Newbie Developer seeks guidance :o(

[Phil]

I am at the feasability stage of a project and we are considering embedding some flavour of Mozilla into our (Unix) product.
I need information regarding PC resource usage, development effort etc. for Mozilla, Galeon, Skipstone, (others?). Which of these can be crammed into our limited memory? What can we remove if we decide to go our own way? Will it run fast enough?

I've had a look at the newsgroups and found lots of spam and questions but no answers. Are there FAQ pages anywhere? Specifications for builds? Test results?

[jgraham]

I hate to suggest the obvious, but <a href="http://www.mozilla.org">mozilla.org</a> contains a *lot* of information - you could try searching. Otherwise, I'm told the developers hang out on irc://irc.mozilla.org/#mozilla which would be the place to go to ask specific development related questions.

If you're just embedding gecko, then you probably want the <a href="http://mozilla.org/projects/embedding/embedoverview/EmbeddingBasics.html">gecko embedding basics</a>. That would be the most efficient way to embed the rendering engine that is common to all mozilla based browsers.

I hope this answer isn't misleading. maybe I should have left this to someone who knows what they're talking about...

[Phil]

Thanks for the suggestions. I've read lots of useful and interesting stuff, but still cannot find the basics.

For Linux,
1) How much RAM & Disc space does Gecko require?
2) How much RAM & Disc space does Mozilla require?
3) How much RAM & Disc space does Galeon require?
4) How much RAM & Disc space does Skipstone require?
5) At the limit, what is the minimum RAM & Disc space requirement for an absolutely no frills browser?

If we go for Gecko, I need to estimate development costs for producing a browser with it.

[jgraham]

Thanks for the suggestions. I've read lots of useful and interesting stuff, but still cannot find the basics.

For Linux,
1) How much RAM & Disc space does Gecko require?
2) How much RAM & Disc space does Mozilla require?
3) How much RAM & Disc space does Galeon require?
4) How much RAM & Disc space does Skipstone require?
5) At the limit, what is the minimum RAM & Disc space requirement for an absolutely no frills browser?

If we go for Gecko, I need to estimate development costs for producing a browser with it.

I suggest you try netscape.public.mozilla.embedding if you have not already. Otherwise, in answer to 2), from the 1.2.1 release notes, for Linux:

<blockquote>
* The following library versions (or compatible) are required: glibc 2.1, XFree86 3.3.x, GTK 1.2.x, Glib 1.2.x, Libstdc++ 2.9.0. Red Hat Linux 6.0, Debian 2.1, and SuSE 6.2 (or later) installations should work.
* Red Hat 6.x users who want to install the Mozilla RPM must have at least version 4.0.2 of rpm installed. There is an official update to rpm from Red Hat.
* Intel pentium class 233 MHz (or faster) processor
* 64 MB of RAM
* 26 MB of free hard disk space
</blockquote>

Note that this installs a lot of 'junk' that you could remove for embedding purposes. The mozilla based phoenix browser (no mail/news, no irc, no composer) is much smaller than this. I'm sure someone can give you a figure. Importantly, much of this size change is from stripping away chrome (e.g. only one theme with the default build). This will also reduce the memory requirements substantially. If you want to use mozilla technology on a low-spec machine, it is *not* standard mozilla you want to be looking at. Note also that Galeon (afaik) doesn't use XUL for the interface - which is also likely to represent some performance improvement.

Again, I defer you to someone more knowledgeable than myself to answer your detailed questions. Newsgroups should be the answer, but another possible source of information would be the <a href="http://www.mozdev.org/consultants/index.html">mozdev consultants</a> or someone linked on the gecko embedding pages.