A common problem for web developers – but some users as well – is that of websites that work in one browser, but not in another. Some websites are (still) ‘optimised’ for Internet Explorer, but with the popularity of other browsers reaching ever greater heights, the problem becomes apparent to more users. A new browser from Japan, called Lunascape5, tries to address this issue by allowing you to seamlessly switch between three different browsing engines (IE’s Trident, Mozilla’s Gecko, and Safari/Chrome’s WebKit).
The browser is still in its infancy (it’s an alpha release), and obviously only works on Windows, but the concept is rather interesting. You can switch rendering engines without restarting, and you can assign engines to specific websites. So, if your bank is still stuck in the middle ages, you can solve the issue by using Lunascape to browse with Gecko, but switch to Trident specifically when you launch your bank’s website.
As said, the browser is far from done, which shows in slightly crude translations, lack of security features like SSL certificate details or phishing protection, but it’s an interesting concept nonetheless. The release is freely available for download.
Pros will still have to test in actual browsers as before – whichever ones the contract demands.
“It doesn’t work in IE? But I tested it in some Lunascape with Trident!” I’d be kicking arses if I heard that on a project, including my own arse if it was me saying it.
A nice solution but one without a problem. Sorry.
Good point. Isn’t that what standards are for? Is it possible to code for a common denominator and get good results (even with the help of automatic code generation tools)?
I know there is a plugin for Firefox that will let the browser assign IE to a tab or Gecko, but I have not seen one that will switch between all three of them.
Why is it that interesting? Sleipnir [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleipnir_(web_browser) ] (another Japanese IE wrapper browser) has been doing trident/gecko for ages and Firefox has IE tab extension.
And secondly, like the above poster said, it’s not even as good to pretend one has tested on the said browser engine on top of Lunascape… It’s just the engine, Lunascape may have its own bug on one of the engine handling that may or may not appear on the native browser or Luncscape may not use 100% capability of the chosen engine to start with…
And hell, chrome’s JS engine isn’t webcore’s… This is such a dangerous suggestion by this article to any new web developers to pretend if the web site works on Lunascape it works on most browsers fine.
Good for advertising there are more browser alternatives, but not for a web development, except for some cheap developers who can’t take the time to install couple other browsers.
And by the way, article sounds like Lunascape came out of nowhere being alpha right now, but that also has been around for ages, just not that popular.
Edited 2008-11-25 16:28 UTC
Looking at the Lunascape site, I don’t like that they are boasting about being ‘fastest’ by using the engine that they never even wrote… And why isn’t safari listed in the graph anyway?
This browser has never won market share in Japan against Sleipnir and putting alot of shiny advertisements about being fast and complete and cool and everything just makes it look like it stopped competing technically.
But I do hope for their best to make good browsers.
So far, I have prefered actual installs of respective browsers. I have loved MultipleIE: http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE to test old versions of IE, I also have Firefox, Safari, and Opera (my default browser). It takes a long time to test in all these browsers. I hope this is going to change.
I can test a webapp on all 3 engines *without* loosing cookies, that is within the same session.
For complex web apps this is true revolution in testing efficiency.