As many of you are aware, AOL’s latest version of Netscape is based upon Firefox, with a twist. It allows users to render their pages using their choice of either Internet Explorer’s rendering engine, or Gecko, the native Mozilla engine.
For those who aren’t familiar there’s a good article on it here.
The ability to switch between Gecko and Internet Explorer rendering engines is a good thing for users, I think, and. It allows them to use their browser of choice and still be able to browse any web pages they want. And of course, Gentoo is all about choice!
As such, a new version of Firefox will be in portage a bit later today with exactly this enhancement. Using the same basic technologies as Captive NTFS, we are now able to make use of mshtml.dll on the Linux platform, and optionally use it in place of the gecko engine currently used by Mozilla Firefox.
The Internet Explorer renderer will be enabled by default in the ebuild, and can be switched off using a menu item once Firefox is running. I hope you all enjoy this technical innovation!
Hmmm… I hate April Fool’s Day.
So this means “iexplore” will be added to the list of valid USE flags, right? 🙂 Hopefully the Gnome team adds support… as I’d MUCH rather use explorer than Nautilus. 🙂