Endorphin Web Browser

I was talking with a fellow member here on the forum about Arora, when he asked if I ever heard of Endorphin browser. I admitted I had not, well come to find out it is a fork of Arora and they are quite active getting ready for their first release.

https://endorphinbrowser.github.io/

I was able to build Endorphin using qmake rather than cmake, as they have converted it to cmake, and the default would be with qtwebengine which we don’t have. It’s still quite hampered using qtwebkit, and it currently still has an issue with the adblockers. I was able to activate it though.

endorphin1

endorphin2

endorphin3

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That project looks not really active.
I looked at its Github repository and the last commit in the master branch is from December 2020.
Also,it doesn’t solve the problem that QtWebKit has been abandoned by the Qt project in favor of QtWebEngine,which is not yet ported to Haiku.
QtWebKit still works,but lacks a lot of support for modern web standards.
Someone should fork QtWebKit itself and keep it updated with the current Apple WebKit codebase instead of just forking browsers that depend on it.

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It’s well known on this forum, about the problems using qtwebkit, that’s why everyone suggests staying with webpositive.

Personally, I’ve been looking at ultralight webkit, which I find very interesting:

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WebPositive has its own problems and at the current state,I still prefer the outdated QtWebKit for most use-cases but I know that it won’t stay useful forever.
Ultralight looks really interesting.
Unfortunately,the interesting parts of it (Ultralight and UltralightCore) are closed-source and a license costs 1500 US dollars per year.
The open-source part WebCore is only a port of Apple WebKit which is already open-source but isn’t usable standalone but also needs the closed-source UltralightCore for drawing the graphics.

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If you look under licenses for Ultralight, you"ll see the following:

Ultralight is free for non-commercial use and free for commercial use by companies with less than $100K gross annual revenue. For more info see LICENSE.txt

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The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers says it all!

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Yes,it’s free for non-commercial use,but free is not always open-source.
As you’ll see in the pricing section,you only get the full source-code if you pay for a license.
Binary builds are,as always,only available for Linux,Mac OS X and Windows.
To run it on Haiku,you’d have to grab the source code,maybe make some modifications to it and then compile it yourself.
The repository from which you link the license contains only some CMake stuff but not the actual source code of the Ultralight application.

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For fun I just downloaded the source for Ultralight-1.2.1 and without doing anything outside of running your basic cmake command, it starts checks for building:

screenshot2

I then, took the build for linux, and made a quick hpkg for Ultralight, then with that installed. I started building something a little interesting to see if it might be possible. Obviously, It won’t complete the build, due to the linux build of Ultralight.

screenshot3

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I already started to try it out myself but now exactly what I said happened to you: You can’t complete the build because you only have a Linux build of Ultralight (which isn’t binary-compatible to Haiku) and you can’t make a own Ultralight build for Haiku because you don’t have the source code.
That’s really sad because I think Ultralight could be a great lightweight and modern browser for Haiku but I don’t think there’s any chance to solve that without anyone paying for the source.
Hm,proprietary software really sucks :frowning:

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I managed to build it on Linux,it was quite fast and easy.
Comparing the HTML5Test scores of Ultralight and Midori (Webkit2GTK),Ultralight clearly loses but still I think it would be nice to have it on Haiku.
Again,I don’t see any chance to make it happen but it’s okay to have dreams.
shot-2021-09-05_23-07-49

So what’s the solution?

Fight back and push hard on reasonable web standards that can be supported on all web accessible platforms. I think it starts with web/application servers being able to logically support a low-tech web.

I came a lot closer to building it, then I thought I would

screenshot4

Maybe play with https://github.com/litehtml/litehtml

We have an up to date WebKit fork that natively targets Haiku? What about using that? Anyone with some experience with user interfaces programming could improve the GUI for WebPositive. To me that sounds a lot easier than maintaining yet another WebKit fork? Why is no one trying that?

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Web+ is definitely the most important web browser for Haiku to keep up-to-date and hopefully will continue to see improvements.

Did you already try litehtml and does it work for you?
There’s even a native Haiku port of it’s demo browser: https://github.com/adamfowleruk/litebrowser-haiku
Unfortunately,it doesn’t complete the build for me.
I exactly followed the instructions in the readme.
Here’s a screenshot:

Besides that,I expect nothing better than Netsurf here: They don’t even mention any basic Javascript support,only HTML and CSS.
It may work for some static websites where you only read information but don’t interact with it,and it may even be really fast,but it’s useless for any dynamic content.
That’s far worse than what we already have with Otter and its outdated QtWebKit.

It failed to completely compile for me.

Maybe something changed in Haiku since the last work on litebrowser has been done.
The last commit was done in January 2020,and Haiku has seen two big Beta releases since then.

Looks like various JavaScript engines can be had like https://duktape.org/

1 Like