Any updates on the Falcon QT browser?

[David Kiley]

Just curious if anyone has heard anything. Still being worked on?

[David Kiley]

I was planning to donate to it soon but wanted to check the status to make sure it's still a thing.

[Dave Yeo]

They keep running into deficiencies in our build system, needed a new GCC and various libc updates. See for example https://github.com/bitwiseworks/qtwebengine-chromium-os2/issues/3. It's coming along and I'm sure they appreciate donations.

[Doug Bissett]

Well, first it is Falkon (with a "k"), not Falcon (with a "c"). They are two different browser programs. I have tried both in windows, Falcon is pretty limited. Falkon is much more capable, and seems to work okay. I also tried Pale Moon, which seemed to be pretty good (and has been mentioned as a possibility for OS/2).

Word is, that they are approaching the end of the project, but it may get held up, if they don't get the funding.

[guzzi]

There has been quite some progress. Voice will release a status update tomorrow.

[Roderick Klein]

I was planning to donate to it soon but wanted to check the status to make sure it's still a thing.

Hi David,

I am Roderick Klein president of the Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation. You can follow the update status here:
https://articles.os2voice.org, as Guzzi wrote we will release a new status update tomorrow. 

The Dutch VOICE foundation has been collecting sponsorship for BWW for this project.

This whole project is not just a matter of recompiling the web browser (running the compiler). Recently a new GCC compiler (initially released by Paul Smedley) was further enhanced by BWW. The mayor portion of the work has gone into porting the QT library framework to ArcaOS.  Portion of this is the QT webkit DLL. This  QT webkit HTML/Javascript engine is also used by Google Chrome and the Microsoft Edge browser.  The webkit DLL is done for about 40% and the QT framework is already ported. We need at least another month.

Yes some people reading might be critical that its taking longer then planned. The honest answer is that BWW has been on target on this for about 12 months and that its difficult to make an accuarate estimate with such a large project!

Any donation is welcome to keep deveopment moving forward! As I have always stated certain projects need a full time developer to work on such projects such as QT.
A large portion of the software we use on ArcaOS are using the GCC compiler and the LIBC libraries. These DLL's are used by Linux applications ported to OS/2.

I consider the Firefox 45 for OS/2 simply dead. More and more websites do not work properly and the engine is hard to update. Is the Falcon browser ideal, mayb its not.
But its going to be better up to date then Firefox 45.9.

You can make a donation here: https://www.os2voice.org/membership.html

Greetings

Roderick

[Roderick Klein]

Here is status update on the status of the new web browser.

http://articles.os2voice.org/

Best regards,

Roderick Klein

[Neil Waldhauer]

I know estimating software is problematic. I am worse than many at making estimates. Still, we must make plans.

Instead of giving a date two months hence for the browser, this time you said so for Qt 5. This is probably realistic, but past experience is that the job is quite large, and two months is not enough.

Then, after Qt is complete, then the Falkon browser will take some time to port. Is that two more months? Is July, 2020 a reasonable estimate now for Falkon?

Then, what about a reasonable debugging time for Falkon? Users will find problems that developers won't. So that will take some months to accomplish as well. Counting the debugging also as two months, it sounds like a reliable browser is about 6 months off, and funding is needed that VOICE cannot produce.

A reliable, modern browser will transform this platform. I have contributed in the past, and I intend to do so in the future. Thanks, Roderick, for organizing the funding of this project.

[Roderick Klein]

I know estimating software is problematic. I am worse than many at making estimates. Still, we must make plans.

Instead of giving a date two months hence for the browser, this time you said so for Qt 5. This is probably realistic, but past experience is that the job is quite large, and two months is not enough.

Then, after Qt is complete, then the Falkon browser will take some time to port. Is that two more months? Is July, 2020 a reasonable estimate now for Falkon?

Then, what about a reasonable debugging time for Falkon? Users will find problems that developers won't. So that will take some months to accomplish as well. Counting the debugging also as two months, it sounds like a reliable browser is about 6 months off, and funding is needed that VOICE cannot produce.

A reliable, modern browser will transform this platform. I have contributed in the past, and I intend to do so in the future. Thanks, Roderick, for organizing the funding of this project.

The whole QT framework is done and tested. This QT testframe consists of (if I remember correctly about 80000 tests), all of these tests pass expect 2.
Currently the webkit is at 50% complete to compile.

The beaty is that 80% to 90% of a QT based browser fucntionality comes from the libraries above. So we are certainly expecting a way smoother development then 6 months.
Read some of the earlier newsletters for the new browser newhere some of this information is described in, please visit https://articles.os2voice.org.

Roderick

[Lars]

Is "Chromium" (mostly) the equivalent to "the Falkon browser" or is this yet another engine/component to port before the browser itself can be ported?
Plus,libraries might need to be extended/fixed that already exist which is also mentioned. That will also take some time which should not be underestimated.

[Dave Yeo]

Well the widgets should be taken care of by the main QT libs. I'd guess the only hard thing will be getting the JavaScript's JIT working correctly.

[Roderick Klein]

Is "Chromium" (mostly) the equivalent to "the Falkon browser" or is this yet another engine/component to port before the browser itself can be ported?
Plus,libraries might need to be extended/fixed that already exist which is also mentioned. That will also take some time which should not be underestimated.

The chromium/webkit engine is the core engine of the browser, thats the reneding engine. If you put on top of that the UI stuff of the browser itself is QT also.
This browser is the quickest route to compiling a new browser on OS/2. And other developers could look at compiling other QT based browsers.

Roderick

[hakuchi]

Anyone looked into Otter browser?

https://otter-browser.org/

[Dave Yeo]

Anyone looked into Otter browser?

https://otter-browser.org/

One of its dependencies is gstreamer, which would need porting. Gstreamer uses plugins so would take a bit more work to port then just building, sound support, using DosLoadModule() to dynamically load the plugins.

[Eugene Tucker]

Otter looks promising but the development even in Windows and Linux is very slow. FalKon is more stable.