Just noticed a thread over at AW that jacadcaps would be open to a port to OS4.1 but no one from A-Eon etc. has approached him about it..this was March of this year..obviously surprised to hear that
They maybe didn’t noticed the thread like you did in the first place, They are not interested or have their own solution on the way but going Wayfarer is the only way to go, it’s more than surprises thought it’s bizarre.
@All If you read carefully, you will see it's not about porting, but about licensing, which means - there you go, take the source code and port it yourself. I bring that info to Mattew and Trevor a few times already in the last few months.
Anyway, why anyone that circled on a browser? Like, it will save everyone from being retro-hobby stuff ?:)
A Browser on PPC always will have issues in comparison with browsers on windows. ALWAYS. Some sites will not work, some will work wrong. You will be always in need to support and update. And only to realise later that browser still not support a lot of other stuff (and will not) in comparison with other modern browsers.
Morphos guys probably have in mind to switch to x86 soon or later, and then there should be not that hard for them to take Waywarer to x86, but on PPC it will always dead end with missing stuff and slow enough. And does not matter if it morphos or amigaos4.
What will happen once jadacaps will lose motivation and burn out with all that everyday work on a browser? Right, it will the same stops, then WebCore obsolete after a year or two, and the same situation as always.
Imho it's better to just realize that if you want a modern browser, PPC oses is not for that (that includes linuxes too, by the way).
If anyone wishes to make a browser for PPC, that good enough and interesting, but to make that all correctly, there need really some skilled programmers working hard every day and have interest in it.
Ask Jadacaps if he didn't think about giving it all a rest and dropping working on this Wayfarer completely, I am sure he on the line of burning out already :) And then some users come "plz, make my site work, I was in hope that with the new WebKit core everything will work everywhere" :) And there come issues with the whole web industry forgetting about big-endian, and completely make their JS and other code being little-endian only.
Add to that issues with all those "licencies" coming all out of all places on all modern big sites, where you can do that or that until you pay, damn .. the whole modern web is just start to be crap.
@kas1e Again a sober take on the situation. I think Cameron Kaiser of TenFourFox and Classilla fame summed this up well in the "End of TenFourFox" blogpost: Quote:
Writing and maintaining a browser engine is fricking hard and everything moves far too quickly for a single developer now. However, JavaScript is what probably killed TenFourFox quickest. For better or for worse, web browsers' primary role is no longer to view documents; it is to view applications that, by sheer coincidence, sometimes resemble documents. You can make workarounds to gracefully degrade where we have missing HTML or DOM features, but JavaScript is pretty much run or don't, and more and more sites just plain collapse if any portion of it doesn't. Nowadays front ends have become impossible to debug by outsiders and the liberties taken by JavaScript minifiers are demonstrably not portable. No one cares because it works okay on the subset of browsers they want to support, but someone bringing up the rear like we are has no chance because you can't look at the source map and no one on the dev side has interest in or time for helping out the little guy. Making test cases from minified JavaScript is an exercise in untangling spaghetti that has welded itself together with superglue all over your chest hair, worsened by the fact that stepping through JavaScript on geriatic hardware with a million event handlers like waiting mousetraps is absolute agony. With that in mind, who's surprised there are fewer and fewer minority browser engines? Are you shocked that attempts like NetSurf, despite its best intentions and my undying affection for it, are really just toys if they lack full script runtimes? Trying and failing to keep up with the scripting treadmill is what makes them infeasible to use. If you're a front-end engineer and you throw in a dependency on Sexy Framework just because you can, don't complain when you only have a minority of browser choices because you're a big part of the problem.
Again a sober take on the situation. I think Cameron Kaiser of TenFourFox and Classilla fame summed this up well in the "End of TenFourFox" blogpost:
Exactly :(
@Benny Quote:
Even if it is about licensing, that would be better than reïnventing the wheel!
Just someone should port it after still, which means skilled person, which, then, if that person is around us, can do it before too. And while there no such developer(s) it means if AEON licence source code for 20 thousand or how much there needs it, there probably need also pretty much work to spend to port it all from morphos related pats (which since Odyssey times changes for sure as well, and some need total rewrite and reimplementation on os4 port). It also ObjectiveC (all the morphos parts), so again make no sense to have that source code at all.
I mean, why AEON need to spend 20k$ for example, to have sources, which in general need a full rewrite? There no sense in it. I can understand if Jadacaps have a will to port it to OS4 for more money, then yeah. But having sources that need a rewrite, adapt, etc, etc and sitting on them have no big sense, realy. It just too much was changed in MoprhOS itself, in the way how they code, in their GCC fixes, that porting such a beast will be harder than writing new GUI on top of a modern WebKit.
And IMHO, if someone needs hobby-PPC-OS just for and only for Browser, then why just not use MorphOS as the main os ?:)
I have to agree here. Licensing makes not much sense if you still need to invest a lot of time in porting. Then it would propably make more sense to do something from scratch and invest the money in it. But even if you do it one time and have something modern, it must updated all the time. For that you need someone very skilled who does it for love and interest and hopefully keeps motivation or you pay for it but then you need somebody investing money in it for a long time. I doubt that anyone willing and able to do that. In any case something changing as fast as a web browser is difficult for a small hobby niche with not much money to make and limited resources.
So I looked at some review showing how painfully slow it was on web pages they bragged about supporting, I think this thing is really useless, unless we get full web assembly support and JS JIT support, only then will it make sense to update it.
As for Firefox, we need rust and that is another major undertaking.
I think instead of poring another browser, we better spend time on the technology under it, NodeJS etc.
(NutsAboutAmiga)
Basilisk II for AmigaOS4 AmigaInputAnywhere Excalibur and other tools and apps.
Cameron Kaiser is so right on what he says. Unfortunately, Internet is already broken. And lets be honest, to have a good browser on AmigaOS 4 working fast, will need at least an X1000 and for sure an X5000, and of course multicores working in parallel for the many threads. I wouldn't expect that to work ok on a SAM 460cr or an A1222. And as Kas1e said, it will be slow, because of JS.
In my opinion, we should focus more on creating applications that move internet stuff to desktop, like watching video streams (i.e. aiostreams) or discover music and media (i.e. MediaVault). We should also keep updating applications that consumes streams, like AmigaAmp and Emotion.
For me, I am pretty happy with Odyssey so far. I can watch YouTube on 720p pretty fine, with the Emotion av libraries and Radeon va libraries, and I can visit most of the websites I care about. I can watch Twitch streams with aiostreams, and listen music while I develop something.
Sure, there are websites that seem broken on Odyssey. If we could update the WebKit to newer version, if not to newest, that would be awesome.
Again, in my opinion, Wayfarer licensing will not help, as much as I see it.
I’m sure that Wayfarer is able to handle many millions sites I don’t care if I can’t see Disney it is more than enough to me, but you’re right it takes already a lot of years to AEON to do not provide the A1222 or Libre Office better not distract them from this if we want to see this product in our lifetime. Oh I forgot Trevor should also release the source code of ASDG products given to him how many years does he needs?
I am curious and mean no disrespect to the hard work the person or team that built UX for Wayfarer. But if it is built upon Webkit, and Odyssey is built on Webkit where is the repository for the opensource Webkit modifications.
So a full new browser might be wrong discussion with licensing and such; use of the updated Webkit for Odyssey might be more practical.
I am not fully familiar is Webkit GPL or BSD/MIT like in which case that answers the question why there is no public repo for Wayfarers Webkit modifications for Big-endian. I prefer BSD/MIT myself so fully understand.
As for waste on making browsing better I disagree it does not mean it cant be made a bit better. Use it for the fun that it is. I enjoy my Amiga X5000 immensely(complain when it flakes out) and respect its limits. I chug along with my projects, enjoy all the creative stuff interacting with an eclectic little community puts out fun software and marvels at big accomplishments like @geennaam HDA driver.
I see your pont about 'licensing' vs porting but still if Wayfarer is much better than our Odyssey and the programmer is willing to help out in some way you would think that someone from A-Eon (since Hyperion is/has been MIA) would at least reach out to see if any collaboration could be worth while
walkero wrote:
Quote:
In my opinion, we should focus more on creating applications that move internet stuff to desktop, like watching video streams (i.e. aiostreams) or discover music and media (i.e. MediaVault). We should also keep updating applications that consumes streams, like AmigaAmp and Emotion. For me, I am pretty happy with Odyssey so far. I can watch YouTube on 720p pretty fine, with the Emotion av libraries and Radeon va libraries, and I can visit most of the websites I care about. I can watch Twitch streams with aiostreams, and listen music while I develop something. Sure, there are websites that seem broken on Odyssey. If we could update the WebKit to newer version, if not to newest, that would be awesome. Again, in my opinion, Wayfarer licensing will not help, as much as I see it.
I'm fine with this too since if I can download a video or website or podacst that I want to see on my Amiga and play it on my Amiga at that moment without having to use my PC notebook I'd be ok with that.
WebKit is not GPL so Wayfarer guy is not obliged to release the source to anyone who asks. He is offering access to his private repo with ongoing updates but his browser chrome is in ObjC and depends on his own ObjC runtime port for morphOS, and he is not interested in doing the OS4 port himself. So the value of access to his changes to webkit to get it to build using morphos tool chain is questionable compared to spending the same amount of money/time on working directly on odyssey.
His changes are not big endian fixes for webkit, webkit does support big endian fine. In fact the whole big endian/little endian debate is a red herring with the exception of JavaScript.
Wayfarer does not have a big endian JIT for JavaScript. TenFourFox does, so even though that is now end of life, it is still up to date and could be ported. There is at least one other big endian powerpc JIT for Javascript on linux.
Also whilst new Firefox uses Rust which Amiga does not have, Timberwolf was built against XUL and C++, and SeaMonkey, which is still actively maintained, still runs on XUL and does not need Rust. So while it'd be a big job, it is not un-feasible technically to update timberwolf with patches from seamonkey and tenfourfox to make it better.
I paid him to open source his webkit patches. For the greater good. You can find it on github. His morphos specific code however is of no use to any other Amigoid platform as it uses a MorphOS specific Objective-C based framework, so there'd still be a lot of work to do. However, his webkit is a lot newer than the odyssey webkit so a good place to start would be aiming to replace odyssey webkit with the wayfarer engine.
EDIT: Forgot to say, thank you for paying him to get it open-sourced. I was very focused on getting something done with the released code.
@all Could someone please create an embeddable WebKit. Something that could be used with this webview (or similar). It doesn't have to be a Reaction/MUI gadget if that isn't workable, so long as it could be embedded in a window layout somehow.
Actually jacadcaps has commented elsewhere that he thinks it's not infeasible to make a MUI or similar control that embeds the webkit. Unfortunately it's beyond my abilities and spare time.
it's possible there are compiler dependencies on OS4 GCC that cannot be met, see other threads for that
Wow, I didn't know that. Thank you so much for doing it. Does this include future updates? At the repository, I see that this was released two years ago.
Quote:
it's possible there are compiler dependencies on OS4 GCC that cannot be met, see other threads for that
Could these dependencies get covered with a cross-compiling environment? I guess that Jancek does not compile Wayfarer on a MorphOS machine.
Anyone wanting to build the source-code, switch to one of the MorphOS branches first (e.g., morphos_2.34). That's where the MorphOS-specific cmake files and other changes are.
@Walkero
Quote:
Could these dependencies get covered with a cross-compiling environment? I guess that Jancek does not compile Wayfarer on a MorphOS machine.
IIRC, there are some shortcomings in our stdlib implementations that need to either be fixed, or worked around. IIRC, good performance also needs OS support for Thread-Local-Storage (TLS).
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