This week saw some new updates of the broadway backend. We now have a in-browser window manager for the non-toplevel window mode, and the backend now support a bunch more features.
I don’t want to bore you with technical mumbo jumbo though. Lets see some video instead! (Original source availible here)
[youtube width=”512″ height=”384″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO-qca9ddqg[/youtube]
This will be the last update in a while, as I need to spend time on other things. The code is in a pretty good shape though. There are still things to do, but most things work.
Update: Tested this with safari on OSX, and it worked too. Also we now have nicer browser-side window decorations.
While I’m not convinced running applications inside a web browser (well, painting applications, actually) is a good idea, you really deserve tons of recognition for the incredible feat you’ve achieved.
Like the idea or not, it’s just amazing from the purely technical point of view. I take my hat off to you.
Is this the beginning of the end of good’ol vnc?
Anyhow – Thanks for this, gnome has a bright bright future thanks to devs like yourself
Cairo and Canvas seem to have very similar APIs it would be cool if cairo stuff could tunnel through and be rendered using canvas in the broiwser.
WOW.
Speechless.
This is awesome work, Alex!
How come the window manager in the browser looks like Win7?
Leif: The WM decoration CSS was based on some existing css that looked like vista. I just landed a new adwaita-based look from one of the gnome designers (lapo).
Here is a screenshot of the new “WM” decorations
That’s cool. Like really cool!
Have you tried Battle for Wesnoth?
Does Battle for Wesnoth use gtk 3?
Have you tried if it runs firefox? (I herd you like browsers, so I put a browser in your html so you can browse html while you browse html)
David: Firefox isn’t gtk 3, and it has a bunch of X specific code, so it doesn’t work. There is a gtk 3 port going on though, so it might be possible soon.
That’s. Fucking. Crazy.
So, if you combined this with emscripten, you could translate the C code to JavaScript and run that in the browser too, drop the web server, and directly execute an entire GTK+ application in the browser.
alexl: I see what you did there!
[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ‘0 which is not a hashcash value.
How was state managed between firefox and chrome?
When I heard rumors that X may eventually die because no one cares about a “network transparent” window manager part of me died. Despite its performance issues and hiccups it was one of my favorite “to use in a pinch” linux features. You’ve just filled me with hope and got me excited for the future again. This is brilliant. Thank you!
I’ll have to go back and read to see what this is all about, but great stuff! Does this mean we’ll be able to forward our GTK apps to our remote browsers one day?
Incredible work! This blurs the line between desktop and browser applications even more.
Ar: VNC in HTML 5 has already been done as well: http://guacamole.sourceforge.net/
The recursive programmer in me really likes the idea of opening a the current browser showing Broadway, in the current browser 🙂
Now try this: connect to broadway, and using ephiphany in broadway connect to the broadway service also
Amazing! Really awesome stuff!
Try opening the web browser site inside the web browser site, just curious what will happen
Can we use this to easily port our gtk applications to android? Could we just run them in google-chrome?
Martin: The Android browser doesn’t seem to support websockets.
How long until I see firefox4 running in firefox4?
in my opinion, broadway is THE most impressive thing in last year. but, i have to wonder… will WM in browser be only option? i was downright floored by http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTMwMQ . in browser WM is always cumbersome restriction, while standalone out of browser windows in that video looked really, really slick and natural
Browser windows still work (append ?toplevel to uri to enable), but it has various issues that are hard to fix. The primary problem being that popups (like menus) can’t extend outside the window.
ahhh, thanks for both. developing this and information;) and since it was long ago since i last used any menu in my application, this is best news i could possibly hope for.
Hi,
is it possible to launch the app from within browser, but run it outside the browser? (somewhat like a special browser session with no menu/bar and stretchable borders)
Also, this thing needs to be done -just right- to succeed. otherwise it may end up as an interesting computer science project.
it has immense potential (if done right).
I want to try on my home server. is it(broadway) available for public download?
thank you.
Rajeev
Related Idea: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/27523/
Please promote, if interested.
I’m going to try to build a Native Client port of GTK based on this. That should allow the entire application to run native in the browser. (See http://cananian.livejournal.com/tag/nativeclient )
That’s simply awesome!
I want to see the Totem video player running with the GTK broadway backend. You should be able to put an HTML5 video on top of the canvas and use javascript to controll it.
i made this: http://vimeo.com/25108293
is there some options to control the port and the range of addresses to listen ?
My test tells that is always 8080 and just 127.0.0.1 or 192.168.x.x
is it correct?
Thanks for the great works
Francesco: Set BROADWAY_DISPLAY to the port you want. It will then listen to that port, and on all interfaces on the machine.
alexl:
If I build gtk3 with broadway backend enabled and try to start a gtk binary I will get a segfault with a warning:
$ GDK_BACKEND=broadway gnome-calculator
(gnome-calculator:19736): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: invalid cast from `GdkBroadwayDisplay’ to `GdkX11Display’
Segmentation fault
I’ve modified the latest gtk3 package from ubuntu (added –enable-x11-backend –enable-broadway-backend to configure parameters) and build it on https://launchpad.net/~dnjl/+archive/experimental.
Do I need something else?
Ah, removing ubuntu’s new overlay scrollbars solved this. They are not clean gtk3.
will this work without x server sometimes?
@dnjl:
I’ve tested your broadway enabled gtk3 libs but I get this error:
$ GDK_BACKEND=broadway /usr/bin/gtk3-demo
Gdk-ERROR **: Unsupported GDK backend: broadway
aborting…
What is my mistake?
Gigi
Looks cool, but wait! What about the security? I always thouhgt GTK+/Glib/… was not considered secure enough to be used “over the Internet”.