Will 3.x ever get a modern browser

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Megol

So why not run WinUAE?

The whole real hardware vs. emulation subject has been discussed over and over again... don't let us start ...
I have no real personal preferences in that matter.
Anyway: the question is little bit besides the point here, isn't it?

Why not interface a real graphics card?

What is a "real" graphics card? Why do you think this project does not qualify?

Waste of money and effort without any gain. Creating a non-compatible solution for something that nobody ever asked for.

there was quite a demand for the predecessor.
But it is more or less a hobby project and it will be, what ever the creator wants it to be!
I don't think it is our place to tell him what he should develop and what not - it is all open source - so if you want it to be something different: change it.

Sure as a hack it could be cool but it being a useless hack wasn't the impression I got...

If some one uses it, it is not useless anymore...

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by utri007

As said. No, it is not. It woun't render HTML5 or CSS, so you are practiacally testing speed of GUI.

No, I am testing the overall speed of two browsers on different platforms, when rendering the same (non css/html5) web page.

PS. Seems that my 800mhz PPC is faster than your i3 3.0ghz, if compared that way. Obviously not true.

This isn't about CPUs. Netsurf might be 'fast' on an Archimedes, but the ports to Amiga and PC aren't. Doesn't mean the CPU is slower, just that the ported code is very inefficient.

I'm not knocking Netsurf. This is simply what happens when you port a program without making any effort to optimize it for the new platform. You might get away with it when porting to a machine with more horsepower (though not in this case) but it won't work the other way. To get good apps on the Amiga we must be willing to spend some time and effort on interfacing the code, not just shovel it across with an emulation layer and/or 'compatibility' libraries.

Doing it right is hard. Not as hard as writing all the code from scratch, but a lot harder than just getting it to compile. In the old days we wrote code from scratch because we had to, whereas today's 'developers' mostly just reuse stuff that was built by others. Are there any Amiga coders left who are still willing to do real work, or are we all too lazy? If the Amiga never gets a decent web browser this will be the reason.

[modrobert]

Originally Posted by Amiga4000

OMG thank you for pointing this out! I wanted to weigh in on this thread but I knew I would go on a crazy, endless rant about JS. JS is the scourge of the internet! PERIOD! I use FF with JS turned off most the time 'cause there's no way I can even begin viewing a JS Ad infusioned website even with 8GB of memory on my Mac. It makes me go insane!!! What really toasts my balls the most is that many of the usual sites I visit (news, weather, history etc...) go full JS on me about once a week. The site then becomes totally unusable!

There is NO browser that can handle the amount of JS shoved down the throats of the user these days. As a matter of fact, you could probably get by using a P4 CPU with the web still if it weren't for JS. Yea, I need a new computer? WTH! My computer is sooo slow! Why? What a crock of sh!t the web has turned into!

NO! You don't need a new computer! I use many old computers to go to certain website that have no JS what so ever and they load very fast! I even have a DOS machine thaty is usable!

Take iBrowse for instance.... It works great even on my A1200 with an ACA accelerator.We just need it to get updated securtity. You can already turn off JS easily. What iBrowse would REALLY need is an Ad Blocker!

OK, I gotta quit now or I'll go crazy! There should be a a world wide initiative to ban JS forever!

Oh yea, and one more thing.... modern sites don't use tables anymore (I built hundreds of sites back in the day - everything nice and tidy in tables) which makes the content jump all over the place while loading. I STILL fall for trying to hit the volume control on youtube before the page is loaded! ARG!!!!!

Totally agree.

The web is turning into a clusterfuck of dependencies and "layer cake" technologies, not to mention websites depending on external cloud resources to load site images and other assets.

With added complexity comes lack of security, big sites are getting hacked at an increasing rate. In an awkward way it feels good iBrowse can't load the modern web, rejecting the crap the modern web has turned into. As a webmaster, if you can't run a website which loads OK for Amiga users then you are doing it wrong.

[utri007]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Doing it right is hard. Not as hard as writing all the code from scratch, but a lot harder than just getting it to compile. In the old days we wrote code from scratch because we had to, whereas today's 'developers' mostly just reuse stuff that was built by others. Are there any Amiga coders left who are still willing to do real work, or are we all too lazy? If the Amiga never gets a decent web browser this will be the reason.

Chris has looked help for Netsurf years now. He is Amiga OS4 coder with no previous experience about 68k coding and very little interest for older OS versions.

There is even this : https://github.com/DNADNL/NetScript

It is for those whoi would like to help but has problems to compile Netsurf.

[NovaCoder]

The internet is a moving target, with each passing year it becomes less and less realistic to have a modern browser running (well) on 68K hardware.

[modrobert]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

The internet is a moving target, with each passing year it becomes less and less realistic to have a modern browser running (well) on 68K hardware.

Indeed, moving in one direction towards bloat.

I've been researching security in the Chrome/Chromium browser while designing a fuzzer. Besides taking several hours to compile, the browser source tree consists of over 40 000 files, and when you compile the debug binary it is ~750mb in size (stripped/compressed ~160mb). There is so much in there that's not related to browsing the web at all, and due to the sandbox nature of the browser it's by design a whole "operating system" in itself on top of your existing one. Chrome behaves like an octopus (think of the kraken) while running, during my tests with 'strace' it "tries" to open over 1200 files (devices/libs included) in your system during launch before the browser window is loaded completely. According to internet sources there are around 5000 developers working on Chrome/Chromium with huge amounts of code added daily.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by utri007

Chris has looked help for Netsurf years now. He is Amiga OS4 coder with no previous experience about 68k coding and very little interest for older OS versions.

There is even this : https://github.com/DNADNL/NetScript

It is for those whoi would like to help but has problems to compile Netsurf.

Sound interesting. But,

To use NetScript, you need Cygwin installed into your computer.

I have enough crap on my PC already, and would very sad if installing Cygwin broke my existing compiler setups.

If I ever try to compile Netsurf it will be with SASC on an Amiga. This might mean having to rewrite large parts of the code, but if so that's a good thing because Netsurf is supposed to be written in plain C so it shouldn't be dependent on a particular build environment.

And anyway this 'NetScript' doesn't solve the problem, it perpetuates it.

If you only need to get NetSurf already compiled for AmigaOS3, you can download the NetSurf_XXX_AmigaOS3_CompilationDate.tar only. This version doesn't contain DukTape and might be obsolete as it isn't updated every day.

WTF? A web browser that might be obsolete if it isn't recompiled every day?

[utri007]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

WTF? A web browser that might be obsolete if it isn't recompiled every day?

Sounds funny, but it just means that repo is same for everyone.

[JC26]

Sorry to take this in a slightly different direction, but...

I think the Amiga would be well served by an Opera mini port. That way most of the heavy rendering is done remotely, and what's sent to the Amiga is a compressed and stripped down version of the website, which should be much more responsive. I'm not sure if Opera allows for ports like that though (their dev.opera site has nothing about rolling your own client).

[asymetrix]

@thread

Most things like asm.js, emscripten, webassembly, java, closure etc need working toolchain.

we need llvm for 68k

Anyone try getting llvm tested with the 68k changes ? https://reviews.llvm.org/D50314

https://johnresig.com/blog/asmjs-jav...ompile-target/

[utri007]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

If I ever try to compile Netsurf it will be with SASC on an Amiga. This might mean having to rewrite large parts of the code, but if so that's a good thing because Netsurf is supposed to be written in plain C so it shouldn't be dependent on a particular build environment.

If you ever try to compile Netsurf you should contact Chris Young. He is very untypical coder, as he is friendly and helpfull.

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by JC26

Sorry to take this in a slightly different direction, but...

I think the Amiga would be well served by an Opera mini port. That way most of the heavy rendering is done remotely, and what's sent to the Amiga is a compressed and stripped down version of the website, which should be much more responsive. I'm not sure if Opera allows for ports like that though (their dev.opera site has nothing about rolling your own client).

Yes I agree, this is the only logical approach (up-stream rendering).

[rare_j]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

Yes I agree, this is the only logical approach (up-stream rendering).

There's not much difference between this and simply using VNC client to control a browser on another desktop on your network. If you're reliant on another machine for rendering why not make it one you control complerely? Then you can have whatever browser you like.

[ExiE]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

However I downloaded the amiga.org page to a local folder on my PC using Firefox, and removed all css from the html file. Results:-

Netsurf with css: "done(4.8s)"
Netsurf no css: "done(4.6s)"
Firefox no css: < 1s

So the official Windows version of Netsurf is slow even without the "much more complex and power consuming" overhead of css.

If you are talking about http://forum.amiga.org/ your test is still flawed. Even after removing external css files, Amiga.org is still using inline styles, javascripts, is not valid, contains errors in the code... Every browser cope with such code in different ways, more complex browser can be slower but still little bit more usefull in the real world.

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by rare_j

There's not much difference between this and simply using VNC client to control a browser on another desktop on your network. If you're reliant on another machine for rendering why not make it one you control complerely? Then you can have whatever browser you like.

You could have the server interpret the user input, execute all JavaScript and CSS and then create a basic HTML page as output that would be returned to the 68k client. With this approach you still be processing something on the client but all of the heavy lifting would be handled on the server.

https://w3c.github.io/Web-and-TV-IG/cloud-browser-tf/

[rare_j]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

https://w3c.github.io/Web-and-TV-IG/cloud-browser-tf/

Wow that's actually a really nice solution and probably the way to go for a 'proper' 68k browser. As long as the cloud server can be hosted on the local network.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by ExiE

If you are talking about http://forum.amiga.org/ your test is still flawed. Even after removing external css files, Amiga.org is still using inline styles, javascripts, is not valid, contains errors in the code... Every browser cope with such code in different ways, more complex browser can be slower but still little bit more usefull in the real world.

But Netsurf doesn't do Javascript, so absent CSS IBrowse is the 'more complex' browser!

Perhaps just pointing out that IBrowse on a 50MHz 030 is faster than Netsurf on a 2.8GHz Pentium D doesn't impress the enormous scale of the anomaly. Based on clock speed alone the PC should more than 50 times faster. Take into account the fewer clocks per instruction and other speedups of a Pentium CPU and the ratio should be 200 times or more. One has to wonder what Netsurf was doing with all that extra horsepower.

Maybe Netsurf just has an issue with a few web pages, and is much faster on others. In that case gregthecanuck's choosing EAB and amiga.org for his test was unfortunate. Thing is though, these are two websites that many of us visit regularly. So no matter how 'flawed' the results may be they are still relevant for an Amiga web browser.

[modrobert]

Originally Posted by rare_j

There's not much difference between this and simply using VNC client to control a browser on another desktop on your network. If you're reliant on another machine for rendering why not make it one you control complerely? Then you can have whatever browser you like.

Maybe genlock would be an interesting way to show the browser (or anything) running on a different device/computer? While avoiding to bog down the 68k CPU you would actually use a cool Amiga feature. I'm thinking of it as a hardware project...

[utri007]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

But Netsurf doesn't do Javascript, so absent CSS IBrowse is the 'more complex' browser!

Not true, Netsurf does javascript. 68k version has Javascript turned OFF by default. It slows down system a lot.

Perhaps just pointing out that IBrowse on a 50MHz 030 is faster than Netsurf on a 2.8GHz Pentium D doesn't impress the enormous scale of the anomaly. Based on clock speed alone the PC should more than 50 times faster. Take into account the fewer clocks per instruction and other speedups of a Pentium CPU and the ratio should be 200 times or more. One has to wonder what Netsurf was doing with all that extra horsepower.

Maybe Netsurf just has an issue with a few web pages, and is much faster on others. In that case gregthecanuck's choosing EAB and amiga.org for his test was unfortunate. Thing is though, these are two websites that many of us visit regularly. So no matter how 'flawed' the results may be they are still relevant for an Amiga web browser.

I got quite different results.

[nogginthenog]

Originally Posted by rare_j

There's not much difference between this and simply using VNC client to control a browser on another desktop on your network. If you're reliant on another machine for rendering why not make it one you control complerely? Then you can have whatever browser you like.

A native Amiga browser that uses an external device to render the HTML would be nice.