NetSurf issues & wishes

Right now Netsurf isn't summonned up from the dock when you click on its docky. You can only open a new window. Dev CI #3750.

@Srtest

Do you mean the normal NetSurf icon that has been dragged into the dock? If so, that's normal - it will load NetSurf, which will open a new window, regardless of whether it is running already or not.

@Chris

No the one which Netsurf minimizes itself to on the docky as well as on the desktop.

@Srtest

It doesn't minimise to the dock, I think that's the issue. If you click on the dock icon when the window is minimised it won't unminimise. This is probably a bug.

Congratulations on the recent update, I am still experiencing the same freezes I had been experiencing for the last 2 years. Timeouts still bring the computer to a halt between 15-35 seconds. Some sites that realy don't have a lot of graphics can create major slowdowns that make it I can't even run Candi in the background. and sometimes when I close a tab I can get a freeze I can't recover from. That last bug is less common than timeout freezes and the slowdowns on certain sites. I don't think this is related to java but I will try to use it from now on without it and see if it helps (the timeout freezes are definitely not related). Lastly, once in a while it can crush the system after exiting with it giving me that known output in the shell window (assort something something).

* On Amigaworld I can't close the browser and then reopen and continue to be logged-on.

@Srtest
Have you tried a clean install of NetSurf?

What Amiga are you running it on, with what gfx card, and what version of OS4?

Do you have a web page that always causes the issue?

@ChrisH

I always do a clean install. Running on a X1000 with R9-270 on FE.

The quite simple amiga pages cause this issue (here, amigaworld, amiga.com, hyperion) so of course heavier websites have that also. It is important to add that it is not something I can cause very clearly by doing X as it leads to Y. The websites I mentioned cause slowdowns from time to time and sometimes heavier websites cause less slowdowns and sometimes non at all.

The timeout issue is not website-related. Whenever I do stuff in the evening when the net traffic is most intense here, timeouts occur more frequently on certain websites and freeze things up for the period I mentioned. After such a freeze another isn't likely right away.

@Srtest

Quote:

It would be very useful to have this raised on the bugtracker along with the website and what you were doing at the time it crashed.

"assert something-or-other" isn't a known output, it means something has gone seriously wrong.

@Chris

Ok, I will be even more attentive although I already am. As I can't get that log because of the hard crush, I will post a pic next time. I can't tell you it happens if I do anything in particular because I use netsurf for specific bookmarks and oddysey for the rest.

I turned off javascript and it seems to help. What does that mean? That the load times or freeze times or slowdowns are less common and when they occur I can recover more quickly, yet they still happen.

@Chris

Ok, I will be even more attentive although I already am. As I can't get that log because of the hard crush, I will post a pic next time. I can't tell you it happens if I do anything in particular because I use netsurf for specific bookmarks and oddysey for the rest.

I turned off javascript and it seems to help. What does that mean? That the load times or freeze times or slowdowns are less common and when they occur I can recover more quickly, yet they still happen. As a matter of fact I got a timeout/freeze right now when I tried to post this comment - as it is rush hour here and usually that means some slowdowns in net traffic when accessing sites overseas.

@Srtest
FWIW, I personally use NetSurf with JavaScript turned off (I thought that was the default?), because it doesn't seem to allow any non-working web pages to work (e.g. the Amigans.net post Preview button still doesn't work), and because I thought the JavaScript engine was known to be crash prone (although I may be mistaken).

If I want JavaScript, I use Odyssey...

@ChrisH

Well I always thought that if you liked a certain prog you want to use it more and more. Javascript allows that while the cost must still be pretty big at this stage of development. Anyway, turning it off affects the symptoms.

@ChrisH

I know of no JS-related crashes. It used to have a tendency to freeze on certain scripts (because the processing it was doing was inefficient), but that was fixed ages ago.

As you note, there's a lot of stuff which doesn't work yet, and that's mostly because (a) events are only partially implemented and (b) a dynamic layout engine is needed to enable JS to change the displayed page content.

After about a week of using 3.6 without js I can report it doesn't have a serious effect as it affects it indirectly via the "heavy load" condition. That condition can be reproduced when using NS with Candi and TuneNet in the background - when it's stuck it can really get stuck for minutes. When a timeout happens on a certain situation it can even freeze everything. Of course using it alongside Odyssey is a big no as every little freeze can freeze everything. That's why I say it doesn't play well with others when every load becomes big for NS.

_____

About the "assert" system crash in the last couple of days this had happened twice so I reported it here as 2 separate occasions: http://bugs.netsurf-browser.org/mantis/view.php?id=2492
http://bugs.netsurf-browser.org/mantis/view.php?id=2493

Okay I might have an update on the total crash that happened on drag and drop: I was just now marking an entire paragraph in oddysey and I guess I tried to dnd it without noticing as the entire system froze up and that had also happened twice in the last couple of days. Candi in the background might be related. To my defence though, I never experienced this with odyssey before and it also has a known dsi that might trigger all sorts of things.
(X1k, R9-270, AOS4.1FE, latest radeonhd)

I found Candi to be CPU demanding. Suggest try using NS without Candi.

@ChrisH
Quote:
While that's worth a shot, IIRC Candi runs at a low priority so it doesn't slow down CPU intensive tasks. It also has a "low CPU" mode.

It's a pity that we still don't have PowerPC JIT compilation for Javascript in any browser. I expect the amount of Javascript used to increase over time, and JIT compilation would help drop the CPU load back down.

Hans


P.S., Seeing as this thread is also about wishes. I'd love to have a WebGL capable browser. WebGL is based on OpenGL ES 2, which we now have, so it's now a feasibility. I'm not sure if NetSurf's Javascript engine is up for it though, as I remember reading somewhere that it doesn't support the latest Javascript features.

@Hans

I don't know how WebGL works (or what it is). The Javascript engine is Duktape (http://duktape.org/). That would also be the place to look for a PPC JIT implementation, but there's zero chance of that happening without writing it yourself and submitting a pull request.

If it only needs to be implemented browser-side, then http://bugs.netsurf-browser.org is the place to request it. However, there are a lot more important things to do with the JS implementation before that would even be considered.

@Chris

Quote:
WebGL is basically OpenGL ES 2 for Javascript. It allows you to render 3D graphics right in the browser.

Quote:
I'm not about to write one. That's a huge project, one that's more suited to the author of Petunia and EUAE's JIT.

Hans

@Hans Quote:
IIRC it uses a task priority of -1, which IMHO is way too high for something as constantly CPU intensive as Candi (since it'll basically block anything from running with a priority of -2 or lower). I think it should be as low as possible (say -127).

And even if NetSurf only briefly uses a task priority of -1 for something, Candi would heavily slow it down (perhaps enough to reveal some kind of race-condition bug).