Luakit is a configurable, micro-browser framework based on WebKit and GTK+

luakit.org

34 points·bobbywilson0··6 comments

I've been looking for something like this all morning. The only thing I found close to making a custom browser UI is Mozilla's Chromeless SDK which is in alpha stages. http://github.com/mozilla/chromeless

Anybody knows anything else other than taking Gecko or webkit and doing it the hard way?

Maybe QtWebKit?

http://doc.trolltech.com/4.7/qtwebkit.html

It's still C++, but a lot more pleasant to deal with than Gecko, at least...

What are you looking to do? It seems like there are enough of these "base" projects to work off of.

Looking to buld a custom browser for my aunt who is not tech savvy. I just installed ubuntu nd have currently made FireFox to startup automatically in the bash script. I removed the gnome panels too.

I like to keep my eye on these browsers. Conkeror got very close to being the sort of browser I would like to have but was just a little bit too slow compared to Webkit based browsers.

One thing that puzzles me about this though: why lua when you have access to JS engines? Would I have to use two extension languages to write a plugin which touches a webpage and the chrome?

As extension languages go, Lua is like a better Javascript. The whole design is cleaner, and it has a very high performance JIT compiler (LuaJIT, http://luajit.org/) for x86 platforms.

Mainly, though, I think the devs just prefer it. (I do, too.)

Also, using a separate scripting language makes the local / web barrier clearer, which probably helps with security.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com