So I heard that the Haiku team contracted a guy to use the updated Webkit to make a version of Webpositive that would be HTML5 compatable. Now I was just woundering if Haiku Alpha 5 will come with this version and if you can use it on Alpha 4 witch is the release I am running.
Hi - That would be me.
There hasn’t been much progress towards HTML5 yet, as I’m currently working on improving the network backend of our WebKit port. This results in much faster network performance (pages load faster, downloads go faster). The version I’m working on also includes some fixes that were already worked on but not integrated into the distributed executables yet (too much bugs left!). Only when I consider the network side of things done I’ll start working on the rendering side to fix the most visible issues.
Unfortunately, this now version of WebPositive won’t run on Alpha 4. While working on it, I found and fixed many bugs in Haiku itself, and I’m sure I will find more. WebKit also uses code that’s built in Haiku, namely the “Service Kit” networking API, and I made a lot of improvements to this.
As for Alpha 5 (or maybe it will be Beta 1), there are currently no plans as to when it will happen. So I can’t really say if my work will be included. I plan to make my changes available as soon as I get the new network code to work where the previous one did. I’m already quite close to that goal, but there are some bugs left before I call it done. I don’t want users to get angry because I broke the subset of websites that were already working.
That is good to know as there has not been to much information other then a few fague posts on Haikuware. I think that Haiku makes one Relase per year and in two years Haiku will be in the first relase of the Beta stage aka Haiku R1 Beta as that is how the previous releases have been so far.Now why would they make Webpostive part of the OS as that sounds super flawed?
HaikuWare is not the best place to get such information. I suggest you have a look at the developer blogs instead: http://www.haiku-os.org/blog
I’m posting weekly updates on my progress there, so you can get an idea of what’s going on.
We’re currently doing more like a release every 1.5 year, but every year would be better.
As for the Beta, the goal is to have all the wanted features. Bugs are allowed, and will be fixed before we publish Haiku R1. Of course, if the new version of WebPositive is working, we will include it. If it is more broken than what we have, we won’t.
The web browser touches so many areas of the OS so like you said, it leads to lots of Haiku bugs getting discovered and fixed since it’s all in the same package.
I really do hope you get to work on the HTML 5 stuff also. I am not sure if anyone has asked you but, will the updated Webpostive be able to have “add-on?” or at least do you think we may be a able to play web videos via html5??
Anyway, it is great that you are working on it. Anything you can do is greatly appreciated.
David
HTML5 video/audio will not be an add-on, it’s part of the WebKit API and is to be handled internally. It’s some work to get that going, mainly because our Media Kit isn’t ready for streaming support. I don’t know if I’ll have time to go that far, more pressing issues are getting the network backend to work (I think I’m mostly done with that now), updating our WebKit port which is about a year behind current developments, and fixing the most visible rendering glitches, like support for CSS3 gradients, which are everywhere these days. Only with that out of the way (at least the first two points) I’ll start working on video/audio support.
So thanks for the link to the blogs. I have to say the Haiku project has quite supirsed me compared to your competitor React OS. I am glad that I switched over to Haiku. I hope to see add ons added to Webpositive and we could use them to add extra features that other people would not want. Now will updating the webkit also allow some one to port over chomeium as I dought that google will port over chrome to Haiku.
Chromium does not use WebKit anymore. They forked it to a project called Blink, and they are drifting away from WebKit. While a port of this is possible, I think it may not be as easy as porting WebKit which already supports more different platforms.