NetSurf OS3.x Issues

[chris]

Edit again - Chris's 3.3 on Aminet is for OS4.  Remind me again why I hate NetSurf?  You can still get his version for classic systems though, otherwise how would I have gotten it?  :banana:

Try http://homepage.ntlworld.com/cdyoung/tmp/netsurf_os3.lha

btw v3.4 of NetSurf isn't released yet. Anything versioned 3.4 is a post-3.3 development snapshot.

[chris]

Have you created new version to test?

No.  I need help to get any further.

[chris]

Thanks for the version to test. Its VERY SLOW on my A4000T 060/PPC and looks like this when a page finally loads.

In Users/{your user, probably Default}/Choices try adding:
friend_bitmap:1

That might fix the colour issue (and maybe speed it up a bit).

These might help with memory/speed:
simple_refresh:1
dither_quality:0
screen_ydpi:72

I can't remember if I ever got use_diskfont:1 working properly, but if it works that will speed it up too.

It is built without compiler optimisations due to an issue with GCC I don't know how to fix, and there's a fair bit of non-optimal code (it uses outline fonts - which are horribly slow on 68k - and the image reduction works via DataTypes)

[chris]

I didnt start this thread for an argument. I simply wanted to know if getting Netsurf working on a classic Amiga with a PPC card was something I can do.

Is installing OS4 an option? Or maybe I could build a WarpOS version? I don't know how to do that though, I suspect it's not as easy as just using different GCC switches.

[chris]

PS. SpiderMonkey v1.5 CLI for m68k exist here (haven't tested it yet!).
PPS. v1.5 dates back November 2000...

v1.7 works on the Amiga.  Anything later... yeah, good luck.
http://git.netsurf-browser.org/toolchains.git/tree/sdk/recipes/patches/spidermonkey/ppc-amigaos-1.7.0 (might need some minor changes for OS3)

[chris]

Hi Chris!

Thanks for the info. and the link! Later versions would be a pain to have on AmigaOS?

Cheers!

They need NSPR. Although I was following a bug/enhancement to decouple it from NSPR, I'm not sure that has actually happened yet (and it doesn't necessarily make it any easier).

IIRC v1.80 ought to be easy, but it doesn't work for reasons I don't remember (could be endian related).

NetSurf has moved over to Duktape because sufficiently new versions of Spidermonkey are such a PITA to port, and it's relatively heavy.

It's possibly worth looking at the Timberwolf source to get a working new-ish Spidermonkey.

[chris]

Download link?  It's very confusing which version is which.  

Edit:  Added a pic to clarify.

Mine is the one on the left. The minimalist interface is intentional, there are lots of options in the menus. It is possible to add a hotlist bar by moving items into the hotlist folder, although I don't know whether that works under OS3.

The graphical problems I could do with some help with. The font spacing issue irritates me, so some pointers on how to fix would be useful. I think I need to query OT_SpaceWidth and advance manually when encountering a space, but I couldn't get much sense out of it when I tried. From a user POV, installing and using a different CG font might also work.

[chris]

Any idea what the one on the right is?  The person who posted that screenshot said they "had it running in less than a minute".

That's Artur's, but I'm not familiar enough with it to say exactly which version.

I was thinking the one on the left was Artur's, and the one on the right was yours, also because the one on the left says it's "3.4", and I thought I remember you saying 3.4 "isn't released yet, and utri007 said Arthur's version is "the no gui version".

Heh.  3.4 isn't released yet, but anything built post-3.3 is versioned 3.4.  You can tell the difference because it will say "(Dev)" after the version number.  Release versions have the release date.

Artur's is the Framebuffer frontend, which is designed for systems with no GUI.  It has a GUI, of course, because it's running windowed under Intuition.

Edit:  On a side note though, when I pulled up www.google.com in yours, it looked damn good!  I was kind of taken aback by how good it looked, honestly.  Wish every site rendered that well!             (10:30 minutes in this video)

Yes, people keep posting screenshots of amiga.org, which doesn't render properly.  Actually I've not seen a screenshot of anything else from that version!

Interesting video.

[chris]

PS. That's one of my confusion because on my '060 AGA (no RTG), I can't get any version (that I tried) to run "windowed"... Could someone points me to a version that would work on my Amiga, as a window on the Workbench screen?

Mine does that.  It defaults to running on it's own screen and because the prefs window doesn't work on OS3, it's not obvious how to change it.  So... you will need to run it once and quit it.  Then open users/{your username, probably Default}/Choices and add the following line:

pubscreen_name:Workbench

That should make it open on WB instead.

Don't forget the following might be needed or helpful too:
friend_bitmap:1
window_simple_refresh:1

[chris]

I can't remember if I ever got use_diskfont:1 working properly, but if it works that will speed it up too.

It appears this does work to some extent.  It might be worth checking if this makes NetSurf any quicker:

use_diskfont:1
font_sans:Topaz
font_serif:Topaz
font_mono:Topaz
font_cursive:Topaz
font_fantasy:Topaz

(you can substatute Topaz for a nicer font of your choice, but note the font_mono needs to be fixed-width, like Topaz, and my quick test didn't involve any non-Topaz fonts)

With those I can scroll through the amiga.org homepage at a reasonable speed, on my emulated supposedly real speed '020

I also have:
redraw_tile_size_x:100
redraw_tile_size_y:100
window_simple_refresh:1

[chris]

First I made those changes to choises file wich Chris sugggested. Performance increase was unbelievable!

Good to hear!  I've set these as default now and uploaded a new build.
There will be various core changes, but probably nothing significant (most of the work has been on Javascript, which I can't build in without the compiler optimisation bug being fixed).

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/cdyoung/tmp/netsurf_os3.lha

It's suggested to remove all the font lines from the Choices file, I've set some better defaults.  If you want to switch back to outline fonts, you'll need to add font lines which specify outline fonts (it won't set the correct defaults)

[chris]

It works, but it is slower than perivous version with Topaz font. Can't say how much, it doesn't display done text anymore.

It will be slower because there are more fonts to look through.  The data is cached, but lookup is just in an Exec list, so it's not particularly fast (on OS4 I've used a skiplist, but they don't exist in OS3's utility.library).  I tried using a splaytree on OS3 but it just crashed, and I couldn't see any perceivable performance benefit on OS4, so I abandoned it.
(edit sorry, I'm talking nonsense, the exec list caching is only for scaleable fonts, bitmap fonts aren't caching at all, which might be part of the problem)

It also has a new problem, is shoot down my Network from both amigas. I can download one page, after that it says "dns lookup failed", when I try to browse another web page. Need to reboot amiga, to get it back online. I also tested amia.org, it displayded very fast "dns lookup failed", did you made some changes for timouts?

ISTR there have been some changes because RISC OS was having timeout problems.  If it's knocking out the network, it's probably overwriting memory.  However I notice my toolchain is out of date, as at least libcurl has been updated, so I'm rebuilding that and we can see if it helps.

I will test it with Topaz fonts to see does it make any difference.

Topaz is likely to be more reliable, as it's fixed-width, so any bugs in the layout calculations are less likely to show up.

and.... re-built with latest components, archive in usual place. (haven't tested it)

[chris]

I would say that Topaz or any other hand defined font is OK, if speed diffrence is that big. Bad that there is no way to define font like AWeb does?

You can define fonts as you've been doing (different fonts for sans, serif, mono). I think the only difference is that AWeb lets you set the sizes for headers etc. This is mostly irrelevant with CSS. NetSurf has a default font size, and the other sizes are calculated from this (AmigaOS scales bitmap fonts if exact size is not available). If the size is defined as an absolute point or pixel height that will be respected. There's a DPI option that can affect the size on screen for those (although I don't think that works for bitmap fonts; probably screen_ydpi:72 is a good option to set to stop things going out of proportion)

Network problem is now solved.

Scrolling etc is OK.

It is still much slower than previous version with topaz font.

Odd. I don't know remember what I've changed since the previous version. I'll need to nose through the git logs.

AGA still have some problems with png pictures?? Is it because a datatypes or it can be because of FBlit or both.

Don't know. Is it just PNGs? What's the problem exactly? Have you tried friend_bitmap:0? (it's on by default now)

If it's just PNGs I can try disabling the internal decoder so it uses the datatype instead.

[chris]

I'm prety sure that it just a png pictures, like this http://www.hollywood-mal.com/img/plananarama_small.png

Interesting.  I tried disabling the internal PNG reader so my DataTypes reader would handle PNGs, but for some reason it isn't recognising that file as an image, so it looks like my DataTypes reader is broken under OS3 (I suspect I'm using too new picture.datatype tags).

I don't have time to investigate now.

edit actually, scratch that, it looks like I'm using some datatypes.library v45 features, and I'm on v44 here so they don't work.  If you're on OS3.9 it will probably be OK.  Try http://homepage.ntlworld.com/cdyoung/tmp/netsurfnopng.lha

[chris]

I just realised that NetSurf would not run on Workbench 3.1... Is 3.5 the minimum? Is that a strict requirement? (For example, could I hope to make it run on my 3.1 if I copy some of the 3.5 libraries?)

3.5 is the minimum - it needs all the Reaction classes and newer icon.library, picture.datatype.