I have successfully built the latest version of WebKitGTK 2.42.2. I will update in haikuports after testing.
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Canât wait to try it 
Recently some Linux user reported a bug in one of my Webapps that appears in Webkit 2.42.
With that Iâll soon be able to reproduce and fix that 
BTW our WebKitGTK version is already a lot newer than what FreeBSD offers 
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So, I really like Epiphany. I think, at this point, there are two kinds of users: those who use Epiphany as their browser, and those who should use it. Honestly, if Haiku has a âkiller appâ, this is it. Iâve yet to meet a user who doesnât do the majority of his daily work in the browser, and at this point Iâd say Epiphany and Falkon are the only choices (and Falkon is borked six ways from Sunday). Lunduke now recommends Haiku as a daily driver OS, and the only reason he does (aside from the fact that itâs got a high-gloss polish) is that it has a functional Web browser.
All of this leads me to wonder: what is the point of including WebPositive as the default? What is the point of even continuing to work on it?
This isnât a rhetorical question. I understand Haiku needs its own indigenous software without leaning on UNIX ports every single bloody time. If I wanted UNIX I would use UNIX. But as far as I understand things, a Web browser is UI sugar for a Web engine. Epiphanyâs engine (a version of WebKit) and Web+'s engine (also a version of WebKit) would appear, to me, to be somewhat interchangeable, but WebPositiveâs engine is irretrievably borked, refusing even to play YouTube videos.
Using Epiphanyâs WebKit inside WebPositive would seem to me to be a solid course of action. But if it isnât, we really should be asking ourselves if itâs the right choice for the default Haiku distribution.
The GUI used by Gnome Web is Gnome which is not the native Haiku GUI. WebKit is, itself, used by both WebPositive and Gnome Web with the main difference being the GUI.
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Humdingerâs the name. Well met.
I only use Epiphany (or Otter, need to check this out more) only for sites that donât quite work with Web+. Those are very few in my case. Web+ starts instantly and is ready to surf from the first second, while Epiphany has me sometimes wait many, many seconds until it accepts my URL. Gets worse with more tabs. I often cannot paste into Epiphany and canât enter a â@â or ââŹâ.
I like Web+ bookmarks. For example, I can just drag&drop the websiteâs locator icon of a github project into my open project Tracker folder and create a bookmark to the site there.
Web+ GUI is well integrated in Haiku and doesnât stick out like a sore thumb.
If you like Epiphany, thatâs great. I stick with Web+ where possible, thanks.
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Maybe I am doing something wrong, but I find epiphany slow and crashy. Web+ is way better for most sites
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Do you have any specific problems with WebPositive? I use it for a lot of things, and the main limitations I know of are:
- Video support in Youtube and other video websites (but, did you mean to write âvideo playerâ instead of âweb browserâ?)
- Lack of ligature support for icon fonts in Gerrit
Other websites seem to work quite well. So, if itâs just these two issues, I still donât understand how the collective answer to this was âletâs port 5 other browser until one happens to work somewhat better (or really, just has a different set of maybe sligtly less annoying bugs)â.
The other problem with Epiphany is the dependencies. You donât just get the browser, you get Wayland, GTK, glib, gstreamer, and a bunch of other stuff installed alongside it. And then we get complaints that Haiku is bloated and big, and that BeOS ran in 8MB of RAM and so forth.
That is not an engine problem. In fact, the engine is the same as in Epiphany, itâs WebKit, in reasonably up to date version.
In Epiphany case, WebKit is backed by GTK and GStreamer. In the case of WebPositive, Iâm trying to build a version that is backed by our own Interface Kit and Media Kit. The Media Kit part is disabled at the moment because it is slow and crashy. But this is not an engine problem, this is a problem of me not knowing the Media Kit well enough to write the needed code. And at the moment, disabled code is better than slow and crashy code.
There is the option to make the ânativeâ WebKit backed by gstreqmer, too. But then we have to include GStreamer in the Haiku distribution, and the same problem as with Epiphany happens.
So, I still think WebPositive has a very sane base and engine, and is missing maybe a thousand lines of code to play videos. Really, if thatâs the only complaint, why is no one fixing that one problem?
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I hope webpositive will catch up soon, for now there are unfortunatly a lot of site it has some problems with, but of course the integration of webpositive is much better
Keep up the good work, thank you
The list of bugs reported against it does not have that many listed: Custom Query â Haiku
It would be helpful if people took the time to report the problems they see. Because I canât just test âevery websiteâ myself
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Is the bookmarkbar code disabled at the moment too?
If not I will file a ticket if I still cannot make it show.
Fully agree with all!
Stay with Web+ please and make it better!
We just need a media kit developer then!
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The bookmark bar is shown if you have enabled it in the menu and you have some bookmarks in the corresponding bookmarks folder. Why would the code be disabled?
gitlab is producing no text (sometimes highlight with hovering the mouse), if itâs not listed in the ticket tracker I could add this if you want.
Screenshot: Web hosted at ImgBB â ImgBB
Please report any rendering issues you encounter. : )
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I kinda feel that. The machine I use to run Haiku has 32GB of ram, a Core i7-1185G7 chip, and a 4tb ssd⌠and the reason itâs this overstuffed is because itâs also my NixOS box. Yep⌠UNIX. (That, and my browsing habits include having, literally, 2,924 tabs open at once.)
Frequent crashes of tabs (though never the entire âteamâ) or sometimes just a thread on the tab. Also, frequent flickering and screen artefacts, particularly on âWeb applicationâ type pages (like for example Google Docs, Google Drive, or Snapchat for Web).
Granted, static pages render fine on Web+. The Guardian, for example, works almost flawlessly, though some Google ads can bring it down. Some Google ads donât render properly, aNd tHaTâs tRaAaAaGiC (he said, playing the worldâs saddest song on the worldâs smallest fiddle for Googleâs suffering advertisers). I had problems posting to Google Groups usenet gateway for work (the Captcha didnât work properly).
I think the disabling of video (which was creating âlocksâ of the whole user interface while the entire video was downloaded to RAM) fixed the lockups, and semi-recent (a few months ago) changes to the drawing code largely fixed the flickering. Unless there are cases I missed.
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I think some âfreezesâ still exist, but I would not spend too much effort on this since wk2 will most likely fix/mitigate most of them, and will turn it from âmy browser frozeâ to a âThe site â freezes which will be much easier to investigate.
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Right now I need both. WebPositive canât handle the regular run of sites - google maps, for example (which I see has been reported) - and when all thatâs sorted out we can talk about user interface.
But it seems to be usable to display HTML emails, and Epiphany was pretty balky at that when I tried it. I imagine there could be a time when this kind of application will be more integrated - with WebPositive, a native browser.
[ edit ] Also I notice that WebPositive can deal with Google Translate, and text entry in a form is just like text input elsewhere in Haiku where you can use âdead keysâ to compose Latin-1 characters that arenât on the keyboard. [ /edit ]
There is a goal to switch Web+ to use WebKit2. This involves using the updated Haiku APIs and possibly other modern frameworksâŚ
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