Haiku 64 bit hrev54881.
Had trouble choosing the category, in the end decided that WebPositive is part of the OS…
I was using mainly Otter for some time now. After latest nightly update Otter’s rendering of the forum was weird with overlapping text and stuff like that.
Today I thought of trying WebPositive for the forum. Rendered without any issue.
After that I began to browse the sites I check everyday. Aside from some known delays. common to Otter and WebPositive, all sites were rendered correctly with WebPositive feeling snappier than before. For the record (and maybe useful info) some of these are: OSNews, ArsTechnica, Phoronix, OMGUbuntu, a Greek weather site e.t.c.
Some other important things in my opinion:
There is a specific Greek news site (www.protagon.gr) which was always giving me trouble with Otter. While browsing back and forth between main page and specific articles memory consumption was increasing and browsing was getting slower and slower in short amount of time. Used to close and restart Otter to resolve it. Always thought of creating a ticket but never did…
Well, today with WebPositive, after much time on the specific site, not much memory increase and no slowness in use! No other problems!
Choosing to share articles on twitter through the above site worked without issue. Yesterday with Otter it was failing (not supported browser or something).
All the time I am browsing today (still in WebPositive now) no sense of instability or other problem!
EDIT: 4: Just found out that also renders gmail in full enhanced view and not in “standard HTML” view !
I am really-really excited experiencing that behavior in WebPositive today !!
It seems that some very good work has been done in the meantime
A big thank you to all contributors and please continue like this !!
For a long time I was able to follow the progress of WebPositive to perfection based on the display of Ancestris - Freies Genealogieprogramm.
Currently, but already for some nightly, some pages of my son are no longer displayed correctly (overlays…), although it used to be perfect!
I have to say: It is my main browser while waterfox is used for webrtc sites and other exotic websites. It behaves so well in haiku power saving mode and that is crucial for low power, low heat in small machines.
Please, by all means, do not lose faith on this . When it gets fully polished, i am sure it will be very fast and lean. Those who used webpositive in the early parts of 2020 know how much it advanced until now, and this is definitely correlated with how haiku matured.
Confirm here also, WebPositive is now my main browser, only for YT I “need” another
And maybe for gitlab, that’s still not all too wel, but atleast I can access my account on gitlab with WebPositive.
I agree too…would love WebPositive to be the go to web browser. It has come a long way yet has a long way to go still. In the meantime, the FireFox ports provide me the ad blocking, spam control and basic security thru extensions. I would love to see WebPositive on par with today’s browsers. Keep going and I will keep testing when new features come on board…!
I haven’t heard anyone arguing to the contrary, but let me pre-empt things by stating the blatantly obvious.
WebPositive must remain the standard, installed-by-default Haiku browser. If I am a developer and I write HTML help for my program, then I know I only need to write what works in WebPositive. I don’t have to worry if my help will still be readable in ten years’ time when the GodOnlyKNowsWhat Browser 2.0 is all the rage.
In the BeOS era help files were generally written in StyledEdit, with the limited font and style support it had. And those files are still perfectly readable.
Other browsers are like Pokemons: I collect them all! And I appreciate what they offer. But WebPositive is our little island of stability. It is ours. Whenever I get the chance, I advise newbies to try WebPositive first.
I will jsut add it to the endless list of things that poeple ported to Haiku and then did not maintain.
The hard work is keeping things up to date. Every few weeks, I have to merge the changes from WebKit, and from time to time make a new release. If there is no one committed to doing that for 10+ years, any other web browser project for Haiku will become irrelevant very quickly.
I don’t mind being relieved of that job and spend my time on something else, but until now I have not found someone doing it as reliably as I do (whatever brower engine they pick), and with a limited set of dependencies (as I prefer “native” apps myself - but that’s just my personal choice).
WebPositive is well-enought browser, native to Haiku. I’ve just mention that there are plenty of projects, many of them interesing and plenty that were unthinkable back in the days.
The recently released Iceweasel and Floorp are like wrapped inside a VM or something to run on Haiku ? How is this different from the “native” Webpositive ?
Iceweasel and similar Gecko browsers rely on GTK for their UI and on Wayland for compositing, both of these are non-native pieces of software that had to be ported over and add an extra layer of baggage between the app and the native functions used to render apps. This alone adds considerable overhead to the ported browsers.
Add to that the fact both GTK and Wayland are bloated pieces of trash and yes, performance-wise, these kinds of ported browsers will never compare to native ones when it comes to snappiness and responsiveness.
Afaik QT-based browsers have it slightly better when it comes to this but some amount of overhead is inevitable when it comes to ported apps.
Why use Wayland server for this and not some X thingy? I’m asking because while using Iceweasel the mouse showed black square while moving and drag and drop support is working vaguely
(correct me if I’m wrong)
I don’t know the specifics, the people working on these ports should have a good answer for that, if I had to hazard a guess it’s because open-source projects in general want to move away from X11 as the linux crew has been trying deprecate it for years now, it’s very likely Firefox’s code base in general switched to Wayland to be more future-proof. Or maybe the Wayland-based versions are just easier to port.
Also, a Wayland port should be smaller and more manageable then an X11 one, while also being more useful in the long term.
That said, the Wayland port is still a complex beast and is currently incomplete, which triggers the issues you’re describing.
The thing is, Haiku has neither a wayland server nor an X11 server. Both compat layers translate the protocols to the native equivalent, and the X11 compat layer is for a specific X11 library and not for the X11 server protocol itself. So you can only port apps with this that use this specific library, and not arbitrary X11 apps.
There is no need to be insulting the people working on these things. Even if they did a great work, the overhead of running their code on top of Haiku’s architecture, to which it is not matched, would create problems.
They certainly have different goals and compromises.
Fair enough, I guess I’m still salty about Gnome3 and the many times their project direction went some bizarre ways to catch some shiny new feature of dubious utility while discarding a bunch of standard features and alienating their userbase.
And I appreciate what they offer. But WebPositive is our little island of stability. It is ours. Whenever I get the chance, I advise newbies to try WebPositive first.