Firefox ESR may fill the high-end web browser slot for Haiku as an alternate to GNOME Web (Epiphany). Porting forks of Firefox ESR considered redundant at this time.
I see all the hard work on haikuwebkit and WebPositive is being ignored. Even Firefox, which doesn’t even run at this point, gets a checkmark, and WebPositive doesn’t even get a mention?
Please keep in mind this is not necessarily representative for the community. There will always be some very vocal people that just want their favourite browser ported, regardless of any explanations why that might not be possible or the ideal way to go.
Disclaimer: this post is not meant to discourage or belittle the people that actually put in hard work to try to port Firefox.
This thread was started by Kenz to inform us about his port of Firefox. It’s disrespectful to divert people’s attention by discussing other browsers that may or may not even exist for Haiku.
I already moved the PaleMoon posts to an existing topic, but now consider creating a new “Catch-all browser discussion” thread to move all future off-topic ramblings there.
I ran a test build on Haiku x86 (hrev57114). There is a rustc issue during x86 builds (i.e. cbindgen). Got the cbindgen_x86 package built, so now it is just fixing the script for any x86 dependencies.
Update: cbindgen 0.24.3 x86 build issue with rustc seems fixed in Haiku x86 (hrev57116) update.
Aren’t you the first to say that people should work on what they want on their free time ?
Porting Firefox is way better than trying to keep we positive up-to-date
I wouldn’t say that its better (or worse). Having a Haiku native browser that fits with the user interface is important, and having it be Webkit compatible makes it on par with Safari which is one of the big browsers, especially on mobile (iPhone and iPad).
For a web developer it is very important to have Webkit, Blink and Gecko browsers available for testing.
When you have some updates about the progress itself, please write a blogpost instead, as it seems some of us can’t respect asking to keep this thread for porting efforts progress results.
I do not know why exactly :
¤ not everyone reads every posts in a thread
¤ urge a feeling to an already off-topic post must be replied
¤ do not respect thread opener aim/goal with the thread
¤ do not take consideration of request to keep clean for effective info about the topic - from multiple members, even moderator.
¤ etc.
Anyway - I stop following this topic as it is so magnetic due to word “Firefox” but noone contribute this from others by coding/building and use it to update you or the community
but their ego and any stuff non-related to coding acts.
I stop checking - as it is not meaningful.
Thanks for your offer – hope we would hear some about it - even if it done for Haiku 64bit - however I’m still on 32bit.
I do not know that actually accurately I just experienced new apps mainly built by more devs for 64bit by default as they are on already on 64bit. No problemo - I will try to prepare EFI better here to be able to change 64bit soon - until now I failed those “attempts” (boot fails, install fails, etc.).
I don’t commit to write a nice blog post because I have poor english skill, but when it start working at some degree, I have to write some more “official” announcement. You can find it if/when it occur on other media (OSnews?). You don’t need to keep checking here to know that.
I can understand people expect something progress more quickly. I’m sorry for very slow progress and I have nothing to report here periodically. But this is my “spare time” project, I can dedicate effectively just 5-10 hours per week for this project.
In fact, altough I didn’t give up porting firefox yet, but I’m currently not working on porting firefox itself (as I wrote in my recent reply).
I’ll post the LLDB start working on Haiku next (of course when it happens). Don’t expect any progress on firefox itself before that.
32bit thing is not on my sight now, but Firefox itself supports 32bit OSes so when it start working on 64bit, 32bit support may be not a hard task.
I was not referring to the Firefox port (it is great to see that happening!). I was referring to cocobean’s message completely ignoring WebPositive in his “high end browsers for Haiku” list while including things that don’t have a working port at all.
As someone who have worked on another web browser (and fixed a lot of other things in the OS in the process), I can certainly understand this
IMHO Webpositive has a big advantage that all purposes browsers like Firefox or Epiphany have not. Being light and not having a load of dependencies allows it to be included in an iso. This is important because before starting to install other things, you have to make the system work. So it is a good idea to read the user manual and learn few things about it.
I never have said that Firefox is better than WebPositive (myself, I know a few people say such a thing tough).
I just said I would love to see Firefox working on Haiku because I love both. Many people improved porting environment enough to believe porting Firefox is viable work which single person who was non Haiku developer (me) can achieve. So I never have called or asked to join the community member.
I know it is best and perfectly correct all developers who intend to improve browser situation on Haiku SHOULD work on WebPositive and WebKit. But didn’t know anyone MUST NOT work on other browsers on Haiku.
I believe the default and best native browser is WebPositive. Actually I used it daily to work on Haiku, it has enough stability and features to use this forum, github, and other sites. So I know there is no need to port one more browser to Haiku. I didn’t work on this project for anyone’s need. Just for fun, just for my preference.
I already have enjoyed to know how much part of Firefox codebase just compile or not, to make the Haiku Debugger can load some type of irregular debug info (thanks developers to help me on this).
I gave up to optimize the Debugger memory consumption because making it usable for very large project (Firefox, LLVM, maybe LibreOffice) requires some architecture change as far as I explored its code.
So I decided to work on LLDB(LLVM debugger) for Haiku at end. I also believe the Haiku Debugger is the best debugger to be preinstalled on OS because it is simple codebase, small and can be compiled with legacy-GCC. But I thought it is a good thing to have LLVM/Clang friendly and very scalable option to debug some large applications.
I enjoyed to make it compile, to investigate how it works on other OS and to learn Haiku debugger interface, Haiku process(team) and thread management facilities.
Almost no progress, but it was happy hacking time.
The use of past tense in your words sounds like you’re leaving. I hope this is not true. The browser wars both in Haiku and other platforms are getting really out of hand and will not end even if you quit.
My proposed solution to the browser wars was to phase out the use of browsers altogether by making a WebAssembly runtime based on the WASI standard. Unfortunately, the maintainers of the standards body (the Bytecode Alliance) in charge are slow-walking the already painstaking standards process to make it truly cross platform. The result has been a conflicting fork called WASIX based more directly on POSIX standards, and now the browser wars continue in a different form led by Wasmer. Ugh.
Even if you choose not to pursue the Firefox port, please don’t leave. There are plenty of things to do that are smaller and simpler. Just keep in mind that Haiku is in its fourth beta release. Things change in beta releases, sometimes more rapidly than others.
I think you must have misread that somewhere. Nobody (besides maybe some curmudgeons living under forum bridges ) tries to - or actually can - prevent you to work on anything you want. On the contrary, while not joining your efforts or maybe even preferring having more help on Web+/WebKit, the devs try to facilitate anyone’s work by answering questions, accepting patches for the OS or helping with recipes for dependencies.
WRT browsers, it’s my opinion that anyone can hack on anything to have fun, but they are too huge beasts to be maintained by one person for long.
More so, there are some of us here that will help out in any way we can to aid you. As a non developer one could see if parts for the port are missing and can be added in the process.
I don’t think anyone said that. I made unhappy comments, but only specifically at the lack of recognition of my work on WebKit as a viable option. This happens often and is a bit annoying to me because I put a lot of work into making it usable.
I just want it to be mentionned in the list of browsers. Wether people consider contributing to it or porting something else, is everyone’s personal choice. And it is great to see all these attempts, and to get some competition to motivate me to fix some things in WebKit
Thank you for encouraging words. I indeed misread some comments for my poor English skill. I’m sorry for that. I was a bit nervous as my progress is bad and felt not met to the expectations.
Honestly, this project is harder than first I estimated. I have some application developer background, but less on system level programming like debuggers or lower level interfaces. Challenging them is fun but tough.
(successful, debugging)
)
) tries to - or actually can - prevent you to work on anything you want. On the contrary, while not joining your efforts or maybe even preferring having more help on Web+/WebKit, the devs try to facilitate anyone’s work by answering questions, accepting patches for the OS or helping with recipes for dependencies.