Chimera (web browser)

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Chimera (web browser)

Chimera 1.72 running on ArchLinux
Written in C
OS Cross-platform
Platform libhtmlw Xaw HTML engine
Development status Outdated
Genre Web browser
License Unknown, something that allows the release of the sourcecode

Note: This page is unrelated to the Chimera project started at Mozilla to demonstrate that the Gecko rendering engine could be embedded in a Mac OS X Cocoa application. Camino is the successor to this project.

Chimera was a web browser that was originally created in 1993. It was originally created for UNIX workstations and used the Xaw widget set. As time progressed usage of the browser decreased and eventually dwindled away[citation needed], and attempts to compile the browser today with modern compilers will fail unless the application's sourcecode is changed or appropriately updated sources are found, due to compiler syntax changes since the browser was released, and the unmaintained state of the sourcecode not keeping up with these changes.

Chimera will crash (SIGSEGV / Segfault) on many websites, for example Google's homepage will load, but search result pages will crash the browser. One other site that is known to work is the MapleStory homepage.

[edit] Compiling the browser on a modern system (moderately advanced)

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Note: This worked for the author of these instructions. No guarantees as to whether this will work for everyone.

  • Download http://modest-proposals.com/lhafh-02.tgz from http://modest-proposals.com/Hacklin.htm and extract it.
  • cd to lhafh-02/chimera-1.72/ and then decend into each subdirectory, running xmkmf in each to remove the Makefiles' references to the Slackware system the code was originally built on. The xmkmf utility is included in the imake package.
  • Edit the Makefile in the src/ folder and remove the references to "../../siod/libsiod.a" and "../../xcommon/libxcommon.a" on line 1057.
  • Either
    • Replace the two references to "../../common/libcommon.a" with a working path to this file on line 1057 in the aforementioned Makefile, OR
    • Place a copy of libcommon.a in ../../common/libcommon.a, taking into consideration that the build process would be running relative to src/. Therefore, if you extracted the archive to /home/username/lhafh-02/chimera-1.72/, place libcommon.a in /home/username/lhafh-02/common/libcommon.a.
  • Run make from the parent directory (chimera-1.72). The code should build. If it does, congratulations!