Monday, October 6th, 2008
Mecca: A new social browser
Category: Browsers
Mecca is a new browser by the prolific Todd Ditchendorf of Fluid fame. It is currently in the works, and features:
- Open Plug-in Architecture
- Built-in Userscripting
- Userstyles
- ÜberView for Plug-in Split Views
- Global Keyboard Shortcut
- Single-Window Browsing Mode
- BrowsaBrowsa Plug-in for Sidebars
- Session Restore
- Full-Screen Mode
- Customizable Shortcuts
- Integrated Gears-loading (InputManager)
- Hidden “Closed” Windows
- Thumbnail Plug-in for CoverFlow
- TinyURL creation/expansion
- Automatic Software Updates
- Custom User-Agent Strings
- Full WebInspector
- Custom Window Opacity/Level/Style
It looks very interesting, and I can’t wait to see it!
2.2 rating from 19 votes
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The requested URL /dist/Mecca_0.1.zip was not found on this server.
:/
Looks Mac-only. If it stays that way, it’s doomed to a pretty small slice of pie.
Wow, yet another browser for Mac OS X. Somebody please update this list: http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200710/mac_os_x_web_browser_rundown_2007/
@Nosredna:
So?
Thanks for the mention Dion. I’m flattered. @diogo: sorry, the app isn’t available just yet, but very very soon. Stay tuned. thx.
@eyelidlessness
Just seems silly, when FF, Opera, Safari are able to hit multiple targets. If it’s relegated to such a small slice, will anyone even test against it? Will jQuery and Dojo bother to support it?
As long as it sticks to standards pretty well, I guess it’ll be OK, but I’d be a lot more excited about it if I saw potential for it to affect IE’s market share. :-)
If this has a similar impact on browsing, as Fluid has had on my webapps experience, I think it’s going to be huge.
Nosredna: I would imagine that it is based on one of the major rendering engines, so as long as you’re compatible with the big 4, you should be fine.
No single individual is going to implement a browser from scratch these days.
@MorganRoderick u r absolutely right. Mecca simply uses the WebKit framework that is already on your machine (the same as Safari and many others). Therefore, Mecca will *not* impose any new testing responsibilities on web developers or web framework engineers.
As for market share… well, that is definitely not the goal with this project. Mecca is simply an attempt to explore some ideas for advancing the state of the art in web browsing. If any of the ideas are worthwhile, they will probably propagate to other browsers… just as Mecca has taken inspiration from the browsers that exist today.
Mecca is a niche project, and that is all it’s meant to be. Even a sliver of a percent of all web users is a massive audience for a single developer tinkering on nights and weekends ;0]. And that’s perfectly fine with me. :0]
Not made to also work with Firefox? Booooo!
Is this browser no longer being worked on? The site seems to be gone.