Friday, January 23, 2009

WebKit Instead of Mozilla

I'm a big fans of Liferea, an open source RSS reader application. It's very easy to install, with only small dependencies. It only asked for some GNOME/GTK libraries, which is easy to be found on most Linux distributions.

That idea has changed when 1.5.x (unstable) was released. New libraries are needed, making building process a little bit harder than 1.4.x. In 1.5.6, there was a big change on the HTML rendering engine. They have dropped Mozilla/Gecko/XulRunner support which was used until 1.5.5 and turn to WebKit. I don't know why, but it works and they changed it just like that. I know WebKit is also a good rendering engine, but in most RSS feeds, the layout are mostly very simple and plain. It's being focused on the content itself.

In order to compile the latest version, i had to compile webkit and all it's dependencies first, then i can install Liferea. It's a pain in the past, but i have managed to install webkit and now Liferea is lurking back again on my system big grin

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:24 PM

    I like liferea, it seems to work well as a GTK RSS reader. However the biggest problem is the inclusion of GConf and ORBit2.

    It just "leaves a mess" in my /tmp (yes, I am that OCPD about things). plus I feel it's fairly obtrusive (this might just be a personal opinion and not based on facts at all), that once it is installed a lot of things tend to jump in on it.

    I might give it another run in the future :)

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  2. yeah, GConf and ORBit2 is a mess, but luckily, there's a SlackBuild script on SlackBuilds.org which really helped me on installing that packages in order to satisfy the dependencies

    i have just upgraded to 1.5.8 and it's working fine here :)

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