Port Chromium to Haiku

I’d like to propose a bounty fundraiser for anyone who dares to port the Chromium browser. Perhaps someone as brave as kenz will be found?

The are bunch of patches for freebsd and openbsd, help of the great expert needed to apply them for haiku.

“bunch of patches” means 856+ patches. :grinning_face:

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Our condition doesn’t allow us to try to port Chromium after porting Firefox/Iceweasel.

If a bounty is ever set up, it should be about moving to R1 or completing the RISC-V port. However, bounty is not really the style here.

Everyone is free to organize a fundraiser or bounty for whatever they want. Nobody has actually done it for a very long time though…

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Haiku Inc. got some bitcoins which cannot be sold due to account issue. What about using it for bounty?

Disclaimer: I do use Chome/Chromium on other OSs.

But I need to ask, why? We have FOUR competent Firefox clones now. A few rough edges here and there, but those can be addressed. Extensions work, bookmark converters exist.

Actually, when on Haiku, I use WebPositive the vast majority of the time, as a matter of principle, falling back to other browsers only when necessary.

Apart from sheer bragging rights, what functionality would Chromium add to Haiku that Firefox does not? I am not arguing either side at this point, I would like to ask what exactly you are looking for, before someone starts taking on a massive effort without a clear end goal. Have you encountered websites that work in Chome but not in Firefox-alikes?

Okay, having asked the question, I will attempt to give one possible answer. If I understand the relationship correctly, it opens up the possibility of porting Electron apps. Anything else?

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This what you can read on the upcoming Mageia 10 releases notes:
Internet apps Chromium-browser have been dropped due to too much maintenance work. If you need it, install it as Flatpak; install app/org.chromium.Chromium/x86_64/stable, or Chrome Flatpak. Or use the Chrome RPM from Google.
Mageia is not what I would call a major linux distribution but has way more contributors than Haiku. If it’s already hard to maintain for linux, imagine what would need a port…

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I’m still guessing people would love to have that, which I could understand, for yet another browser not so much.

Add to that that the Chromium project actively rejects patches that add or improve support for any non-mainstream operating system,such as the BSDs.
Having to maintain about 1000 patches and upgrade them at every release without a chance to get them merged is a huge burden,and pointless at a time we already have Firefox-based browsers,QtWebEngine browsers,HaikuWebKit and QtWebKit.
Firefox and WebKit seem to be much nicer projects to work with and accept platform-specific patches,as far as I know.

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Personally, I don’t see the fascination of using Chrome/Chromium browsers, they spy on you more than most others!

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If we already have chromium, port of only office would be easier.

OnlyOffice can be used in the browser,no need to port that specifically.
Should run just fine in Firefox,I used that in the past.
You only need a server where the backend runs,that’s C# and probably won’t run on Haiku any time soon.

Chromium supports a few things that Firefox doesn’t, like WebHID, which is used to configure the keyboard and other devices on my laptop.

I think I have (most of) the skills needed to do that, just not the time.

If there’s financial motivation I can put in a hand. I hate Firefox enough to desire a Chromium port :sweat_smile:

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What would be the best way to fund this effort, and what kind of money would be reasonable?

I get that everybody’s got their favorite browser and they want to see it on the platform someday, but I don’t think taking an experienced developer and make them use months of their time to get a Chromium port up is worth it, not when there’s a whole lot of areas in the core OS that could be improved instead.

The effort is just too big, the codebase is immense, it would need a lot of patches that will not get accepted upstream and thus will need to be amended and integrated with each new release, so said developer would spend a sizable amount of time and in return we’d get like 1, maybe 2 up-to-date Chromium releases and then the port would inevitably fall behind without the constant effort of some maintainer.

Also, if a developer knows their way around Webkit I’d rather have them work on HaikuWebkit to improve WebPositive instead, it may be a less flashy work in the short term but improving a core App is good for all users, not just those that want a browser over another for reasons.

Alternatively, I think updating Falkon is way less work to achieve a similar result, it is a genuinely good browser whose Haiku version is already 2 years behind unfortunately.

(Case in point, Falkon is much less complex to maintain than Chromium and yet we’re already several versions behind for it, Chromium wouldn’t fare much better in that regard)

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Just to play devil’s advocate for a moment, that’s exactly what we said about LibreOffice. Impossible to port, until it was done.

But we NEEDED it, badly. I’m not entirely convinced that we need another browser right now.

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I’m sure the LibreOffice team happily accepted patches for Haiku,so that the Haikuports team doesn’t have to maintain a huge patchset and update that again and again and again for every release.
That’s the big difference I see here.
The Chromium project just doesn’t care about anything other than the big platforms where Google makes money from it.

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Can we seek potential developers that are willing to accept bitcoin payment so that we can spend away trapped bitcoins that Haiku Inc owns?

Haiku Inc finances Haiku development and architectures.
IMHO, things that could eventually qualify to a participation are the development of a high level native app that emphasise the OS qualities or the port of a lib that is really deeply needed. Port of an app doesn’t, moreover when a native app is already existing for the job.
Anyway a bounty or hiring a dev for one shot wouldn’t work. Due to maintenance difficulties, you would have to pay someone for life…

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