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Re: Web browser: stuck with Opera-9.62



Hi,

tlaronde%polynum.com@localhost wrote:
Hello,

On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 03:34:48PM +0000, herbert.raimund%ovi.com@localhost 
wrote:
Hi Thierry,
I am not happy with this situation either. On my laptop I use seamonkey 
(pkg-version). It can be not so difficult for Opera to compile a Netbsd 
version. For Freebsd they have one.
Unfortunately, NetBSD is not considered mainstream. Opera is here under
Linux emulation, and ISTR that FreeBSD emulation has now problems.

I will perhaps try seamonkey... But I do think for this Web thing that
this is the same as for TeX ->  TeXlive and others: the size of the
monsters is a sure symptom that this is not going in the right
direction (they have a size several times an O.S. without providing the
features...). I fail to see how with such a size "security" can even be
talked about (but this is another matter).

I fully agree here, the browsers are incredible beasts I just hate them all. They depends on latest stuff, they bloat and leak memory... Howeer the amount of things you need to support to have a decent browsing experience is incredible and incredibly complex. Even wikipedia, google.com or other wiki pages need quite some features (css2, advanced javascript... and without Flash everything is crippled anyway). Chromium is an abominium based on WebKit which is a terrible beast. Firefox and Seamonkey are actually quite nice to use, but since they rely on GTK2 stuff the maze of dependencies is incredible

A programmer and I started an effort to make a small but acceptably usable engine+browser with few dependencies, by making a clean implementation of WebKit for GNUstep without using the obj-c+ abominion and use Obj-C and AppKit/Foundation features directly, however the project gathered no momentum and is a quite complex task. At the moment something very small exists with which you can browse and search (textfields do mostly work now) but living without JS and CSS and tables is almost impossible today. Everybody claims to be interested in such a small engine, however once it is not a "Safari" or "firefox" replacement they turn imediately away and don't contribute anyway....

On NetBSD you and use Firefox or Seamonkey easily however, they do work reliably once compiled. I can compile them fine with 512Mbytes of ram. I gave up with flash on NetBSD. So right now I stick to that. Seamonkey is my favourite on FreeBSD and OpenBSD too where I have it running with 1GB and 512 respectively. Flash used to work on FreeBSD, but with one ofthe updates it broke and couldn't get it to run again. GNASH exists, but it has even more dependencies than adoble flash itself...

So, look for your compromise...


Riccardo




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