[dundee] Chrome://

[Rick Moynihan]

On 26/02/2008, christopher wyllie <cgwyllie at googlemail.com> wrote:
> What is the "chrome thingy"? :)

I'm no XUL/Chrome/Mozilla expert, but because of certain abstractions
built into Mozilla you can render the Chrome (which is pretty much a
containing UI panel plus scrollbars, menus etc...) by visiting it's
URL.  Try visiting the following URL in firefox, to render firefox
inside firefox:

chrome://browser/content/browser.xul

I'm not particularly well informed on the issue Arron raised, and have
never built anything on top of Mozilla directly other than via
Greasemonkey; but I suspect that what Arron's after isn't really
possible without serious hacking.  My reasoning:

Chatzilla is a plugin running under firefox's Gecko Runtime, where as
Sunbird isn't a plugin but a separate application making use of it's
own Gecko Runtime.

I suspect you could get someway there by hacking around the Chrome
registry and resolving paths to the relevant javascript, XUL and
perhaps even linking any native Sunbird code with XPCOM.

Perhaps this sort of thing will become increasingly more possible
though with projects like XULRunner:

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XULRunner

and Prism:

http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/10/prism/

striving to turn Mozilla into a better RIA (Rich Internet Application)
platform.

Also, Thunderbird 3 under (now under Mozilla Messaging) will be
integrating Calendaring presumably from Sunbird... When this happens
presumably Seamonkey (formerly the Mozilla Suite) will do the same
(allowing precisely what you want).

Still, this is just speculation on my part; so it might be as 'simple'
as merging the differences between both application installs (in
practice though I'd be surprised if this could be described simple).

--
Rick Moynihan
rick.moynihan at gmail.com
http://sourcesmouth.co.uk/blog/