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Lunascape - Web Browser with all major rendering engines

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icekin:
Straight from Japan: Lunascape

Claims to be the world's only triple engine browser. Don't know about that, I know FF with IE View extension was quite popular among web developers before. Anyone tried this?

marcdw:
I'm giving it the once-over right now. I must say, so far I'm impressed. Relatively speaking it's a rather
snappy program. Having an older computer (ThinkPad T21, 800MHz PIII) I get a good feel for how well
programs run. Firefox for instance is just too heavy feeling. Very slow to startup, seems to suck up RAM,
and just doesn't feel very responsive. Almost the same for Thunderbird, too (my default email app though
I'm still searching for something with its features but less resource usage).
My default browser for years has been SlimBrowser so that's the one I compare all others too.

Upon installation and initial startup Lunascape walks you through various setups such as selecting default
rendering engine and design/skin. When I selected the Firefox (Simple) look it was too bright for me so I kept
it at the IE6 look which better fits my rather dull OPENSTEP Windows look (I'm not much for eye candy).

Settings:  There are lots of them which is a good thing. You can tweak this thing to your hearts desire
although I can't uncheck the option to use skins with the tabs. Thus my tabs have a white/blue gradient
look that clashes with the gray of everything else.

Haven't yet done any testing with changing rendering engines on the fly. As you may know each tab
can hold a page with its own renderer. One can also set, somewhere, for certain sites to always use
a certain rendering engine.

Whether or not I adopt Lunascape depends on whether or not it can use the RoboForm toolbar.
The RoboForm toolbar is listed in the list of bars to toggle but when went to the DonationCoder
logon page RoboForm didn't recognize it. Nor was I able to fill in the form.
Even though the toolbar will attach just fine I guess RoboForm itself doesn't support this browser.
Or maybe it has to do with the renderer, not sure. I'm using Gecko as the default.

Anyhind, so far so good.
Marc

sajman99:
The Lunascape website indicates "Browsers are not made equal...but you can have it ALL with Lunascape". From a security standpoint, I'm thinking I might not want it all. I mean, wouldn't this triple-engine browser be exposed to every Trident/Gecko/Webkit vulnerability? :tellme:

dantheman:
Firefox 3.5 may be slow at clean start up but usually starts up much faster after initial system boot. Otherwise, it is faster than IE6,7,8 and whatever plugin browser that goes with it. Google Chrome 3 is probably fastest at present but you don't have adblock nor plugins (addons or widgets) to enhance your browsing experience. Shucks, it doesn't even have mouse gestures!  :o

Vulnerabilities for Lunascape? Probably not much of an issue anymore as all major browsers keep making security updates. Just like AV programs. If you get hacked it's because they don't have the means to resolve the issues yet or... you haven't kept your AV updated?

Nutty:
Re: Chrome
There are addons for Chrome.  See e.g., mychromeaddons.com and chromeplugins.org.

You'll need to change to the beta or developer channel for Chrome, however.

Here is a mouse gestures plugin.
Here is an ad blocker.

If you don't want to change to an early-release version, you can always find a general purpose gestures app that will work for any application that doesn't have built-in support, e.g., gMote.

Re:Lunascape
Obviously, it's great for web designers who want to test how their website displays in each of the engines.

I quite like the ability to change engines and even set certain pages to automatically change to the engine desired.  However, there are some odd interface quirks, and for some reason it wouldn't set itself to default browser, despite clicking on the button to do so.  I had to use the Default Programs app for Windows to do it.

As far as vulnerabilities, it's not like you're using all three engines at once.  Because of its smaller market share, malware creators don't target Webkit (and Gecko for the most part) like they do with IE.  I would argue this is much better, because you have the option of using IE where a poorly-designed website requires it, but otherwise you can stick with another engine in large part.

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