When will we start browsing normally?

Sad but true

About what you said about Office…yes. Definitively. Although we must face that need for an Office suite is dramatically drecreasing over time. Much better to use a browser-based office experience, which will be consistent and more practical in a multi-device environment.

This trend is not specific of Haiku, ofc.

A browser in crucial for a modern experience (let alone the hardware acceleration, this is another topic) in many different contexts aside the “simple” web browsing.

That’s why I think that Web+ could be refreshed a bit - in terms of design. Which peculiarities it has and how they are so uniques or could be made unique tnx to Haiku structures and API. And the benefits on having them.

Curating good content pushing this unique perspective will prove to be VERY effective in promoting the platform.

Port Firefox on Haiku and you’ll just end having the very same browser you would have on Linux or Win, just slower. Marketing suicide.

@PulkoMandy are there chances you will consider refreshing marketing and promotion strategies one day? :stuck_out_tongue:

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@PulkoMandy, would it be feasible to solely focus on Web+ and Network Stack for Beta3? It would be a valid marketing point. And presumably it would cut waiting time for Beta3 a lot.

We have caligra too, for me better because libre on haiku is not stabile (or me, crashed often).

I am not afraid about need to work with Browser Base office, because you need to be online every time and you data from user to the cloud with the office and back to the user are not every time the secure option.

Off topic, but I’d love to see a BeProductive clone.

Never hear of it, you mean gobeProductive? Thats 3rd Party and not be, but nice.

Yep, that’s the one. Forgot the Go.

Not from me. I’ve done what I could, now I need other people to look at my code and fix my stupid mistakes that I can’t see myself. Also I’m fed up of working on it and especially of working on it alone. Don’t expect me to save the day here.

Also, I am still not the project leader or anything and I don’t decide what others will work on. And it should stay that way.

I’m not letting Web+ lagging behind just to annoy users. I use it as much as I can too and I’m well aware of the limitations and bugs and how frustrating it can be. But I can’t do anything better, find someone else to work on it.

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The browser at beginning of the BeOS Universe was Orb, if anyone remembers it, and it was really basic…Netpositive was a miracle by contrast!

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You have done very well and been very active. Almost every time I update my software I see that something has been done to Net+.

I’m in the “focus on WebPositive” camp myself. If a port of Firefox existed, I may be interested in using it as a stopgap solution while the issues with WebPositive are sorted out, but to me WebPositive as the fully-functional flagship browser for Haiku should be to goal and anything else just a temporary crutch until that goal is reached. Given that, I am sympathetic to the argument that time spent porting big, famous cross-platform browsers would be better spent on WebPositive.

In my circles we call Safari the “crown jewels” of macOS. This may be a minority opinion, but the reason is that in today’s software landscape, still having a native browser that works is unusual and valuable. When I was using modern Macs more often, I never needed anything other than Safari. I hope someday WebPositive can get there and we can similarly just forget about everything else.

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I’m not a developer, so I can’t help. to navigate use webpositive and Otter (I must say very responsive), it is true they have limitations but you can navigate quite well. qupzilla, but why I can’t find it anymore…? You’re doing a great job
Stefano

You probably misunderstanding how it works: WebPositive will be rebuilt for each and every Haiku nightly, thats why you see it nentioned all the time during the update, but it doesnt mean there was any actual change.
WebPositive made of 2 different part:

  • webkit library
  • WebPositive GUI

WebKit was changed on 11th april last time, but PulkoMandy explained the actual WebKit version used by WP is not the latest because rendering problems with Gerrit.
In the other side, WP was changed 4 months ago last time.
Hope this makes things clear.

If you visit QupZilla GitHub site, you can see that there are a bunch of issues accumulated.
In fact, two years ago, the author decided to change the engine used to render pages and rename the project Falkon. In same time, he dropped support for QupZilla.
As long as it was working, there was no problem to include it but if you had it installed anyway, you would see that last QupZilla crash.
It is a thing to fix a bug existing only in Haiku but it is not to people making recipes for Haiku to maintain the whole code of an app.
So why not Falkon? Unfortunately, it uses Qt WebEngine which is not ported to Haiku so we can’t build it.
Porting a web engine takes a long time and never ends. If it was not so demanding, we would have every browser we want.

There is an early port of it but it isn’t ready or stable enough to be usable in other applications.

See: QtWebEngine Haiku patchset · GitHub

As long as there aren’t enough skilled developers interested in this sort of software, then it would indeed take a long time to bringup other browser. In this case for QtWebEngine, it is a fork of Blink used in Chromium so you can imagine that the patches above can be reused here to speed up the bringup process.

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Bitwise Works started chromium port to OS/2 recently https://github.com/bitwiseworks/qtwebengine-chromium-os2/commits/master

Could be useful for us too.

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Net+ was a really good web browser for its time. Was much faster than IE and I use to show that off to folks who were amazed.

Thank you. I did think Pulko was in danger of burn-out.

Gerrit is working fine for me in HaikuLauncher including login (details in #15426):

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You are using a commit from February, though, and also some app_server patches. But it would be very good indeed if we can get a new WebKit out before the beta.

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