Thank you for OWB, Joerg

I just wanted to thank Joerg for all he's done with OWB. I very much doubt I will ever know all the things he's work on, but off the top of my head I certainly noticed that he added:

* More bug fixes than you can throw a large stick at! OWB is obviously a complex piece of kit (with support for many modern web standards), and just getting it to all work correctly must have been a big enough challenge itself.

* Tons of speed AND resource optimisations, which have gradually turned OWB from a hungry snail stuck in molasses into something which gives IBrowse a run for it's money. No small achievement considering how much more complex OWB is (internally) than IBrowse, and considering that OWB was never designed for AmigaOS.

* A decent toolbar, even with a user-configurable search box.

* Menus! And pretty-much every menu item is for a feature which he had to add (and I mention many of them below).

* Web-site icon support (dunno what it's properly called).

* Tabs, with close gadgets. Couldn't live without this :)

* Loading local HTML files as web pages.

* Basic saving web pages as (HTML) files.

* Decent web form support (which I used to write this!). Given how long it took to get working well, it was clearly a complex feature.

* Cut/Copy/Paste, both on normal web pages, as well as within forms. Apparently even with character set conversion!

* Undo/Redo, which is never easy to implement.

* A Firefox-like search bar. Very useful.

* Context-sensitive pop-up menus, which I couldn't live without! Dunno why they are disabled by default :(

* Displaying web page sources.

* Status bar, including a progress guage. (The progress guage may be much harder than it looks, since Net Surf still doesn't do it.)

* Full HTTPS support. Presumably uses someone else's SSL work, but it still had to be integrated into OWB properly. Was probably quite a bit of work, given how long it took to get debugged.

* Pop-up login requester support. So I can log into my ADSL router :)

* Address bar, not only with history, but filtering the history as you type!

* A cookie database, which not only works fast & well (after a lot of work), but one which now uses Journalling to avoid trashing the entire database due to a crash/reset. This must have been a huge amount of work.

* Support for standard Web Fonts (from Microsoft). If you install these then things looks even better.

* Support for context-sensitive mouse pointer icons.

* Middle mouse button scrolling (try it to see what I mean).


I feel guilty for not being able to think of more (off the top of my head).

P.S. If I have attributes any work to Joerg which was actually done by someone else before he took-over, then I'm sorry! It's rather hard to know who did what on something that has been in development for as long as OWB.

@ChrisH

yes sir big thanks to Joerg and AFX Group (also my favourite racing track when I was a kid!)

@ChrisH

* Web-site icon support (dunno what it's properly called).

Favourite icon often called fav icon. A simple file called favicon.ico (or .png/gif) that usually sits at the root of a server.

Thanks from me too

Me too!!

I hate "me too" posts, but in this case it's called for. Before OWB matured my A1 got limited usage, now combined with the maturity of OS 4.1 it's on more than it's off.

Well done to Joerg and everyone else involved (I sent a donation of about ?20 or so ages ago and would strongly encourage everyone else who uses it a lot to do the same, as it's well deserved).

@ChrisH

Quote:

Favicon

Quote:

It use Throbbler instead

@ChrisH

I agree so much work has been done by both Joerg and AFX Group it hard to comprehend as being a non developer myself
thanks guys you are great and help keep the amiga alive and fun :)

Thankyou Joerg.

redfox

@ChrisH

Quote:Of course the major work is done by the WebKit developers, and Pleyo implementing the OWBAL which made it work on any system without changes.
In the AmigaOS 4.x parts there is not much from other developers, the only exceptions are:
- The Arexx port was initially implemented by afxgroup for his SDL builds of OWB, some parts of it are still used in the current AmigaOS 4.x port.
- The StringView gadget with history used for the URL was implemented by Stephen Fellner and Rene W. Olsen, I only fixed a few minor problems in it.
- The bookmarks window was implemented by George Sokianos.

A lot of things you mentioned like undo/redo, displaying the source of a page, pan scrolling, etc., are either core WebKit features, or were implemented by Pleyo for OWB (for example the cookie database, although it was completely unusable initially and I had to fix a lot of bugs in it to get it working correctly), and didn't require much, if any, changes in the AmigaOS 4.x parts of OWB. Of course there are improvements in AmigaOS itself used by OWB as well, for example support for close gadgets in tabs was added in the AmigaOS 4.1 Update 1 version of clicktab.gadget.
It's the same for a lot of bug fixes and speed improvements, between the first AmigaOS 4.x SDL builds of OWB and the current AmigaOS 4.x version 3.29 there are several hundret OWB revisions and thousands of WebKit revisions with bug fixes and speed improvements, OTOH the opposite is the case as well. One of the major problems with WebKit is that there are no stable releases, new revisions fix bugs most of the time, but very often they add new bugs as well. Even a plain SDLCAIRO build of the current OWB without any of the AmigaOS 4.x parts doesn't have much in common with the OWB SDL builds by afxgroup from about 2 1/2 years ago any more (except for having no GUI, no support for multiple windows and other things which aren't required on CE devices).
Most of my work in the AmigaOS 4.x port of OWB is "invisible", besides a lot of bug fixes (which often takes a lot of time if you want to identify the root if it and fix it correctly in such a complex program instead of only adding a quick workaround) for example things like the much faster AmigaOS font implementation instead of using the libfreetype/libfontconfig based one of OWB/WebKit, workarounds to keep it working on AmigaOS 4.0 at all (required as long as there is no AmigaOS 4.1 for classic Amigas), and regulary building new versions of several of the libraries OWB uses for AmigaOS 4.x (cairo, xml2, xslt, curl, openssl, ICU, sqlite, ...).

I really thank you a lot Joerg,
without you I doubt I would turn on my Sam instead of my PC for some browsing.

I really looking forward to use OWB on a new Sam460: my poor super mega GHz PC will be very much hit by this combination!

Thanks Joerg!

@joerg Quote:
Well, I guess you still had to integrate them into our AmigaOS version, because they weren't there initially, and/or didn't work so well initially?

@ChrisH

I second your thank you - well done Joerg!

Quote:

It's because there's no interface in the code for implementing a progress bar, not because it is particularly hard to do. The % done figure needs exporting to a platform-specific function to do it properly, rather than being hacked into the status bar changes.

I suspect something similar applied to OWB.

(edit: Actually, the % done figure doesn't even exist in NS anymore, I wonder when that was removed? As an aside, there is RISC OS progress bar code but it appears to be unreferenced)

@ChrisH

Middle mouse scrolling (feature I requested btw! Thanks Joerg!) needs to have RMB context menus enabled.

"Favicon" is the correct term for website icons (probably mentioned already). I still think OWB is slow due to lack of non-blocking DNS requests.

Yeah good on you dude! It's an impressive feat and you've done it out of love for the amiga, bringing us a decent, modern web browser. . . . Just thanks dude

@joerg:

Lots of kisses and thanks from here also

By the way: How do you make ssl work? Do you use amissl or smth else? I really need a libcrypto.so for the Qt browser!

Oh, and by the way, if anyone wants to see the difference between a "clean" build of the webkit engine and the optimized version used in OWB, they should download the newly available Qt SDK at os4depot and try out the demo browser... Needless to say it's somewhat of a different experience!! (That is if you can even get it to load a page without crashing multiple times...)

@alfkil

Quote:AmiSSL doesn't include all required functions, I had to build libcrypto and libssl myself instead, but I only have static link libraries, no shared objects. I can't use shared objects in OWB because they didn't work in AmigaOS 4.0 yet.

If you don't need something newer you can use the libssl-0.9.8.so from OWB Blastoise which still used shared objects. There is no separate libcrypto.so, it's linked into libssl-0.9.8.so instead.

Quote:If the Qt port is complete enough for it already you should try to build Arora, it's only a simple web browser, but unlike OWB it is a desktop web browser.

@joerg


Many thanks Joerg, for a constantly improved browsing experience
Without OWB i wouldn't ever have considered buying a SAM

@Thread

Strange that I seem to run OWB more than IB these days.
I think I'll switch completely to it as soon as I switch to the Sam460