Welcome to the home
page for the Grail Internet browser.
Grail is an extensible Internet browser written entirely in the
interpreted object-oriented programming language Python. It runs on Unix, and, to
some extent, on Windows and Macintosh. Grail is easily extended to
support new protocols or file formats. Grail is distributed in source
form, free of charge, and without warranties. It requires recent
versions of Python and Tcl/Tk to run.
Announcement
Grail development is now hosted on SourceForge. The project
page provides links to information about accessing
Grail repository on SourceForge. The CVS repository
imported at SourceForge contains Grail 1.6 with a few
minor patches. Two new mailing lists are being run from
the SourceForge site as well: grail-interest list replaces the current list for
announcements and general discussion, and grail-checkins list is for developers interested in
receiving notifications of checkin activity in the source
code repository.
Download Grail 0.6 now! A minor
revision of Grail was released on 1 April 1999. This
version requires Python 1.5 or newer, and Tcl/Tk 8.0 or
newer. See the news
bulletin.
If you are already a Grail user, this release will fix a few
bugs and provide some minor feature enhancements. If you are
not already a Grail user, please be aware that development is
at a crawl and we cannot be particularly responsive to bug
reports (though we'd be glad to know of any bugs you find!).
It is allowed to redistribute Grail and to use it for commercial
purposes (within the terms of the license).
While Grail's main platform remains Unix, it also runs on Windows and Macintosh.
Grail is an extensible Internet browser. It supports the protocols
and file formats commonly found on the World-Wide Web, such as HTTP,
FTP, and HTML, but, unlike most browsers, it is also easily extended
to support other protocols or file formats, such as CNRI's handle protocol. Grail is distributed by
CNRI free of charge, and
can be freely redistributed (within reason).
Grail is written and extensible in Python, a free object-oriented programming language. It also
uses Tk, a free UI
toolkit by John Ousterhout. Grail should run on any Unix system to
which Python and Tk have been ported - i.e. almost all Unix systems
supporting X11. In particular, Grail is one of the few web browsers
that supports Solaris for Intel x86 processors. It now also runs on
Windows and Macintosh, since there are now stable ports of Tk to those
platforms. (You need a lot of RAM though.)
Grail lets you download Python programs that execute inside Grail
on your local machine. These little applications ("applets") can do
things like display animations, interact with the user in new ways,
even create additional menus that pop up dialogs if you like. If you
are using Grail now, visit our applet demo
collection. Grail applets run in a restricted execution
environment, so that broken or malicious applets ("Trojan Horses")
can't erase your files or crash your computer. (However, see a security warning.)
Grail supports full HTML 2.0, including images, forms and
imagemaps, and many HTML 3.2 features. It uses asynchronous document
transfer, supports printing and saving documents, searching,
bookmarks, history, and more. It also supports frames, client-side
imagemaps, file upload in forms, support for JPEG, TIFF and XBM
images, image printing, and tables (within the limitations of the Tk
toolkit). It has preferences panels, an I/O status display, a remote
control interface, and many, many other nifty features. For the full
scoop, see "What's New" and "Grail Info".
Apart from running applets, Grail is extensible in other areas, by
writing so-called Grail plug-in modules. Grail Plug-ins can be
written for the following areas:
New
protocols (e.g. CNRI's handle
protocol) New file
formats (e.g. for handling JPEG or sound directly) New HTML
tags (e.g. tables) New
preference panels
On
this page:
introduction,
features,
applets,
plug-ins. ![[Grail Home]](images/grailbut.gif)