WebKit based browser initiative

@mr2
Quote:

It will :) same as with older Odyssey: the whole webcore is more or less crossplatform, while remain 1% is platform specific: an actual thing to render in, open a window, blit things in, gui, etc, etc : all should be written for os4. That is harder part and real ptogramming.

But, once George will have a window to which sites render, then in worse case, even without gui, one can make a binary to which you spend a url and it open window and render to it.. It will be not a browser, but something as a start. Just like it was with OWB from Andrea many years ago.

At least we can test if core works , how fast, what need to fix, deal with crashes (i am sure there will). The fact that core compiles, doesnt mean all works as expected, it is unknown by now.

So, yes, remain 1% is harder than first 99%, this mean some real programmers with free time need to step in after some time. But firstly, of course, core should work and be tested for, and i hope George will be success with

Kas1e is right. I expect that we will have crashes and more to deal with (looking at you pthreads). Maybe it would make sense for a different team to step up and develop the browser, if there is anyone interested doing it, and we keep on maintaining the WebKit, addressing issues and keeping it updated.

Have in mind that even Wayfarer didn't get where it is now in a year. Jacek works on it for a long time, adding new features all the time.

Great to see that we have progress! Thank you guys! ☺️

Yes, thanks guys for all the work you’ve done!

@walkero

Would it be possible to use Alfkill's QT6 as GUI for for this project ?

https://github.com/alfkil/amiga-qt6

@SinanSam460
Why would we do that? What are the benefits you think we would have against ReAction or MUI?

@walkero

It sounds like this is making progress. Thanks so much for the update.

@walkero
why it’s not possible to reuse the OS 4 code from Odyssey?

@Kamelito
Check latest posts in Odyssey's thread, where i explained why: api change, structure change, massive changes everywhere. Part of code can be reused, like i did from Joerg's OWB version before for Odyssey, but "take the gui from odyssey and use with new webkit" will not work as it. It can be used just as reference, with some parts (maybe even not some, but still) of code taken.

@Sinan
QT on os4 in bad shape: slow, with bugs, fat by libs, had cosmetic problems. We dont need this half worked layer. Instead, if we want fast and "true" os4 gui, our choose is mui or reaction. At least the only bloat we will had then is only webkit itself :)

@kas1e

My impression of QT was that it was working well, but we did not have latest, and we need proper support for .so files, because objects had been loaded and unloaded, and constructors and destructors was called correct, but it should now be fixed in the elf library. Problem if any is only one developer working on QT, and he not active as he likes to be as usual. Not sure if has access to latest. That is required to make it up to date.

In many was QT is better than Amiga GUI, because stuck with codepages and ascii. And elements can be rearrange and customized, something amiga GUI suck at.

@liveforit
Make a proper, finished, fast and finalized port of qt, integrated to amigaos in all possible way: then i am for it as well. But what we have currently its only to tinker with and to use smtube.

Try to run qt text editor and reaction based multiedit from Andy, on pegasos2 for example, and compare time of start, speed of mouse reactions, menus, scrollbars, size of binary, etc, and you will see how well is it :)

@kas1e, all

If we had a vote, i'd go for native GUI (Reaction over MUI. my personal preference)...of course, having no way to contribute to a GUI myself (code-wise) i'd also go with a potential devs choice (if it was MUI)

But please, do not add another layer of dependencies, like the QT environment, that will taint the whole experience (speed-wise) once again...and one thing we will never have is speed (compared to the target platforms of todays browsers)

This is great news, much appreciated @walkero and team! If there is need for help which doesn't involve coding, let me know, happy to help.

@Raziel

Real QT should not add any extra layers, when you have native port.

Perhaps you are thinking about GTK2MUI, that was created for MorphOS, I think project that issues. For example, you can’t use GTK classes, so you be really restricted. There is also wxWidgets if I understand it correct does something similar. The benefit is you get more applications ported quickly, the disadvantage you get more applications ported quickly without anything special added to the platform. Of course it limited by the primitiveness of older Gui systems.

Porting WebCore to AmigaOS 4.x is only about 20% of the work.
Another 20% is porting the JavaScript JIT to PPC, unless there is support for PPC already now? (It wasn't at the time I did the OWB ports, and maybe it's not very important for X1000 and X5000, but it is if it should be usable on other systems as well.)
20% for audio/video/etc. and printing support.
About 40% of the work is implementing a web browser around WebCore/JSC.
Of course a BOOPSI (Enhancer/ReAction/ClassAct) based GUI for the browser would be much better, but for QT there are browsers already which could be used with next to no changes.

@walkero

Thanks so much for your update. Regarding the discussion of GUI stuff, I hope it will be ReAction or MUI. Either one is fine with me.

Thanks,
redfox

AmigaOS is Reaction
MorphOS is MUI

With the old QT4 we had reached a good level of integration, stability and resolution of the vast majority of the graphical issues... yeah we really spent months of betatesting into it!...
However the problem is that the work did not continue after that, as Alfkil prefer to bring a more recent version with the need now to have to rewrite almost everything...
of course one can always understand the necessity of an update, but in this way we never have a finished and decently integrated version, expecially if only one person will work on it ...

As for the general GUI for the future WebKit based browser, I expect MUI to be used, it would at least be useful in case wr manage to bring Wayfarer from MorphOS, as it would seem the most logical step to do at this point

At least in this aspect we are quite lucky and both Reaction and MUI are the best GUIs in the desktop computer space.
Both very light and super customizable make our systems recognizable to the masses, preserving the identity of the OS with unique peculiarities.
Windows has a truly horrible GUI and I challenge anyone to say otherwise.
Linux on the other hand is not known what GUI it has, apart from the shell it does not have a real identity that makes it recognisable.
The only system that has been able to update the GUI, while maintaining its identity at the same time, is MacOS.

If I have to use my Amiga to have non-native stuff, ported without any rearrangement from other operating systems, I already have my much better alternatives and I'm not interested.

If I have to use a browser or any other program on AmigaOS 4 it must be Reaction or alternatively MUI.

My2Cents

I've been using OWB for 68k for two years
The videos on YouTube and the navigation is perfect
with AmigaOS 3.9.
I use "browservice" for a modern view.

Also works with the QT browser included with the "QT-minimal" package
and also with "InternetSurfBoard" present on OSDepot.

But the speed is slower with OS4.1

I hope to be able to try the updated QTBrowser as soon as possible

Thanks for your work.

Here OWB 68k at work without any script but just simply using "Browservice" on youtube:

https://youtu.be/Gj0RPKWR83w