NetSurf 3.2 released

[chris]

NetSurf 3.2 is primarily a bug-fix release. In addition to fixes, a disc cache feature has been added, and a little work has been done to improve CSS3 support. Several of the front ends have received quite a bit of attention, with new features and improvements; notably the GTK, AmigaOS and Framebuffer front ends. We recommend all users upgrade.

Download: http://www.netsurf-browser.org/downloads/
More information about NetSurf: http://www.netsurf-browser.org

[chris]

@whabang

you are probably referring to amiga version of netsurf. chris one is os4 exclusive, which probably would be best specified in an announcement to avoid confusion. the amiga version
should be possible to try out under some sort pf uae as well. unfortunatelly im not that up tp date to tell how good it is.

Actually the announcement was multi-format. You are correct that the "Amiga" version of NetSurf is for AmigaOS 4.0 and up, I probably should have mentioned that. The 68k version is an unofficial fork and not supported by the NetSurf development team, so has no place in this announcement.

It is possible to run OS4 Classic under WinUAE these days, so you could compare.

[chris]

Actually, I was referring to Netsurf in general, not a specific implementation (I assume the rendering engine is the same for all forks and versions?).

It depends what you mean by "rendering engine".

The layout engine is the same on all versions, however the bit which puts it on the screen is platform specific.  For the AmigaOS 4 frontend, this uses graphics.library for drawing lines and things (with support for palette-mapped screenmodes too) and BulletAPI (diskfont.library) for text. Images that aren't in formats that NetSurf supports natively, are loaded using DataTypes.

The end result looks pretty much the same on all platforms if you ignore the GUI elements.  Have a look at the screenshots on http://www.netsurf-browser.org.

As for whether it is good enough for general browsing, I use it as my primary Amiga browser as it is so fast.  Javascript support is very primitive at the moment, so pages that absolutely require Javascript won't work, but the majority of sites I visit are fine.

[chris]

I need some advice here.

I try to run Netsurf 3.2 on a pretty initial OS 4.0 system.
The binary gets loaded, but nothing happens.

Am I missing any dependencies? SnoopDos wasn't of any help, at least I didn't see anything missing.

Hey Mulder, I haven't tried NetSurf under 4.0 for a very long time but AFAIK it should still work.

If you run it from the command line with:
NetSurf -v *>ram:ns.log
You'll get a log file created which might give more clues. If you post here or email it to me I'll see if I can figure out why it's not working.

I have a feeling some of the font names changed between 4.0 and 4.1 so it might be as simple as that.

[chris]

I gave it a try, but unfortunately "netsurf -v" doesn't show any output.
Also tried your command line with redirection to an file, which is empty afterwards.

It's possible that the release builds have logging disabled. Download the latest test build from http://ci.netsurf-browser.org/builds/amiga/ and try again.

Or it's failing before logging anything....

edit CI build #2118 has the logging start earlier, so you might get something out of that one.

[chris]

Still no output with -v, but SnoopDos has some Fails now.

I'm missing all the OpenLibrary() calls, which are the most important ones.  None of the fails look particularly relevant.

Do you have a version of Snoopy which works with OS4.0?  That tends to work a lot better than SnoopDOS - unfortunately it's locked to specific DOS versions though so you'd need the right one.

At least we've proved that it is failing before it starts running, which probably means libauto isn't opening something (I thought that gave error output, but maybe it doesn't).  I know libauto isn't recommended these days, so I'll see about opening everything manually myself - I know none of the OS4.1 libraries are actually required, so I can tell it to open the old ones, if that's what the problem is.

[chris]

@mulder77

Sorry that this has taken so long, but please can you try build #2291 or higher.  Again, create a log file and see if you get some output this time.

Let me know the outcome.