Hey all. I don’t think that using phrases like «doesn’t smell right» is a good way to start a public discussion - I find it provocative and offensive.
Now regarding the matter of the topic (browser delay et al).
I was virtually paralysed when Russia invaded Ukraine and started a war by the end of February. I couldn’t do anything besides thinking on how catastrophic this is for everyone. When I caught my breath I realised that I can’t stand it any longer and need to leave Russia ASAP. It’s not only that it became impossible to do business due to all the sanctions. It’s mostly because I couldn’t tolerate what’s going on. I couldn’t be part of the country that turned into 1930’s Germany (even though I was born there and spent there all my entire life except one year). The least I could do is leave. So I was completely occupied with organising an immediate relocation (with the help of my friends, including some OS/2 folks, as well as some guys from the independent news outlet I also work for).
As I was getting closer to the leave, I got some confidence back and made myself work on the browser a bit between solving numerous move out problems. I don’t understand why this became a subject to criticism as if it were better if hadn’t done this. A few days ago I finally left Russia and plan to stay in Turkey for a while. Currently I’m a person with no home and no residence permit anywhere but Russia (where I’m not going to get back) — and this exposes a huge number of every day problems, starting from inability to have a bank account (and therefore bank cards) to prohibition to stay in a country for more than three months in a row (so I need to move between countries until I get a permit). So until this is solved somehow, my life situation remains volatile and my resources are very limited (in addition to limitations that were already there before the war).
Regarding the overall progress. Our first plan was Otter Browser. We made it to a beta but then decided that it’s not stable enough to be released widely. In parallel, we discovered that there is another Qt-based browser called Dooble. Tests have shown that despite using the very same engine (Chromium) Dooble appears to be more stable than Otter. So we decided to go with Dooble instead. Pretty much simple.
I also want to mention that bww income has dramatically reduced within the last couple of years (mostly because there is not enough parties willing to pay for what we do). I was working full time for bww for many years but last year I realised it can’t go that way anymore because bww just didn’t have enough money to pay me the full salary. I was underpaid for a few months. So I started doing some other stuff in parallel and this of course affected the progress of all our OS/2 projects, including the browsers. Silvan and I were talking about all this more than once. This is the current state of reality.
Regarding updates having «little to do with the browser». This is simply not true. I’m actually surprised Paul is writing such things because he is pretty much capable to understand how things work. Almost everything bww have been doing recently eventually relates to the browser. I’m not talking about small library and tool updates that take little time - I’m talking about updating LIBCn, LIBCx, GCC, Python and a bunch of core tools and libs. All these are needed either for the browser itself or are part of the Qt/Chromium tool chain. In fact, the reason we update them usually is to make Qt/Chromium work.
Also, it’s not true that there is some private source code for the OS/2 versions of Qt/Chromium/Otter/Dooble/whatever. Every single line of code we do is published and every project is buildable from scratch. We (bww) have some private repos but they have nothing to do with the projects we collect money for from the community within the browser campaign. I don’t think that it’s OK to even spread rumours like these without knowing it for sure. It’s certainly a bad attitude.
Another thing worth mentioning is that even Dooble (or simplebrowser) is not 100% stable at the moment. There is a number of known bugs in our port of Chromium that need addressing to make it more stable. There is also a number of technical limitations (like 32 bits) that affect stability and are way more difficult to overcome than fixing bugs. Even if we had a single full time developer assigned to all these tasks, it would not go fast because of the complexity and volume of the code (remember, the original teams working on these projects consist of dozens of skilled developers). But we don’t have even a single one right now. So please don’t expect any outstanding progress in this area. So is the current state of affairs. In my understanding, It’s already a miracle that we got to the point where we are now (having a working Chromium port for OS/2 together with Qt 5).
Porting Qt 6 (as well as fixing Qt/Chromium bugs) is not a problem per se — we have all the tools and all the experience needed for that. What we don’t have (or have not enough) is human resources and money. The best an individual can do here is to either donate what he can, or help with testing and bug reporting, or even help with coding (we accept patches and pull requests since day 1).
I should have more time for OS/2 in the next few days which means that there might be a Dooble RPM for wider testing.
Peace to everyone, I stand for Ukraine.
