and main memory should be as low as possible.

I'm thinking about a QT widget, but also recompiling some (old) KDE libs with minimum dependencies...

Before digging deeper into this topic - what would be the most promising alternative regarding a small, fast HTML viewer?

What hard disk and main memory footprint would you expect?

Kind regards.

[wysota]

It will be hard to go lower than khtml (Konqueror) which depends on KDE3 libs (several MB of memory footprint) or WebKit that in turn depends on Qt4. If you would strip the javascript requirement, you could use QTextBrowser. All gecko based engines are huge memory haulers as well, so that's surely not an option... What exactly do you need it for? I'm asking about deployment...

[wj313]

Dear wysota,

I'm evaluating some kind of "help viewer" and "interactive configuration interface" for users.

I'm using a patched "dillo" at this time. However, without Javascript. Unfortunately, Javascript is a "must" - otherwise I can stick with dillo ..

It doesn't need to be the latest-bleeding-edge implementation of the HTML, CSS or Javascript specs ..
I'm also thinking about qt2 and kdelibs2 (khtml, kjs) .. any experience with the memory footprint of this libraries? (Would it be a "good" option?)

Kind regards.

[wysota]

I would strongly doubt khtml2 supports css, you'd have to look at release dates of both of them.

From what I see Dillo is very limited - no support for neither JavaScript nor CSS.

Is it going to be deployed on a machine with strict memory policy? An embedded system maybe?

I currently have konqueror opened and it consumes 47MB in total (33M reserved + 14M shared) with some webpage open and probably some caching in memory. Those 14M are more important here - that's the impact of Qt3 and KDE3. The reserved part can surely be much lower.

[wj313]

Dear wysota,

no it's not an embedded device - but the target is a very low-end x86 pc ..

The announcements of KDE 2.2 stats that Konqueror supports Javascript and CSS (http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-2.2.php).

So I think khtml2 has support for CSS ..

Maybe any other option for a configuration interface that can be controlled also via remote? (e.g. "native" QT is not an option ..)

Kind regards.

[wysota]

KDE2 might support CSS but in a very limited degree. Comparing the dates one can see KDE2.2 might handle a small subset of CSS2. Heavy effort has been put to make KHTML3 CSS compliant, so I guess previous versions had problems.


Maybe any other option for a configuration interface that can be controlled also via remote? (e.g. "native" QT is not an option ..)

Why do you say native Qt is not an option? If you used Qt, you could get the browser almost for free (I'm speaking about Qt4 and WebKit).

[wj313]

Dear wysota,

can you give me some number about the hard disk and memory footprint of a "minimal" QT4 with WebKit?

If you compile QT4 without _any_ dependencies - just to display some very generic and simple web pages, what would you expect?

Kind regards.

[wysota]

You can strip many things from Qt while compiling it, so it's impossible for me to determine a minimal set of features you might need. Full-featured WebKit library is about 10MB in volume. Qt libraries QtWebKit depends on are Core, Gui and Network which with a minimal feature set should give about 4-6 additional megabytes. Just be aware Qt depends on some other libraries as well. They should be already available on your system, but they also occupy memory.

In general if you are going to run the whole set on a unix machine with 64MB RAM or more, it should be enough. With 32MB it might be hard as the system needs some memory to operate as well :)

[Brandybuck]

Go with WebKit. It has the smallest footprint of any open source web engine that supports JS/CSS2. It is being used in embedded devices, so it should not have a problem in an older PC.