I tried to open some web sites and was running into errors with WebPositive.
I could not login into icloud.com.
I could work in my cloud at mailbox.org but on the top of the site many icons are missing/not shown.
Google docs says, my browser is outdated.
Another web site blocked me because of a violation error (Error 1020).
The longer I use Haiku the more web sites I find where WebPositive doesn’t work correctly.
This leads to some questions for me:
Does WebPositive uses the actual WebKit version like the actual Safari browser?
Is there an actively maintainance for WebPositive?
How often are WebPositive updates?
What about the security of WebPositive?
I know, the devs are making a good, hard and intensive job and there are many questions about a modern web browser but nowadays the web browser is (one of) the most used app on a computer and has to be very stable, secure and in actual state.
I can work with Haiku and some minor bugs are absolutely okay but without a good web browser many new users will leave Haiku after short time. People (and I) like to use web mail, cloud app and other modern online services. That all depends on one app - the web browser.
your exceptions about Haiku are very high…
This is Beta version of Haiku!
To use Haiku you have to be more patience…
Haiku is using webkit and it is up to date…
you need to be patience for the Haiku beta 3!
What do you expect?
A perfect OS for free without malus?
Anyway thanks for your helpful report, we need more feedback to make Haiku better…
Thanks
Unfortunately, web browsers are not an easy target. They had became bigger and complex, in the same way that the web had increased their complexity, and the amount of different technologies. Actually, web browsers are almost as complex as an entire OS.
That means that is an impossible task? Of course not, but surely is not an easy one.
As an example: some years ago (maybe 2012, 2014, not remember exactly) there were big complains about the lack of a complete office suite for Haiku. At that time, looked like a big and almost impossible task. Now, we have not one, but two: LibreOffice and Calligra available at HaikuDepot.
How fast (or slow) we can improve this situation, only depends on how much people contribute to the project. Specifically about WebPositive, in my experience recently their compatibility and stability had been improved, but of course there is a lot of work to do yet.
As a final suggestion, I just want to add that also you have some alternative browsers available: Otter and Dooble, in HaikuDepot. If you can’t use some site in WebPositive, try with one of them.
Thanks for your answer.
I don’t expect a perfect OS. I just had a few questions about the Haiku browser because even security is very important in these days and for that it needs a modern browser with actual Webkit.
I am patient.
I would not have installed Haiku an my laptop hd for only some test to delete it then soon. No, I love Haiku and I’m interested to follow the steps of growing up and getting from beta2, beta3 to the first release.
Sadly I can not help in development. I can only test some things and give my feedback.
I have much respect of all your work.
Hi, as the main maintainer for Haikuwebkit I can give some info about the current situation.
The last update that was shipped was shortly after the beta2 release. The reason for that, is that we continue to improve our Webkit port, and to do so, we sometimes need to make changes to Haiku. Some of the changes have happened after beta2 was released. If we released a new version of webkit now, it would not run on beta2 versions of Haiku, only in current nightlies. And a lot of our users are running the beta2 version, so it would make an even worse impression.
So, currently we use a version of WebKit that is similar to what Safari was using one year ago. With the web now moving extremely fast, this is very outdated. Also, WebKit is not the only component of the web browser, and a lot of the code is our own, both for rendering to screen, and for implementing the HTTP protocol. A lot of issues in that code have been fixed since the beta2 release but could not be delivered to users yet.
We are now working on publishing beta3 of Haiku that will finally include this big update to WebPositive and hopefully fix some of the problems. And we will have more frequent updates after that.
Web Positive, Dooble, and Otter are all QT-based browsers. This probably helps keep the QT cross-platform kit up-to-date, so other QT apps can be brought to Haiku.
There’s also an open source 100% Java browser - Lobo Evolution (v1.0). The dev is happy for others to fork it, and/or contribute. If this was brought to Haiku, it would make him happy - he gets his browser into an OS - and Haiku would not only get an extra browser, but would have access to a Java coder who could give advice on keeping Java up-to-date. Then other Java apps could be brought into Haiku. Haiku would then have two working cross-platform kits: QT & Java.