[Users] Fresh Installation of Claws-Mail

[Andrej Kacian]

On Sat, 2 May 2020 10:06:44 -0400
Jerry <jerry at seibercom.net> wrote:

> On Sat, 2 May 2020 15:37:26 +0200, Andrej Kacian stated:
> >On Sat, 2 May 2020 07:44:04 -0400
> >Jerry <jerry at seibercom.net> wrote:
> >  
> >> I certainly do not want to offend anyone; however, 'dillo' sucks. I
> >> don't know why the claws-mail team chose it for their HTML
> >> engine. As far as I can tell, it is not even maintained. I have
> >> never used the 'LiteHTML' plug-in. I have heard that at best it is
> >> mediocre but never-the-less, better than 'dillo.' The 'fancy'
> >> plug-in worked exceptionally well.    
> >
> >You can thank all the "web for everything" people for making the HTML
> >standard so complex and convoluted that it takes a team of dozens, if
> >not hundreds of people in order to implement a fully compliant HTML
> >renderer. The majority of rendering complexity is due to the
> >byzantine rules of CSS layouting.
> >
> >All the big HTML renderers (Webkit, Chrome, Firefox, ...) have this
> >kind of manpower and budget to maintain it. In comparison, Dillo is a
> >work of perhaps half a dozen people, and Litehtml is work of just
> >one person.
> >
> >I myself find the Litehtml plugin sufficient for the simple HTML
> >layouts of blog posts I read via their RSS feeds, and the occasional
> >invoice e-mail. Where it often falls down hard is commercial spam,
> >which tend to be very heavy on CSS layout. Then again, not being able
> >to read commercial spam can probably be considered a feature. :)
> >
> >I get that not everyone's use of HTML mail is as basic as mine, so
> >Litehtml (or Dillo) plugins are not ideal for other people. However,
> >there is nothing better, given the dependencies and requirements of
> >available rendering engines.
> >
> >Options? Webkit via the Fancy plugin might see its big return in the
> >GTK3 version of Claws Mail. There is Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF),
> >which could also be "pluginized", if someone feels motivated enough
> >to scratch that itch. As far as Firefox' engine, I don't think it is
> >available to being embedded in a plugin.
> >
> >On MacOS, the apple's HTML engine could perhaps also be used in a
> >plugin, but it will take a MacOS-friendly developer to write such a
> >plugin.
> >
> >On Windows, neither the old, nor the new HTML engine are embeddable
> >in the way Claws Mail needs.
> >  
> 
> Andrej, over a decade ago, probably more, I used a product called
> "Becky Internet Mail" <http://www.rimarts.co.jp/becky.htm> on a
> Windows machine. It did then, and I am told, still does, employs MS
> Explorer, now MS Edge as its HTML engine. Would that be an option for
> claws-mail on under a Windows environment?
> 

Alas, not in a GTK application. I have actually tried embedding the
MSHTML engine a while ago. I got a plugin kind-of-working, but it was
very wonky, due to MSHTML having its own event loop and input handling,
so it was sometimes stealing mouse clicks and key presses from Claws
Mail, sometimes the other way around, it was often not scrolling and
redrawing properly, etc... I should still have the source code
somewhere, in case someone wants to work on it, but I think it's a dead
end.

And even if such plugin could be made, it would become obsolete soon,
since Microsoft is switching to the Chrome engine for its browser, and
will therefore not maintain their own HTML engine in the future.

-- 
Andrej Kacian
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