A few minutes ago I read a very interesting article:
That gives a lot to think about.
I really don’t want to get into the controversy of using WebKit, or using any other web engine, or hard forking WebKit 2 and continuing with in-house development, or porting the SenerityOS web browser, or making our web engine from scratch.
Just think about what is happening in the web browser world.
Heh, I’m already behind contributing the small changes I’ve to webkit now, I don’t think hard forking is a good idea.
Sadly the web keeps getting more complex each iteration, with hundreds of standards to implement… atleast webkit for now gets that for us, competently, and slows down that madness somewhat (by refusing to adopt webmidi for example, and lots of other stuff)
But, with new regulation by the EU to allow more choice of software choice on devices (which is certainly a good thing!) webkit will loose it’s monopoly on iOS. Perhaps in the future it will be a majority still there, but maybe it will not.
I can only hope that webkit doesn’t die because of that, though I suspect that some of the recent activity from webkit has been to remain actually competetive towards blink.
In any case, it would be cool to have one or two more people to work on haikuwebkit in Haiku, or even webpositive!
Would be cool to get some much needed features for webpositive itself, saving sessions for offline use, integration with the native password store, vertical tree tabs to remove the horrible tab bar. etc.
This article nails it concerning web browser development and the mess it has made of the WWW…The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers
Just popped up in mind the old Presto engine, implemented in early years of Opera Browser, it was so fast and slim it replaced very quickly my browsers at the time (IE & early Firefox (< v4), which was heavy), those were the Windows years for me and the browser also included email client and rss, even a comic strip on the window top right for the shareware builds. Funny times, indeed.
The sad thing is when the new company owner decided the switch for Blink, they’ve thrown away the Presto engine, so today it must lie into a dusty server somewhere in a dark room, instead of appearing into publid domain and being a base for a full featured challenging competitor browser (family?).
The Opera web browser on BeOS was a great experience. The Presto browsing engine should definitely be open sourced.
Do you know of any way to contact Opera, to find out what happened to Presto?
It is possible to use Opera in wine sooner or later.
Not really, they still used the Presto engine for embedded systems where big engines like Blink are not an option. So, when they switched their desktop browser to Blink, Presto was not completely abandoned. Possibly they still make money out of it.
I paid for Opera on BeOS, so I think I’m entitled to Opera on Haiku.
It should happen annnnny day now.
Presto is still used in Opera Mini,a very fast browser for Android,iOS and some feature phones today.
It runs on Operas servers and they only send the rendered result in some very compressed format to the device.
This saves sometimes more than 90% of the traffic,and the device doesn’t need any compute powers.
I don’t know if they still update their Presto engine nowadays,I sometimes use Opera Mini and the rendering has not noticably changed for years,and new websites are having more and more trouble with it.
It’s really sad what happened to it,since Opera with Presto felt at least twice or triple as fast as any other browser on my phone,with Opera Mobile which had local rendering and Javascript and all,just like any other browser (not talking about the remote-rendered Opera Mini)
Too bad Themis never got to the promise land of being the web browser of the future for BeOS and Haiku. Themis download | SourceForge.net
Ha, while nosing around on the subject of web browsers and BeOS stumbled upon https://netoptimist.sourceforge.net/ which I seem to remember this project when it hit the scene.
I found 2 projects working on web browser technology that seems interesting.
Duktape is used in the NetSurf project, yeah! And it’s a good scripting engine, easy to work with.