Intro
This page describes how to configure the default web browser
under CDE/Solaris, which is run when you click on the globe icon
in the CDE toolbar or on URLs in CDE's mailtool. Additionally it provides
an enhanced sdtwebclient script which supports all modern browsers.
Whenever CDE starts a web browser, it runs a script called
sdtwebclient which is located in /usr/dt/bin. This script
searches some standard directories for a binary named netscape
or mozilla, and runs it. It will also look at the environment
variable BROWSER and use its content as the name of the
browser to run if it is set. To set this variable add a line
like this to your ~/.dtprofile file:
export BROWSER=mozilla
After logging out and logging back in, the new default browser will
be mozilla.
Problems arise when an instance of the chosen browser is already running.
Every browser supports some way of remote control, to ask
an already running browser process to open
a new empty window or tab, or to feed it a URL which it should open
in a new window. Unfortunately they all use a different syntax,
and sdtwebclient doesn't know about all of them. For a
long time it only worked with Netscape 4.x. Later Sun issued patches
providing new versions of sdtwebclient to support more browsers,
but it still doesn't work perfectly.
I have enhanced sdtwebclient to add support for remote control
of most modern browsers. Currently it knows about:
- Netscape 4.x
- Netscape 7.x (as downloaded from Sun; and sun_netscape, which comes with older Solaris releases)
- Mozilla (tested with v1.3b, v1.3, v1.4, v1.5, v1.6, v1.7, v1.7.3, v1.7.6, v1.7.12)
- Mozilla Firefox (tested with v0.8, v0.9.1, v1.0, v1.5.0.1rc1, v1.5.0.3, v1.5.0.7, v2.0)
- Mozilla Firebird (tested with v0.6.1, v0.7. Has been renamed to Firefox)
- Opera (tested with v5.0b1, v6.12b1, v7.20b7, v7.21, v7.23, v8.0)
The modified sdtwebclient has been tested on Solaris 8, 9 and 10.
I retained as much of the code of the original
sdtwebclient as possible to guarantee compatibility.
I'd like to thank all users of sdtwebclient who provided feedback
and ideas or patches for new features. Comments are welcome - send them
to martin@par.univie.ac.at.
|