I was mainly refering to the severe crashing problems web+ still has on many sites… which once a single tab goes belly up for whatever reason you just have to kill it taking all your tabs with you.
So, webkit2 would probably be a large usablility improvement since sites that don’t provoke this could just stay running… it will probably be faster also, webkit 1 has some bottlenecks I think (if tabs you are not looking at are doing things it still affects the responsiveness of the active tab directly).
Also @extrowerk some people will want FireFox even if Web+ was perfect… so if someone goes and does it let them and quit bemoaning what people want. Monoculture is bad. And the constant discouragement of anyone doing such any time it is mentioned gets old. Anyone that is capable of doing so will be well aware of the challenges.
I wrote it would be nice to have other browsers in the last sentences.
You have also right, some people would want Firefox port, even if WebPositive would work wonderfully.
And i wrote this not for the capable humans, but the other peoples to have a picture about, how it would work out, what are the pitfalls and how much time would it take. Sorry, i should have to add it to the first sentence.
But frankly, the Haiku Project cannot even man the WebPositive work, PulkoMandy does it almost always alone (but Rajagopalan does a nice job, too!), so i can’t realistically imagine currently, that a team would step up and make the Firefox port. Maybe and hopefully in the future.
Web+ is not alone. MSIE still suffers similar issues even today after 20+ years. More money and
thousands of engineers. Then, they decided to go with the Chrome-based backend.
Firefox also has its own rendering issues with each major iteration.
Like choosing spumante or an adobe, or giving hungry people steak and some people cling to vegetarianism. Can’t please everyone - but maybe a few people (or the ‘who pays my bills’ model).
Maybe, provide another ‘working’ modern browser in place of Web+ to ease the pain? This seems
reasonable. There was a time GoBe was ‘king of the hill’ and now we use LibreOffice…
I find this thread rather annoying as people are just making a wishlist, and no progress is made. To me as the main Web+ maintainer, this is not so nice, because I put a lot of work on the browser, and I don’t get a single “thank you for your hard work”. Only complaints that it’s a crashy mess (and indeed, it is). But I also get no help. I had to wait for a GSoC candidate and another new developer who have finally started to peek into the code and fix bugs. I cannot thank the community here.
On the technical side, WebPositive is using WebKit, which means it has potential to be as good as Safari and any browser that runs on iPhone and iPad. So we’re building on a solid and well maintained base, and, more importantly, we have something working right now, and good integration with the OS. This is in line with my vision of how Haiku should be. You can disagree, but if that’s the case, you should not complain about my work, you should head over to haikuports and start writing recipes for Chrome and its dependencies. And if you can’t do that, I don’t think you can have an enlightened advice on which technical choices are better. Extrowerk was a bit agressive in tone, but made a good summary of the challenges in bringing Chrome or Firefox to Haiku. They are not all that much different from the work on WebKit.
We also have positive support from the WebKit team, if the new contributors to the codebase stay around after the summer it means we will have a team large enough to sustain both keeping the browser up to date, and finally starting again to upstream our changes to the main WebKit repo, lowering the maintenance efforts. And now that we are finally at this point, everyone complains that we should drop years of effort and start the process over with another browser?
I thank you. I know you’re doing a difficult thing and trying to get things working great for everyone.
On a non-serious note, I think we should make Opera build a Haiku web browser because I bought Opera for BeOS and they just dropped it like a hot potato.
IIRC one dev from Opera considered this while they were still running their own engine. But then they switched to Blink.
Anyway, for those of you interested in seeing other web browsers ported to Haiku: please complain to the people making these web browsers. The Haiku team has quite a lot of other things to do already.
First, thank you for your hard work and reading my bug reports on Web+ and HTML5 testing (which you did awhile ago yourself as I found out later in the Wiki).
Second,I said ‘you can’t please everyone’. You know that. People go to grocery stores looking for dolphin milk (or whatever is not sold there).
Third, I didn’t mean toss out Web+ - just that people use what works for them. Do that versus complaining about what doesn’t work for them (or as you said, help fix the problem). SImple enough? Same issue with
sound or video drivers. Some people look at one component as the efficiency of the entire OS. You don’t have working Bluetooth? Screw it! But, it doesn’t mean you should stop doing what you do - or say ‘Screw them!’ either…
As far as I´m concerned I value and appreciate your (and others) work on WebPositive very much. So, thank you!
But I can also understand the people complaining because from a pure user standpoint, Web+ can (as you already pointed out) be very crashy and frustrating. That´s probably inevitable due to the complexity of modern web browsers and ever changing web technologies.
Unfortunately the Presto code is effectively zombie code AFAIK… Opera no longer develops it and I’m not sure they even retain the rights to it as they shuffled things around for a few years there. You can find it online… and there are people maintaining patches for it to work on modern distros etc… or adding codecs and updating SSL etc…
Presto was an amazingly efficient browser engine though I wish it was still the 3rd contender. It was the fastest browser on my N800 tablet by far.
That said, Servo’s webrender and geckoview on Android are working really well in the preview browser I’ve been test driving the fastest browser on an android phone I’ve used.
Technically Haiku already has a working Opera port… it’s just version 3.62 or something like that quite ancient I did install it recently and browsed a few plain HTTP pages.
Yes, I understand this, my problem is people going with “let’s port another browser” while clearly that would be as much work and may not even result in something better. Let’s rather try to fix and continue improving Web+, right?
Yeah I understand that. Just let them try to port their favourite browsers for themselves . If they succeed, all the better for Haiku.
Right, I completely agree with you on that.
In fact, I really would like to help out with Web+ a bit, maybe some smaller stuff that’s bothering me the most. I’m still a bit intimidated by the large codebase, but I’ll try to get over it
As always with any volunteer work it’s under appreciated and can be frustrating with lack of recognition.
The satisfaction comes with the knowledge of your contribution and the end result.
I’m old and have volunteered for many projects in my time and you learn to count on the lack of recognition but the reward is knowing you contributed to a worthwhile project.
I will definitely help on WebPositive when I get a chance, but I have been long on promises and short on actual work lately. At least I take part in the community a bit now, which I did not do at all for many years.
Porting more browsers would be good, but if anyone has the skills they should help on WebPositive and our WebKit port for now.
@extrowerk has it exactly right in how hard it is to port a web browser. I did the very, very basic original port of WebKit to Haiku, and then Stephan Aßmus, Maxime Simon, Alexandre Deckner, PulkoMandy and others did most of the hard work to get it to where it is now, which is still pretty far, believe it or not.
Safari is a very fast and power efficient web browser, and it is built on WebKit. WebPositive can be as good if we put in the work, and when we get GPU accelerated graphics it will be just as fast and efficient as Safari. We probably do want to move to webkit2 sooner rather than later, but I suspect there are plenty of lower hanging fruit we could do first which would still help when moving to webkit2.
As I said, I have the interest and the background to be able to help on this, I just need to put in the time.
I understand this too. I’ve got multiple articles to write, the Haiku on Mac project that’s stalled thanks to me, and other works that are pending both for the Haiku community and my own projects. I’ve been learning to think things though before making any kind of promises myself… which is why I haven’t made any more recently.
Yes; Safari is pretty incredible. The best one to model after though in terms of visual design would be the versions between Jaguar - Tiger. Those were very clean and simple.
hey … sorry for the delay in answering things are really racing around here … well what pops up here on my terminal is: waltop international media tablet corp. "media tablet 16.6 ver, 0107. if you really appreciate it if you can get it to work on my good old haikai.
I’d like to see:
1- Haiku API bindings for Python
2- Falkon and a native webkit2 browser
3- Dropbox, Onecloud, googledrive, Nextcloud integration in tracker and deskbar
4- Openvpn
5- Virtualization layer like kvm (after 3d accelerants)
6- SSH, samba and nfs gui integration/add-ons installed by default and an easy way to connect to a server right from Tracker
Ad 123. Mhhh
Ad 4. In “native” OpenVPN last for changes, simple VPN in network is many of work, buy a router with vpn
Ad 5. Work in progress
Ad 6. SSH and samba with a JAVA port
it’s just version 3.62 or something like that quite ancient I did install it recently and browsed a few plain HTTP pages.
(sorry, couldn’t resist)
