Graphical Web Browser Options

[ins0mniaque]

I'm been trying to build a graphical web browser, but it seems that they are all not ported to the "arm" processor. mozilla, firefox and minimo are not "ported" and koqueror-embedded is horrible. Even w3m doesn't compile (will try to fix it if I have time, or I'll test again in 1-2 weeks and correctly report it to the ports team), ok, it's not graphical, but at least it's a text browser I'm used to use.

What are you guys using? I would be really happy to have access to maps.google.com (It should work in Minimo IIRC)

[Sequethin]

I'm been trying to build a graphical web browser, but it seems that they are all not ported to the "arm" processor. mozilla, firefox and minimo are not "ported" and koqueror-embedded is horrible. Even w3m doesn't compile (will try to fix it if I have time, or I'll test again in 1-2 weeks and correctly report it to the ports team), ok, it's not graphical, but at least it's a text browser I'm used to use.

What are you guys using? I would be really happy to have access to maps.google.com (It should work in Minimo IIRC)

Dillo worked fine for me, but I really didn't use it much.

Good luck!

[ins0mniaque]

But IIRC, Dillo does not display maps.google.com at all.

[iamasmith]

This is a real problem... I'm going to see if I can figure out why Firefox won't compile on this platform (it fails if you remove the mask from the Makefile - it isn't just 'that simple').

I really, really, really want a browser that can handle JavaScript well so that the moinmoin GUI based editor works.

- Andy

[barryg]

Good day!

<SNIP>
What are you guys using? I would be really happy to have access to maps.google.com :) (It should work in Minimo IIRC)

I use elinks and lynx(with qiv for images) heavily, minimo[0] sometimes.

Mabuhay! barryg

[0]
ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapsho...-20050802p2.tgz
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/www/minimo/

--
Barry Dexter A. Gonzaga

[iamasmith]

OK, I managed to tweak the build to start Firefox 1.5.01 building on the Zaurus. It's going to take a while to build though and then I probably want to build epiphany (dependent on Mozilla's Gecko engine) to reduce the overhead a little but I will keep you posted when I have some positive results.

- Andy

[iamasmith]

Damn, 19 hours later it segfaulted... I may have mistuned nspr.... ah well in the meantime I have been looking at memory usage.

OpenBSD binaries on arm seem to have about the same memory utilisation as the i386 ones and Firefox built with gtk-2 runs at about 46Mb

I'm now building Epiphany after tuning nspr on the mozilla dev stuff. If it works and looks nice I will probably build again if it is too big using gtk-1 and see how thing progress.

I will provide a build tweaking transcript (and maybe some ports patches) if it works ok.

- Andy

[macwiz]

Hi. Firefox is working fine on pdaxrom. Perhaps they can help you.
I say it is fine. I should admit that it is great but only once it has started. It does take some time to load.

Good luck.

[iamasmith]

Thanks Macwiz, I have used Firefox quite a bit on PDAXROM and I think they build against GTK1, however, the build is slightly different since the nspr framework is OS aware and chooses some different options when running on OpenBSD.

- Andy

[Hrw]

You could also look how we handled Firefox in OpenEmbedded. Other option can be gpe-mini-browser which base on GTK-Webcore (also in OpenEmbedded). Both use gtk2 because we try to avoid gtk1 at all.

Dillo is too simple to use it for sites which use lot of CSS and/or Javascript.

BTW - cannot OpenBSD use cross-compilers? Building stuff on Zaurus reminds me building kernel on Amiga with 68040/40 - 3h (when cross-compiled on pII/400 it was ~20 minutes).

[iamasmith]

You could also look how we handled Firefox in OpenEmbedded. Other option can be gpe-mini-browser which base on GTK-Webcore (also in OpenEmbedded). Both use gtk2 because we try to avoid gtk1 at all.

Dillo is too simple to use it for sites which use lot of CSS and/or Javascript.

BTW - cannot OpenBSD use cross-compilers? Building stuff on Zaurus reminds me building kernel on Amiga with 68040/40 - 3h (when cross-compiled on pII/400 it was ~20 minutes).

Thanks HRW, the main reason for this is Javascript support yes.

OpenBSD can and does use cross compilers if you want to build OpenBSD alone, the whole base system can be built like that but it is recommended to use native compilation once the first iterations have been built.

The ports tree (the automated build from source system for the non distro applications... covers everything not in base OpenBSD or XOrg) on the other hand isn't enabled for cross compilation and never will be. The view they take is that it is all messy code that they don't have any control over and aren't going to spend time nailing it to work for cross compilation on all the architectures they support - and quite right too really

The upside is that in most cases the ports system works exactly like it does on any other architecture. Take a look at the ports make system some time, it is clean, uncluttered and pretty elegant. It even lets you go into a patch snapshot mode, make changes to a port, close the snapshot and then (assuming you have cvs write access) cvs the diffs back to the central ports cvs. - The complexity of this system would go 'through the roof' and it wouldn't be as maintainable if it were designed for cross compilation across all the different architectures.... these are the architectures they support...

alpha Digital Alpha-based systems
amd64 AMD64-based systems
cats StrongARM 110 Evaluation Board
hp300 Hewlett-Packard HP 9000 series 300 and 400 workstations
hppa Hewlett-Packard Precision Architecture (PA-RISC) systems
i386 Standard PC and clones based on the Intel i386 architecture and compatible processors
luna88k Omron LUNA-88K and LUNA-88K2 workstations
mac68k Motorola 680x0-based Apple Macintosh with MMU
macppc Apple New World PowerPC-based machines, from the iMac onwards
mvme68k Motorola 680x0-based VME systems
mvme88k Motorola 881x0-based VME systems
sgi SGI MIPS-based workstations
sparc Sun sun4, sun4c and sun4m class SPARC systems
sparc64 Sun UltraSPARC systems
vax Digital VAX-based systems
zaurus Sharp Zaurus C3x00 PDAs

16 in total.. remove the binary compatible ones and there are is a 12x12 matrix of cross compiler configurations to test... no thanks I wouldn't like to have to maintain that.

gpe-minibrowser does sound interesting.. I may take a look at that, thanks.

- Andy

[iamasmith]

Well I'm now itching to take a look at gpe-minibrowser but as the Openembedded/Openzaurus sites seem to be down at the moment I can't find a tarball for the project. I'm hoping it will build independently of a major portion of gpe.

Perhaps if anyone knows of a tarball for gpe-minibrowser source they can point me at it.

My browser requirement for moinmoin turned out to be that the browser was capable of handling javascript for an open source product called FCKEditor which enables GUI editing on web sites... it would be nice to see if gpe-minibrowser handles this.

- Andy

[koen]

Perhaps if anyone knows of a tarball for gpe-minibrowser source they can point me at it.

As gpe is independant of OZ/OE you should have a look http://gpe.handhelds.org

A shortcut would be http://handhelds.org/pub/projects/gpe/sour...ser-0.19.tar.gz
Most of the gpe dependencies are in the same directory

[iamasmith]

Perhaps if anyone knows of a tarball for gpe-minibrowser source they can point me at it.

As gpe is independant of OZ/OE you should have a look http://gpe.handhelds.org

A shortcut would be http://handhelds.org/pub/projects/gpe/sour...ser-0.19.tar.gz
Most of the gpe dependencies are in the same directory

Great, thanks for the pointer at the sources directory Koen, I will take a look.

- Andy

[iamasmith]

Ok, I have all the stuff... gpe-minibrowser doesn't like sqlite version 3 on my desktop where I'm trying it first but I will try again.

The most interesting bit of all this is the Gtk-Webcore stuff. very nice, I have had obd-browser running (on desktop not on the Zaurus yet) and the render accuracy is pretty good.

However, the licensing of the Webcore is on unusual territory being owned by Nokia (check the NRC* License files). Can you ever therefore distribure the webcore libraries on their own or is this and gpe-minibrowser only for people who build from source?

- Andy