Timeline announcement for public beta of new Otter Browser....

[Roderick Klein]

Hello,

The new Otter Browser has been tested by a small group of people.
The most important issues are now being fixed to provide a stable browser experience. Current expectation is that first *public* beta of Otter Browser will be released in the last week of February or the first week of March.

Installation of the new Otter Browser will only be supported via ANPM (Arca Noae Package Manager). When the public beta of the Otter Browser is released we will also release the instructions how to install the Otter Browser.

We need your donations to keep going, please consider making a donation via https://donation.os2voice.org

Please visit https://articles.os2voice.org , at the bottom of the Browser update 13 you can find 2 questions. Could you please fill in these two questions about your browser experience
on OS/2, eCS and ArcaOS ? Thank you!

In this newsletter you can also read why the Browser update newsletter have not been released over the last couple of months.

We also explain how the browser will distributed when
the beta cycle is finished.

You can also read how Steven Levine views the new Otter Browser.

Best regards,

Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE

[Heikki Kekki]

Please visit https://articles.os2voice.org , at the bottom of the Browser update 13 you can find 2 questions. Could you please fill in these two questions about your browser experience
on OS/2, eCS and ArcaOS ? Thank you!

For clarity, I answered the other browser. I use Seamonkey 2.35 because on my system it works quickly and well on the pages that it works.

[Dave Yeo]

What about donating directly to Bitwise, last I looked they did accept credit cards

[Per E. Johannessen]

They do, just made another donation using credit card.

[ivan]

A few questions to which I don't see answers in the information given,
a) how configurable is this browser or is it a case of 'what you see is what you get'?
b) does it support things like No Script and adblock plus?
c) is the stupid positioning of the tabs, divorced from the page they relate to, fixed or can they be moved to above the relevant page?

If it won't do those things I will continue using Dave's Firefox ESR 38.8.0 on OS/2 or the Linux Firefox ESR via my KVM switch.

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

ivan, everyone...

...If it won't do those things I will continue using Dave's Firefox ESR 38.8.0 on OS/2 or the Linux Firefox ESR via my KVM switch.

You bring up an excellent point, and even though they say "you don't look a gift horse in the mouth", the reality is that by now, after some years of use, most of us have established a browser platform for interacting with the WWW.

So while my FF 45.9 may not be capable of successfully rendering ALL the sites out there, the reality of my life is that I have far too much of a 'FF 45.9 configured' setup to simply move on over to a browser that only does the basic rendering for ALL of the pages out there.

In fact, as an alternative it is FAR cheaper and FAR more robust to utilize RDP access to a Win/Linux based browser install, or the KVM switch that you ivan are suggesting.

Here is what's been eating away at me: the funding drive, while generally a great and just effort, seems to be single handedly relying on us, the OS/2 end-users to cover the costs. So where are the big-fish of our platform in all of this? Does anyone know? Have those kind of conversations taken place and have any results been arrived at?

If you want to talk full-disclosure, well, let's "talk the talk, and walk the walk"...much easier to raise additional funds if we all understand the full playing field!

[Roderick Klein]

I will try to answer to the best of abiilities your questions.

For your first question download the Otter Browser on Windows or Linux. Its effecitvely the same browser as on ArcaOS.
https://otter-browser.org/ most of the functions should be the same on ArcaOS. 

As for your second question I do not know.

Your third question ? Are you referring to the QT testbrowser that was distributed and mentioned by other people ?

As I mentioned this this working towards a first public beta. That is what the focus is on.
Otter was selected as the browser has been under development for a longer time already.
And while we try with this browser to satisfy as many users as possible, we can not make everybody happy.

The small group of beta testers indeed reported that websites that you could
no longer access on OS/2, now work again. And that is the primary goal of this project make as many websites accesiable again
on OS/2 and ArcaOS.

Thanks,

Roderick Klein

[Dave Yeo]

Hi Ivan, playing with it on Linux, it is not very configurable, currently has no support for extensions though I believe support is planned and comes with its own ad blocker which seems to work. Not sure about tab re-positioning, at least they're along the top like our current browsers.

Hi Dariusz, we don't all have a spare Windows or Linux machine to use. As for funding, I don't think there are any big fish who care about having a browser left besides Arca Noae and I had the impression they and Bitwise don't get along as well as they used to, not that I really know.
I fully expect a lot of people will continue to use the Mozilla browsers along side the new one, perhaps eventually fully migrating, perhaps not. Still need to do email etc too.

Hi Roderick, unluckily we'll be back to not being supported on a lot of sites due to the speed of Browser development and can't even fall back to work arounds in add-ons like the XUL based browsers are doing. The XUL based ones also have a larger user base to pressure sites like GitHub to revert changes that affects them like the recent chaining operator thing, which at least the Simple Browser gets a 4/5 for supporting.
Site showing compatibility, https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es2016plus/ which our old browsers fail badly, the Simple Browser does support up to 2020 JavaScript standards.
The continuing problem is crappy web developers who just plug in JS libraries, test on a couple of browsers and call it done instead of testing for features and having fall backs. We're supposed to update every month now a days
Hopefully the QT people keep supporting the QT5 web engine as it is hard to imagine the shrinking community being able to pay for porting current QT6

[mike]

What was the reason why the Otter Browser was chosen in first place? The Qupzilla/Falkon browser is more frequently updated and has a larger user base. It has the same requirement for a current QT framework.

[Heikki Kekki]

I can use my internet bank with Simple Browser. It is slow and crashes often, but it doesn't leak shared memory like FreeRDP.

[ivan]

Hi Dave,

I considered doing that on my backup Linux box but it was just too much messing about and wanted the install of unnecessary junk on the small hard disk.

[Roderick Klein]

ivan, everyone...

...If it won't do those things I will continue using Dave's Firefox ESR 38.8.0 on OS/2 or the Linux Firefox ESR via my KVM switch.

Here is what's been eating away at me: the funding drive, while generally a great and just effort, seems to be single handedly relying on us, the OS/2 end-users to cover the costs. So where are the big-fish of our platform in all of this? Does anyone know? Have those kind of conversations taken place and have any results been arrived at?

If you want to talk full-disclosure, well, let's "talk the talk, and walk the walk"...much easier to raise additional funds if we all understand the full playing field!

Hello Dariusz,

From my perspective nothing has changest since about 2012 when Bitwise Works was founded. A lot of funding
came from the community. Like with QT 4.68 at the time as Netlabs project a lot of people contributed to the
community.

When it comes to "big fish" you mean large companies ? In the 10 years I worked at Mensys on eCS (from about 2002 until 2013) not
a single large customer demanded browser support. 

So for me the fund raising is not that much different as it has been over the last 10 years.

Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE

[Martin Iturbide]

Hi

So where are the big-fish of our platform in all of this? Does anyone know? Have those kind of conversations taken place and have any results been arrived at?

It is hard to read between lines, but I took it as "Where it is Arca Noae, about the New Browser?" Arca Noae is the only company here with some money flow, they should care more about having a modern browser. I had seen their presentation when they say that newer versions of ArcaOS will include a modern browser, but I don't know how much they are collaborating or donating to the BWW project. I know Arca Noae is very busy right now with their 5.1 release, I see a lot of activity (on the testers mailing lists) trying to consolidate that version, but I don't know how much they contributed to this browser.

Regards

[Roderick Klein]

What was the reason why the Otter Browser was chosen in first place? The Qupzilla/Falkon browser is more frequently updated and has a larger user base. It has the same requirement for a current QT framework.

I will check Dmitry from Bitwise Works. But I seem to recall the Falkon browser would even be more work, because we need yet another library and would take more time to port.

Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE

[Dmitriy Kuminov]

What was the reason why the Otter Browser was chosen in first place? The Qupzilla/Falkon browser is more frequently updated and has a larger user base. It has the same requirement for a current QT framework.

The reason is simple: Falkon (as opposed to its predecessor Qupzilla) is KDE based. So, besides Qt, it also requires a recent version of KDE Framework (KF5) to build. It is a huge project and it is a very complex task to port it it to OS/2.

BTW, Otter is updated not that much but quite frequently, check https://github.com/OtterBrowser/otter-browser/commits/master.