Timberwolf Progress Update

[Fab]

I'm getting the impression that you're one of those people who believe that software writers have an obligation to release their work on an open source licence and that to do it any other way is somehow incorrect, unfair and unacceptable.

The author is indeed totally entitled to his decision, as long as it follows the original licence, and opensource extremists are annoying.

That being said, when it involves a plain port where the contribution of the porter will only represent a very small fraction of the original code (which is especially true in the case of Timberwolf), i think it's rather inelegant from the porter to keep as much closed as possible (even if the licence allows it).

And i wonder why everyone thinks Firefox is an "incredible amount of work", too. There's not *that* much to do once you have implemented the platform layers, which are rather standard (memory, thread, IO, events, network, gfx layer using cairo, ...)

[Fab]

If you get 90% of your work done for you in the way of an open source base, then contribute 10% but refuse to release your contribution...
 

The proportion would rather be 99% - 1% (or probably less, in fact).
But that work has a value and it's not trivial either. So if the license allows to keep it closed, so be it. It's just a bit greedy from my POV.

[Fab]

ear, ear! porting OWB was a huge task while porting FF was/is trivial?

eh, eh, eh ... you guys never cease to amaze me! :-/

Well, maybe you should ask yourself why?
The FireFox GUI is entirely built on the XUL layer, so it's indeed much less work to port FireFox. You "just" implement the os-dependant layers like thread/mutex, memory, filesystem, network, input events, windowing system, ... (noone said this work was easy, but the very same work was also done with WebKit/OWB), and then everything above it is for "free", unlike WebKit/OWB where the whole GUI had to be implemented on top of the WebKit framework. But the drawback of the FireFox approach is that you also get a quite alien GUI with embedded menus and so on, not in a very amigaish style (though you can skin FireFox fortunately, but not everything can be done to mimic the original AmigaOS GUI).

So I have no problem saying porting FireFox is less work.

In fact, my guess is most of the work in FireFox/Timberwolf went into having a hardware/accelerated Cairo (to get a descent performance, since everything relies on it) and fighting against some details like event propagation through windows in XUL (clashing with AmigaOS design), and possibly some network stack issues (like thread safety for DNS resolution).

[Fab]

What i can't get is why a talented coder like yourself, needs to bash someone else effort.

And where do you see bashing? I only said what kind of work it represented in both projects.

[Fab]

Odyssey may be very good, but the writer didn't also have to keep another 4 Amiga camps happy at the same time, did he?

Well, I provided OWB sources and  gave my help to port it to OS4. And if AROS people are willing to (and that Zune is up to the task), i have no problem doing the same for it.

As for a 68k port, considering the requirements of WebKit, I'm not sure it makes much sense, except for UAE users, but is it really needed? They can just use the browser from the host machine then.

[Fab]

Can somebody who have MOS OWB and a Peg with 1 GHZ CPU tell what render time this page need ?

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=649724&postcount=146

As Piru and many more explained, this is wrong to benchmark this way, but if you want a number, i can give you one anyway. With my not so good inet link, OWB loads the site in about 4 seconds, and reloads in 2 seconds. Of course, i disabled Javascript and Flash to be in the "same" conditions as netsurf.

And let me tell you again, the inet latency in this case *is* important. It might not be that much important on 68k where there's also much more time spent in displaying/parsing/decoding, but once you have a faster machine, inet latency becomes the bottleneck.

[Fab]

How many posts here are about "Timberwolf Progress Update"? Quite many are personal insults against Frieden brothers/Hyperion

Dunno, but at least one message is a deep (or not?) love message.