Kazehakase

» see kazehakase.osdn.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Kazehakase shipped its first public release on 29 January 2003, a GTK2 browser for Unix desktops, released under GPL2 with Mozilla's Gecko engine embedded inside it. The name came from a short story by Ango Sakaguchi and translates roughly as Doctor Wind. That is the level of seriousness the project ran at, which is worth knowing before you look at what it actually built.

The interface had levels. You could set Kazehakase to show almost no controls at all, or open it up to the full set, and the browser changed shape around the setting instead of hiding things in a preferences dialog. Bookmarks were programmable: a Smart Bookmark took a regular expression, so a saved bookmark could be a search rather than an address. History had full text search in it years before that became a normal thing for a browser to do.

It also read feeds, and not only RSS. Kazehakase understood LIRS and HINA-DI, two update-notification formats that existed almost entirely inside the Japanese weblog world. That detail says more about the audience than any download count would. This was software written for one internet by people who lived on it.

Kazehakase was Japan-only at the language layer. The code was GPL and the tarballs sat on SourceForge's Japanese site for anyone to take, but everything around the code, from the release notes to the bug tracker, was in Japanese. I was on Windows in Turkey through all of this, and a Japanese-language Linux browser was two steps removed from anything on my TTNet line.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the twenty-ninth ~

Japanese numerals give you wordplay that English does not. Two is ni and nine is ku, so 29 reads as niku, which is the word for meat. The project turned that into a release convention: versions went out on the 29th of the month, and each announcement carried a piece of meat knowledge alongside the changelog.

It held to the end. Version 0.5.8 was published on 29 September 2009, meat trivia included. Nobody said it was the last one.

~ the cracks ~

The problem was the engine underneath. Embedding Gecko was always a moving target, because Mozilla kept changing the embedding interface and eventually stopped supporting it as a product anyone could build on. Every browser constructed that way, Galeon and Epiphany included, spent years being rewritten to keep pace, and the ones without a full-time maintainer did not come out the other side. Kazehakase added a GTK+ WebKit backend as an escape route and never finished walking through it.

In 2004 the project had been picked up by Japan's Information-technology Promotion Agency under its exploratory software program, the state scheme that paid individual developers to build things with no business case attached. That money buys a year of somebody's attention, and Gecko's embedding interface kept moving for another five.

~ what got buried with it ~

LIRS and HINA-DI went down with it, more or less. Both were lightweight update formats out of the Japanese weblog scene, and a browser that read them natively was the only mainstream software most people would ever meet them in. Ubuntu and Debian carried the package for a few years after the last release and then dropped it, which is the real funeral for a Linux program: not an announcement, just an absence from the archive.

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