Web site updates
by Michael Drake
There are some web site updates I'd like to do before NetSurf 2.0 is
released.
The main things are to update the downloads and documentation sections to
properly reflect NetSurf being multi-platform.
For the downloads page, I think the "Download" link on the nav. bar and
the download box on the home page should link to a page where the user is
presented with a list of operating systems plus a source code option.
e.g.
Download NetSurf
================
Please select an operating system:
+ RISC OS
+ Unix-like (including Linux)
+ BeOS/Haiku
+ AmigaOS
Alternatively you can download NetSurf's source:
+ Source code (multi-platform)
Then they click on the option they are interested in and they get another
page. The new page should present the latest release version for that
platform clearly and obviously. There should also be links for downloading
older releases and any development builds which are available for that
platform on the page.
I'm not exactly sure how easy it is to distribute binaries for all
platforms. It is easy on RISC OS. For Unix-like it may be more of a
problem, but at the very least we could have a page listing all the
distros we know of that package NetSurf and link to the source archive, so
they could build it for themselves if they need to.
I think that would be better than the current layout, which can't really
be expanded beyond RISC OS and source options.
Does this seem OK to everyone?
For the documentation, I'd like to make the user guide more multi
platform, but it will probably take me a long time. I can easily use the
RISC OS and GTK versions. Is there any easy way for me to test the AmigaOS
and BeOS versions? Are there live CDs or emulators and is it trivial to
run the NetSurf ports on such a system?
Also, there is a user info page
http://www.netsurf-browser.org/documentation/info
which is multi platform, and a RISC OS specific one here:
http://www.netsurf-browser.org/documentation/roinfo
It would be good to get the platform specific installation instructions
and details platform specific issues for all platforms in similar
documents. Each platform specific download page can link to the relevant
user info page.
Finally, I'd like to update the About NetSurf section to make it clear
NetSurf runs on all sorts of platforms and systems. At the moment that
page/area is a bit dry, but I think it can be livened up with things like
a photo of NetSurf running on a snazzy handheld gadget with a caption
below, kind of like the front page screenshot.
Things like the framebuffer port are worth mentioning as it is fairly
unique, I think, that our browser can run with no GUI toolkit or windowing
system, even run on a bootloader.
Also, I want to update the NetSurf team page:
http://www.netsurf-browser.org/about/team
Please could the Chris, François and Vincent give me a couple of
paragraphs, like the ones already there, about which bit of NetSurf you
work on, what system you use, etc. :)
Thanks,
Michael
--
Michael Drake (tlsa) http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
14 years, 3 months
GSoC 2009
by John-Mark Bell
Hi,
I mentioned on IRC that lh had pre-announced this year's GSoC -- the
official announcement, with details, will be at FOSDEM. The timetable
is likely to be similar to last year's.
Some questions:
1. Are we intending to apply this year?
2. What projects do we have that can be done over a summer?
3. What should our student application process be?
4. Who is available to mentor?
(That's enough questions, Ed.)
J.
14 years, 3 months
suggestion for a small change to url bar behaviour
by Paweł Blokus
That makes Ctrl+A select the url not the site text while the url bar has
focus. I know it's not a big deal but please be understanding, I am making
my first steps :)
Index: gtk/gtk_scaffolding.c
===================================================================
--- gtk/gtk_scaffolding.c (wersja 6658)
+++ gtk/gtk_scaffolding.c (kopia robocza)
@@ -777,9 +777,15 @@
struct gtk_scaffolding *gw = (struct gtk_scaffolding *)g;
struct browser_window *bw =
nsgtk_get_browser_for_gui(gw->top_level);
- LOG(("Selecting all text"));
- selection_select_all(bw->sel);
-
+ if (GTK_WIDGET_HAS_FOCUS(gw->url_bar)) {
+ LOG(("Selecting url bar text"));
+ gtk_editable_select_region((GtkEditable *)gw->url_bar, 0, -1);
+ }
+ else {
+ LOG(("Selecting all text"));
+ selection_select_all(bw->sel);
+ }
+
return TRUE;
}
14 years, 3 months
Re: GSoC 2009
by Michael Drake
In article
<EMEW,l1MJufd8e8c0962a57e79af07b52f8996d00d8,jmb%netsurf-browser.org,1235418990.12903.39.camel@duiker>,
John-Mark Bell <jmb(a)netsurf-browser.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-01-27 at 20:01 +0000, Michael Drake wrote:
> > 4. Extracting the core into a library
> This either needs specifying properly or dropping from the list. The
> issue we had with this last time is that it's far too open-ended.
OK.
> > 5. Layout engine improvements
> As above. What improvements?
Off the top of my head:
- Stacking order
- Fixed position
- Fixed backgrounds
- Table stuff (various issues with row style)
- Vertical align
- White-space property
There's more, but I think any student would be lucky to get their head
round layout and do all of that in the time.
> > 6. LibDOM
> This one, like Hubbub was last year, is well constrained (although,
> unlike Hubbub, it has the potential to get out of control). Best, I
> think, is to limit it to Core, Events, and possibly HTML.
OK. It would be good to have a few paragraphs of prose explaining what has
been done, and what needs doing with links to relevant docs and spec
sections.
> > 8. Automated NetSurf layout test suite
> Again, needs specifying properly.
OK.
> > 9. Improved GTK front end
> > 10. Improved Haiku/BeOS front end
> > 11. Improved RISC OS front end
> What improvements (for all 3)?
For RISC OS:
- Tabs
- Better config e.g. web page language choice option
- Richer status bar, perhaps progress bar and icons for SSL, and to
indicate what it's doing
- OLE
- Favicons
Some of these obviously need some work on the core, but that's no bad
thing.
> > It would be good to have some more core related ones, I think. How
> > about that idea that's popped up a few times about allowing NetSurf
> > to make a report of all errors and problems found with the HTML and
> > CSS of a page and the rewrite of NetSurf's internal logging handling?
> Rewriting logging is desirable. That said, I don't envisage it being a
> full summer's work for a half-competent student. Note that logging parse
> errors from the current CSS code is probably somewhat of a waste of
> time, given it'll likely be replaced some point during the GSoC cycle.
OK.
> > Also how about an idea related to general browsing efficiency, for
> > example only decoding images when they need to be displayed, making a
> > disc cache, and other stuff? Don't know how much work there is in that
> > kind of thing.
> Again, this needs specifying properly.
I think first it needs some ideas from people about where there is room
for improvements, to see if it's viable.
Another idea is a completely plotters based treeview for global history,
cookie manager and bookmarks, to make that stuff all able to be handled by
the core, lessening the amount of front end specific code that needs to be
written and making sure the code is well tested. Also there's the generic
data storage in urldb. You also mentioned that how URLs are handled needed
careful consideration after 2.0? I'm not sure why or if it's relevant to
this?
Michael
--
Michael Drake (tlsa) http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
14 years, 3 months
NetSurf 2.0 blockers
by Michael Drake
I think the main things blocking NetSurf 2.0 release are:
1. NetSurf doesn't work at all on most modern linux distros. The
throbber throbs but pages don't load. I believe it was discovered
to be due to some libcurl / openssl thing.
Joty has reported it on Ubuntu 8.10 and so has someone else reported
it for Ubuntu 8.10 in #netsurf recently.
We've had reports of the same issue from other distro users like
Fedora for quite a long time.
2. When you open a new tab in GTK NetSurf, and then view the new tab,
the page in the new tab is not displayed fully. Most of the right
hand side of the page is not shown and that part of the window is
blank.
It happens when you load pages which aren't of fixed width in a new
tab.
To reproduce:
a. Open the default welcome page
b. Click middle button to open in new tab on Wikipedia and Drobe
links. (Neither of which are fixed width pages.)
c. Wait a moment so the pages are loaded.
d. Change tabs to view these pages.
e. The display issue should be evident.
I'd guess the cause is the same as for another not so important GTK
NetSurf issue:
When you open a non-fixed width page in a new window (ctrl+middle
click), the page is initially laid out as if the window had an
available width of zero (with everything squashed down the left side),
and then the page is laid out again to the window width.
Aside from looking bad, this causes layout to split BOX_TEXTs so
there's about one box per word, which makes things slower on long
paragraphs and pages with lots of long paragraphs and breaks text
decoration (like link underlines) at spaces.
You can see this pretty clearly when you open Wikipedia pages in a new
window.
3. No way to set Accept-Language in GTK NetSurf. If you set NetSurf
to to request Japanese, you should get the Japanese translation of
the welcome page at
http://www.netsurf-browser.org/welcome/
There is also the issue that GTK NetSurf has no way to select an
interface language other than English. I'm not sure if this part is
a blocker, but it's worth mentioning. Also we were once sent a Czech
translation of the GTK front end, which we have not yet made
available.
4. Textarea / text input / form submission issues.
5. Get Hubbub up to latest spec. and tested.
6. Maybe the new CSS library.
I think that's everything for the Core and the GTK front end. I don't
think there is any problem releasing the RISC OS front end stuff in its
current state. Not sure about BeOS & AmigaOS front ends.
Michael
--
Michael Drake (tlsa) http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
14 years, 3 months
Re: GSoC 2009
by Chris Young
On Mon, 23 Feb 2009 23:40:23 +0000, John-Mark Bell wrote:
> Frames seem to be broken on everything that isn't RISC OS. That's
> telling me that the current way they're implemented isn't particularly
> portable. Perhaps we should look into this.
That would probably keep one of the Google students quiet for a while
:-)
Some sort of internal solution is needed, where the core code
generates the frames and scrollers, and handles resolving mouse clicks
to each frame. The current implementation seems to require a GUI
which has some sort of "windows inside windows" approach. I know I
can't get my head around how to do that here - I may be able to
display each frame's content inside a virtual gadget, which would have
to be dynamically added/removed when changing sites or switching tabs,
but positioning them is another matter, and resizing them I doubt is
possible (using standard BOOPSI/Reaction gadgets anyway... and I don't
fancy writing my own gadget class for this, or at all)
Currently it uses real windows for each frame, which does the job but
looks a mess, especially as they don't disappear when tabbing or
interact with each other on resizes.
Chris
14 years, 3 months
Hi again
by Adam Blokus
Hi,
I opened my developer mailbox after quite a long time and found by my
surprise that there is already quite a lot of noise about the next
GSoC. During the last few months I got a job and together with my two
faculties it made me not realise how quickly time has passed. I am
really sorry for my absence and that I was not as available to
continue any work of mine during the last few months.
I am writing now mainly to excuse myself, as I do not have enough time
right now to engage myself and also I don't really feel eligible to
run for Google-NetSurf coder again this year. But, if it is still of
some interest for you - I have found that the ICU libs
(http://www.icu-project.org/) may be quite useful for creating a
"heuristical" solution for the problem of national characters(not
standard ASCII) in pdf files. There are some functions useful for
determining a utf-8 document's language - what could be used later to
select a font/encoding to be used by haru for pdf exporting. As I
declared myself for finishing this issue, I will try to manage to find
some time to get into it(or to manage embedding unicode text into pdf
files, if possible) - but I think there will surely be not more than a
few hours per month.
Also, there are some better news from me - I have talked with my
brother about NetSurf and he would like to try helping out a little.
He is a second year student eager to improve his skills in a really
useful project (not one of these we write at the university just to
throw away after passing ;) ). He has similar experience as I had last
year before starting GSoC, so I hope that if I was of any use, he will
be, too:p. I advised him to show up on IRC - maybe you could find
something for him?
Adam
14 years, 3 months
Re: GSoC 2009
by François Revol
> > 10. Improved Haiku/BeOS front end
>
> What improvements (for all 3)?
- download window/backend
- bookmark backend, possibly using native bookmark format (empty files
with xattrs)
- history backend, idem
- fix <frame> support
- printing
- prefs window
François.
14 years, 3 months
display page for uploading file
by zhenhua.qu＠accesschina.com.cn
Dear all:
i run the browser on linux platform,i find the browser can't display the page for uploading file as the IE or opera explorer,please help me!!
2009-02-23
17/F, Minfang Tower, No. 189, Guangzhou Road, Gulou District,
Nanjing, 210009, P.R.China
屈振华
Tel:025-83209900 ext.786
Mobile:13585171258
E-mail:zhenhua.qu@access-company.com
MSN：quzhenhua1680(a)hotmail.com
14 years, 3 months
Re: Blanking text box content
by Michael Drake
In article
<OUT-49A1D3D8.MD-1.4.17.chris.young(a)unsatisfactorysoftware.co.uk>,
Chris Young <chris.young(a)unsatisfactorysoftware.co.uk> wrote:
> On Sun, 22 Feb 2009 09:20:35 +0000 (GMT), Michael Drake wrote:
> The problem does still show up occasionally (along with an assert when
> trying to move the cursor past the end of the existing text), but I
> can't systematically reproduce either of these.
For the assert:
1) Type something in the welcome page search box
2) Press left cursor key
3) Press right cursor key twice
Any more info on the text area submit would help. By the way, the fix for
the known text area submission bug was in Hubbub, so if you haven't
updated that, it may be the bug that's already been fixed.
Michael
--
Michael Drake (tlsa) http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
14 years, 3 months
