Goanna (software)

Last updated
Goanna
Developer(s) M. C. Straver [1]
Initial releaseJanuary 2016 [2]
Written in C++
Type Browser engine
License MPL 2.0
Website www.palemoon.org/tech/goanna.shtml

Goanna is an open-source browser engine and part of Unified XUL Platform that was forked from Mozilla's Gecko. [3] It is used in the Pale Moon and Basilisk browsers. It underlies the Interlink mail client, Hyperbola's fork of Basilisk known as Iceweasel-UXP, and other UXP-based applications. [4] [5] [6] It was also unofficially ported to Windows XP for the K-Meleon browser [7] and Mypal. [8]

History

Goanna as an independent fork of Gecko was first released in January 2016. [2] The project's founder and lead developer, M. C. Straver, [1] cited technical- and trademark-related motives to do this in the context of Pale Moon's increasing divergence from Firefox. [9] [10] There are two significant aspects of Goanna's divergence: it does not have any of the Rust language components that were added to Gecko during Mozilla's Quantum project, [11] [12] and applications that use Goanna always run in single-process mode, whereas Firefox became a multi-process application. [13] [14]

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References

  1. 1 2 M.C. Straver. "About Moonchild Productions". Archived from the original on 2017-03-13. Retrieved 2018-04-19.
  2. 1 2 "Release notes for old versions of Pale Moon". palemoon.org.
  3. ↑ M.C. Straver. "The Goanna layout engine". Pale Moon website. Archived from the original on 2023-01-24. Retrieved 2023-01-24.
  4. ↑ "UXP vs goanna". forum.palemoon.org.
  5. ↑ "Iceweasel-UXP". Hyperbola. Retrieved 2024-05-23.
  6. ↑ "There is only XUL" . Retrieved 18 September 2018.
  7. ↑ "K-Meleon on Goanna". kmeleonbrowser.org.
  8. ↑ Mypal browser homepage
  9. ↑ "Introducing Goanna". Pale Moon forum. M.C. Straver. 2015-06-22. Retrieved 2017-02-10.
  10. ↑ Brinkmann, Martin (2015-06-22). "Pale Moon to switch from Gecko to Goanna rendering engine". ghacks.net. Retrieved 2017-11-25.
  11. ↑ "Basilisk web browser". basilisk-browser.org. Retrieved 2018-04-18.
  12. ↑ "Quantum". MozillaWiki. Retrieved 2018-04-18.
  13. ↑ "Multiprocess Firefox". Mozilla Developer Network. Archived from the original on 4 September 2015. Retrieved 24 August 2018.
  14. ↑ "Multi-process, or: the drawbacks nobody ever talks about". Pale Moon forum. M.C. Straver. 2017-11-20. Retrieved 24 August 2018.
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