Author Topic: Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser  (Read 57893 times)

Olafur Gunnlaugsson

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Re: Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser
« Reply #15 on: November 06, 2017, 02:34:12 pm »

Pale Moon is also buggier than most people realise
And that's not the only problem. It also lacks the support for native text encodings. Without an useable C++ development environment there's no hope for something more modern or advanced. Why should an incomplete and slow port of the Qt framework change the situation? On the other hand it's possible to use something written in C that will perform much better under OS/2-based systems. Maybe like the NetSurf (http://www.netsurf-browser.org/) for RISC OS.

Netsurf lacks an ECMAScript interpreter so you are forced to use mobile versions of most major sites.

ak120

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Re: Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser
« Reply #16 on: November 06, 2017, 05:13:48 pm »
Netsurf lacks an ECMAScript interpreter so you are forced to use mobile versions of most major sites.

The Spidermonkey javascript interpreter can be utilised by NetSurf Version 3. Better DOM integration is in development for version 4.

Martin Iturbide

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Re: Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser
« Reply #17 on: November 06, 2017, 05:22:32 pm »
During the OS/2 User Meeting last Weekend we had the Chance to discuss this Topic as well.

I will post my 2 Cents about this here based on the informations we have been presented there and from what I have read/heard elsewhere so far:

- The Project title is somewhat misleading in my opinion: it should be named as: "Sponsorship for a QT5 port needed"

- There is no clear Roadmap regarding a browser: wich will be the one of choice?

- Therefore it is not clear: what is needed at all to complete such a Task? QT5, Rust? Else?

- The Project Goal is 10.000 Dollar where Roderick stated that already 6.500 have been collected, as some "unknown" or "do not want to be named Person" already donated 5.000 Dollar in Bitcoins in Addition. Roderick said that this Money would be enough to work for 3 or 4 months on the QT port. But he estimated the QT port itself would take at least 6 to 9 month to work on...

And for some Browser Alternatives there is even no Need to have QT5 ported.

So this Project is more or less a shot in the dark so far. It is not clear where it leads to nor when it will be completed. Roderick stated that it is better to have a movement than None.

I appriciate all the Things done by Roderick and BWW and all others involved, but not having a plan at all - other than porting QT5 first and looking where this will lead to - is not a good way in my opinion.

I think it would be a good idea to

- make the decision first where to invest the Money in
- give more Information about this at all
- so: to Show a plan.

Hi Sigurd.

I think that your post has a point and that it will be interesting for OS2VOICE and Roderick to reply to the questions. 

On my opinion I support this effort even if it is a Qt 5 port only (no browser yet). I know there are PM exclusive lovers that don't want to try anything else, but Qt has shown that a can provide a lot of apps to the OS/2 platform. While some people counts the micro-seconds to load a Qt app compared to PM, they don't see all the potential new applications we can get from the open source world and the ported Qt4 apps we already have.

While every one is worried on the "short term" strategy on getting drivers for ArcaOS, this is the only open source effort I have seen from the community that belongs to a "middle term strategy" to maintain the platform current by supporting a newer framework to provide more apps. So it is worthy the shot to get Qt 5.

I share the same doubts that you posted, and I thank you for posting those, but I'm also thinking that OS2VOICE and Roderick is doing this in good faith and relaying in a group/company (Bitwise) that has delivered OS/2 projects on the past.

Regards
« Last Edit: November 06, 2017, 05:24:07 pm by Martin Iturbide »
Martin Iturbide
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Martin Iturbide

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Re: Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser
« Reply #18 on: November 15, 2017, 03:18:54 pm »
Hi

I really hope that Roderick can update us on this subject.

Also today Firefox 57 was released for other non-OS/2 platforms and they advertise it as "Faster". Even that I don't know the technical effort to port RUST Language to OS/2, I see RUST as something interesting. Why do I think that RUST will not crash and burn like other novelty languages? I think that because they are starting with a strong "killer application" called Firefox under that language. Instead of being a new language trying to get adoption and applications, it is starting with Firefox running on their language, which it is a very important browser on the internet. So under my opinion it is likely that we are going to see more applications adopting RUST in the future.

On the other hand I also bet for the project of having Qt5 ported to OS/2. We need to have something more standard than PM that can allow us to have more apps ported to the platform and also it represents an open and modern way to create GUI applications.

Regards
Martin Iturbide
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... just share the dream.

ivan

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Re: Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser
« Reply #19 on: November 15, 2017, 03:40:21 pm »
Regarding Firefox 57 the Register has an article about it and a very large number of comments.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/10/open_source_insider_firefox_57/

I am advising all my windows using friends to switch off firefox auto update and not touch this with a barge pole.

Dave Yeo

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Re: Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser
« Reply #20 on: November 16, 2017, 01:48:40 am »
@Martin, it isn't just Rust but lots of other changes. Yesterday they announced that soon they'll require Python3, which we don't have and today, they seem to have made skia a hard dependency, so our Cairo no longer works and skia would need porting. Who knows how many things I've missed as I'm not following development as much as I used to.
They also recommend 16 GBs of address space to compile now, so basically 64 bit platforms. I think that is due to Rust. Eventually we're going to be left behind in a 64bit world

xynixme

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Re: Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser
« Reply #21 on: November 16, 2017, 01:56:20 pm »
I am advising all my windows using friends to switch off firefox auto update and not touch this with a barge pole.

</silence>
Counted blessings of Agile (an extremely bad release is better than no release, while ignoring annoying comments of experts), for people not being management consultants or software engineers paid by the hour: 0 :o

There must be a reason why e.g. ITIL has so define that the customer is satisfied, by definition... :)
<silence>

ak120

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Re: Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser
« Reply #22 on: November 16, 2017, 04:01:12 pm »
Who knows how many things I've missed as I'm not following development as much as I used to.
They also recommend 16 GBs of address space to compile now, so basically 64 bit platforms. I think that is due to Rust. Eventually we're going to be left behind in a 64bit world
Whatever, for further Mozilla development the host build environment can be migrated to an OS/2 64-bit environment which is available (Windows Server 2008 R2 for example). The support for 32-bit target architectures has not been removed until now. But I'm not a spokesman of Mozilla. The current OS/2 fork seems to rely on too many buggy tools. There were no important OS/2-specific code improvements in last years at all. Addionally the newly introduced bugs become innumerable.

Roderick Klein

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Re: Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser
« Reply #23 on: November 16, 2017, 05:08:47 pm »
Can you please provide more specifics instead of saying its based on buggy development tools ?
We have current GCC compilers for example and LIBC libraries are being updated. If
you make a claim make it more specific instead of such a generic claim.

Ooh you said in os2.org that I was distributing hot or baked air. You just cored a home run.

Roderick Klein

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Re: Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser
« Reply #24 on: November 16, 2017, 05:11:21 pm »
Who knows how many things I've missed as I'm not following development as much as I used to.
They also recommend 16 GBs of address space to compile now, so basically 64 bit platforms. I think that is due to Rust. Eventually we're going to be left behind in a 64bit world
Whatever, for further Mozilla development the host build environment can be migrated to an OS/2 64-bit environment which is available (Windows Server 2008 R2 for example). The support for 32-bit target architectures has not been removed until now. But I'm not a spokesman of Mozilla. The current OS/2 fork seems to rely on too many buggy tools. There were no important OS/2-specific code improvements in last years at all. Addionally the newly introduced bugs become innumerable.

And what do you mean with "There were no important OS/2-specific code improvements in last years at all."

Can somebody please delete this guy from the forums. Always so unconstrucitve.


Roderick Klein

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Re: Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser
« Reply #25 on: November 16, 2017, 05:17:46 pm »
Who knows how many things I've missed as I'm not following development as much as I used to.
They also recommend 16 GBs of address space to compile now, so basically 64 bit platforms. I think that is due to Rust. Eventually we're going to be left behind in a 64bit world
Whatever, for further Mozilla development the host build environment can be migrated to an OS/2 64-bit environment which is available (Windows Server 2008 R2 for example). The support for 32-bit target architectures has not been removed until now. But I'm not a spokesman of Mozilla. The current OS/2 fork seems to rely on too many buggy tools. There were no important OS/2-specific code improvements in last years at all. Addionally the newly introduced bugs become innumerable.

Look Andreas if you think our browser environment is so badly broken, specify in more detail how its broken.  The above claims are pretty generic and just completely scare people as if the browser is completely fallen apart. And that is not the case as I have mentioned some of the issue's Firefox has on OS/2 also plague it on Windows and Linux. 

Roderick Klein

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Re: Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser
« Reply #26 on: November 16, 2017, 05:23:14 pm »
These are some of the current compiler tools around for OS/2:
http://os2ports.smedley.id.au/index.php?page=copy-of-gcc-v6.x

The libraries are being up dated as we speak. Partly to accomodate Firefox:
https://github.com/bitwiseworks/libcx

So next time make things more specific and please stopping generic claims.

Andreas Schnellbacher

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Re: Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser
« Reply #27 on: November 16, 2017, 05:57:48 pm »
Can somebody please delete this guy from the forums. Always so unconstrucitve.
The ignore feature works well: http://www.os2world.com/forum/index.php?action=profile;area=lists;sa=ignore;u=41

ak120

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Re: Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser
« Reply #28 on: November 16, 2017, 06:55:07 pm »
Can you please provide more specifics instead of saying its based on buggy development tools ?
I don't want to bore here somebody with numerous links to bug trackers. People with working webbrowsers can simply use a search engine of their choice.
Quote
We have current GCC compilers for example
But the examples are unfortunately missing here. Speaking about GNU's GCC there's no mention about OS/2 in the current supported releases (6.4 and 7.2).
Quote
and LIBC libraries are being updated.
Everybody can check on own system how "updated" the \OS2\DLL\LIBCM.DLL or LIBCS.DLL files are? Perhaps only you have a C Library Reference with additional updates to prove your claims.

Roderick Klein

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Re: Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser
« Reply #29 on: November 16, 2017, 11:30:01 pm »
Can you please provide more specifics instead of saying its based on buggy development tools ?
I don't want to bore here somebody with numerous links to bug trackers. People with working webbrowsers can simply use a search engine of their choice.
Quote
We have current GCC compilers for example
But the examples are unfortunately missing here. Speaking about GNU's GCC there's no mention about OS/2 in the current supported releases (6.4 and 7.2).
Quote
and LIBC libraries are being updated.
Everybody can check on own system how "updated" the \OS2\DLL\LIBCM.DLL or LIBCS.DLL files are? Perhaps only you have a C Library Reference with additional updates to prove your claims.

I do not know what you talking about but Paul Smedley provides current builds of GCC 6 and 7 on his website for OS/2.

I you reference that LIBCM not being updated that is a DLL. So why does not need to be updated ?
We have plenty of new DLL's coming out that are in the Netlabs RPM repo that are being updated to support new ports.

Guys I guess we do have a new Tim Martin for os2world...