Any interest in a crowdfunding for a WebKit based browser for OS4?

[Hans_]

I work with a team of professional webkit porting experts. Wondering if there's any interest in raising a fund to pay for them to port WebKit to OS4 (OS3 is probably a stretch even on a vampire, partly because of RAM requirements and partly because Cairo lib and some others are not available)

How many on the team are familiar with AmigaOS APIs? IIRC, someone familiar with LibreOffice was given an AmigaOS machine, with the task to port to AmigaOS. However, he wasn't familiar with AmigaOS APIs, and he never completed the port.

Funding a big WebKit update would be great. Just be aware that the project will have a much higher chance of success if those doing the work are familiar with AmigaOS APIs. That way they know what they're getting themselves into...

Hans

[Hans_]

• UI - here's a thought, what about using the existing AWeb UI but replacing it's rendering engine and JS library?

Why AWeb? Are you aware that we already have a (now rather dated) WebKit browser called Odyssey? IMHO, it would make more sense to use that. In fact, wouldn't it be a whole lot cheaper to improve Odyssey instead of starting from scratch and using AWeb's UI?

Here's the GitHub repo. I think I linked to the main one, although I'm not 100% sure. You can ask kas1e about the AmigaOS 4 port.

Odyssey basically needs a big WebKit update. It could also use some miscellaneous fixes (e.g., fix memory leaks) and enhancements (e.g., the video player really should use composited video, and we have GLES2 so WebGL should be doable). A Javascript JIT would also be great, although I see that you've already put that one aside. I thought there was a PowerPC Javascript JIT out there already, but I can't remember what the project's name was.

Hans

[Hans_]

@Hans_ ... OWB is so out of date it's probably not just a case of updating the engine. But we'd investigate it for sure. Remember - we have an existing up to date WebKit/JSKit engine port that runs on embedded PowerPC systems with few dependencies on OS provided libs, that we can potentially use. As for suggesting the old AWeb UI, it's as good as any, it was just a thought. Since having a proper Amiga UI is preferable to say, the way the NetSurf-SDL version handles the UI.

Ah, okay. OWB also has a MUI based UI, which might be easier to use than AWeb seeing as it was built to use WebKit in the first place.

Whatever you use, it would be great to have an updated browser.

Hans

[Hans_]

@Spektro The datatypes system is not really sophisticated enough to support a proper web datatype, for example inline images was part of the AmigaGuide spec, but never implemented, as it can only cope with data file at a time, no child data files. Datatypes is also missing data stream and progressive rendering support that makes it unsuitable for us with a browser compared to simply embedding the raw codec libraries. Admittedly it's not very Amiga like to have duplicate code, but it's what every other system does and we certainly can't rely on the OS getting 21st century features anymore. BUT what I was thinking was as follows:
- an architecture that makes both the web engine and the JS engine available as separate entities (imagine being able to use Javascript for rexx scripts)
- a web browser that obviously embeds the two
- a light quickviewer suitable for previewing files, that again just embeds the web engine. This would meet your 'datatype' need for use with workbench, DOpus etc.

A quick comment about this. For developers having a WebKit gadget (or similar) would be most useful for embedding the web engine in apps. However, for users a "datatype" would enable quick viewing of HTML files via multi-view. It wouldn't be much of a datatype really. It would basically be the WebKit gadget embedded in a datatype that is set up to recognize HTML/XHTML. And maybe a simple text/rich-text export ability.

NOTE: There are HTML datatypes already, and yes, they cope with loading external images (e.g., here. They're just waaaay too dated.

Of course, HTML viewing could also be done simply by opening an actual web browser...

Hans