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To what I understand, pages are rendered as textures by OpenGL, so Gecko haven't much to do with it.

As for IE7, these effets are probably doable with Aero Glass, but why would they bother. The utility of browsing 2D in 3D is debatable... It's a nice technology demo, but that's about it.

I agree that in general, the use of browsing 2D in 3D is typically minimal. However, according to the article, he made this so that people can access web sites from within an mmorpg, SecondLife specifically. I think that sounds pretty cool.

Yes, it's good... but it's not rocket science... It's almost like Firefox rendering the website to a Textures (like a PNG) and them the program on top of that displaying this renered texture in a simple 3D cube.

I'm sure they have their reasons to choose Firefox the be the basis of their browser, like everyone that uses Firefox for example, but still, it's something that could be done with IE (even current and old ones) and probably with other browser engines.

That said, I hope this study bring some good additions for 3D interfaces. =]

Yes, it's good... but it's not rocket science... It's almost like Firefox rendering the website to a Textures (like a PNG) and them the program on top of that displaying this renered texture in a simple 3D cube.

Not 'almost'. That's exactly what's going on ;-)

Maybe you were sarcastic... You do know this is Windows Only... Right?

Even if this was just a ref. to the Mozilla code used... it's all based off the source from Netscape... witch at the time was a Windows/Mac only product.

Okay I know there are gaps in my Netscape history, but I clearly remember using netscape 3.5 on a Unix box,and going home to use netscape 3.5 on my win 3.1 box.

Was it with Netscape 4?

Every version of Netscape has had releases on Linux, Unix, or both.

There was never a version 3.5, though.

Edited 2006-02-24 15:03

No. I think the only .5 version is 4.5

/me remembers good old time of NS 3.0

It wasn't good (and not very old either). The browser went downhill right after the "gold" edition of NS2. IE3 was much faster than NS3 on my 486.

Edited 2006-02-26 00:02

I see your quite correct. It must of been netscape 3.0

either way I was right about the cross platform ability

> Every version of Netscape has had releases on Linux, Unix, or both.

Not true - Netscape 8 onwards is a Windows-only app (and requires IE to be installed!) and therefore pretty irrelevant nowadays.

Maybe you were sarcastic... You do know this is Windows Only... Right?

Oups, no I didn't know.

RTFA

From article
How?

I wanted something cross platform since our client is available for Windows, Mac and Linux (alpha version) and ultimately this has to work on all of them. I wanted a way to be able to create and move around various pieces of geometry. There had to be a way to "pick" points off of the geometry in 3D space accurately. I wanted some GUI that would facilitate movement, allow entry of URLs and provide a place to display feedback - progress and status text for example. Eventually I settled on a combination of my own code for picking, GLUT for window management and rendering and GLUI for the UI. There are a couple of minor niggles but for the most part, things worked out really well. Thank you to the developers for making my little a bit easier.

This is absolutely useless

For now, yes, but it could spawn a lot of other UI design and functionality in a browser. Like say for example, an expose like functionality (a la FF Reveal extension) , a cube (a la compiz cube plugin) functionality and a lot more.

It may be useless, but that's a UI issue, not a technical one. Allowing one more graphical thing to be offloaded to the video card is a good thing.

Now, someone with actual vision on how it could be used needs to come along, see it, and go, "ah, ha!", figuring out how it can actually help.

i guess you do not understand that this is only demo application for libxul. how might this be the future if it does not add anything useful to browsing experience? or did i miss something in that app? :]

huh...

" i guess you do not understand that this is only demo application for libxul. how might this be the future if it does not add anything useful to browsing experience? or did i miss something in that app? :] "

Well.. Not sure who is who do not understand...

It's pretty obvious to me that in the future (not the long one ...) browsing will be made in 3D...

Everything or almost will finish being 3D and interactive. We only have to wait for the appropiate hardware to be created, that will allow the 3D sotfware of the near future to run smoothly...

But, I wanted to remark that it will not be done without the annoyeances that undoubtly those new technologies will bring with them... Like we have to stand the annoyances existant in Flash, Javascript... today !!!

Appart for that, is a step in the right direction.. that's to say: progress... Whether it is libxul, OpenGL, Mesa, DirectX or whatever...
(...Hmm, No, Not whatever. DirectX No, sorry... )


Angel

The "future" is here, go look at SecondLife (what this demo was made for). It is a 3d world with integrated tools for creating content. It is absolutely amazing what people have done with it.

It wasn't slow for me. With the flag effect turned on, it was still almost as fast as Firefox and IE are normally for me. I found that the 3D didn't make up for the lacking features in the browser though, so I returned to firefox (which is what I expect most people to do).

"Rotating the entire texture gets weird and greened out and cant see anything...."

I had the same problem with a Radeon 7000/VE card and as soon as I fired up IE to do something else, Microsoft Update informed me there was an updated driver for the card; I DLed it and rebooted and the problem went away. In general the documentation says this is an artifact of the 3-pass system the author uses to render the texture to OpenGL, but could be a symptom of not enough power/memory in your card. Note I said "could be."

Most impressive part of the demo: Leave the image on a flat surface, but rotate it 180 degrees so it's completely backwards. Now navigate to a website with a text entry field in a form and enter some text. Select it. The selection cursor works, even backwards.

uh... did you read the part where it was made clear that it is a proof of concept and that it isn't intended to replace your regular browser? Or maybe the part about it being a good guide for developers looking to embed the gecko engine in their own application?

Sorry the application that was intended to help other developers didn't meet your end user experience.

What about getting AIDS too ?

ActiveX are like HIV : a plague which kills your computer.