A few weeks ago, I was looking at what was still using an old version of XULRunner in openSUSE, and one of the few applications that was left with no port to XULRunner 2 (the one that will be out with Firefox 4) was gnome-web-photo. In case you don't know gnome-web-photo, it's a small utility originally written by Christian Persch, to capture screenshots of a web page, which can also be used to generate a thumbnail for web pages. It's actually the main reason why we care about it in openSUSE: having a thumbnailer for HTML files is a nice little touch.

So I look at porting gnome-web-photo to XULRunner 2, and... I felt some pain. I asked Christian about his plans and if he thought porting this utility to WebKit could be a good idea. As Christian was not working on it actively, he was open to the idea. After a few hours of coding (WebKitGTK+ is really cool, with its easy-to-use API), a rewrite was ready.

I did some more cleanup and added the option to print directly a web page to a printer, and then released gnome-web-photo 0.10. The only real regression, as far as I know, is that it won't handle correctly very tall web pages (like this one): it will simply cut the web page, because we're hitting some limits in some libraries below us. This is probably fixable by scrolling the page and writing the resulting image ourselves, but I really wanted to get the rewrite out and I'm not even sure people would notice this regression ;-)

Enjoy!