NetSurf progress
Last weekend there was a small "hack weekend" meeting of some NetSurf developers in Manchester. I thought it might be encouraging to spread some information. If you have been downloading Continuous Integration (CI) builds, you will probably have noticed that there have been over 25 of them in the last few days. This represents the progress that NetSurf has been making, both in adding new functionality and in fixing bugs. One bug that has been reported multiple times is that NS seems to loop for ever when Javascript is enabled. It actually didn't loop for ever - it just took longer than most people were prepared to wait. The culprit was a regular expression evaluator - not where most of us would expect lots of time to be spent. Recent versions have shown an enormous speed up in that particular part, which translates to a large speed up in page loads as a whole. Some bugs that caused crashes when Javascript was enabled, have been fixed. The main thrust of the work at the moment is in adding Javascript functionality using the Duktape library. When all the Javascript features that were there with the previous library have been replicated, NetSurf version 3.4 will be released. This will also add new Javascript functionality. Many other bug reports concern the layout. NetSurf's layout engine needs to be rewritten. This work will start some time after release of 3.4 - though how long after is not yet known. I would urge you to download CI builds of NetSurf and try them. Always keep a known good version that you can go back to in the unlikely event that a new CI build fails. And, most of all, keep the bug reports coming in! We looked at many of them over the weekend, and were able to close quite a lot, in most cases because more recent versions work and do not exhibit the reported problems. NetSurf is fully capable of creating bug reports using the Mantis issue tracker, including attaching files and adding notes. If you have a problem, ask on this list for help. In short, I feel very much encouraged by recent progress, and I hope you all do too! Dave FREE 3D EARTH SCREENSAVER - Watch the Earth right on your desktop! Check it out at http://www.inbox.com/earth
Re: NetSurf progress
On 3 Nov 2015 Dave Higton wrote: [snip] > In short, I feel very much encouraged by recent progress, and I > hope you all do too! This user (and occasional bug reporter) is very encouraged too, and also very grateful. Best wishes, Peter. -- Peter Young (zfc Os) and family Prestbury, Cheltenham, Glos. GL52, England http://pnyoung.orpheusweb.co.uk pnyo...@ormail.co.uk
Re: NetSurf progress
On 3 Nov 2015 as I do recall, Dave Higton wrote: [snip] > In short, I feel very much encouraged by recent progress, and I > hope you all do too! > I've been very impressed by the speed with which the last few issues I've reported have been fixed. -- Harriet Bazley == Loyaulte me lie == There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
Re: NetSurf progress
In message Harriet Bazley wrote: >On 3 Nov 2015 as I do recall, > Dave Higton wrote: > >[snip] > > >> In short, I feel very much encouraged by recent progress, and I >> hope you all do too! >> >I've been very impressed by the speed with which the last few issues I've >reported have been fixed. Thanks for speaking up, Harriet. The developers really are trying! Perhaps your posting will add weight to my pleas for more testing. Another thing: you must have downloaded and tried numerous development (CI) builds. How many have given you trouble? Dave FREE 3D EARTH SCREENSAVER - Watch the Earth right on your desktop! Check it out at http://www.inbox.com/earth
Re: NetSurf progress
On 3 Nov 2015 as I do recall, Dave Higton wrote: [snip] > you must have downloaded and tried numerous development (CI) builds. How > many have given you trouble? > I only normally download a random development build when I want to report a bug (to check that it's still present in the current version). Hard to tell how many of those have introduced bugs that weren't previously present! The (apparently new?) non-scrolling bug is the one that caused the most serious usability issues. I don't think I've been unlucky enough to download a version of Netsurf that didn't actually run - now that the majority of the lock-up/superslow rendering problems seem to have been located and fixed, I'm considering downloading a newer version of Netsurf on this (e-mail hosting) machine, which I have so far avoided doing because my mother, who also uses it, simply can't cope with switching Javascript off again to access sites that don't work with JS on by default. There's still the issue (for her) of sites that provide a working non-JS alternative but where you don't get to access this when Netsurf claims to support Javascript then doesn't actually submit the form when you click on the button, etc -- Harriet Bazley == Loyaulte me lie == Positive: Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
Re: NetSurf progress
In message Dave Higton wrote: > In message > Harriet Bazley wrote: > >>On 3 Nov 2015 as I do recall, >> Dave Higton wrote: >> >>[snip] >> >> >>> In short, I feel very much encouraged by recent progress, and I >>> hope you all do too! >>> >>I've been very impressed by the speed with which the last few issues I've >>reported have been fixed. > > Thanks for speaking up, Harriet. The developers really are trying! > > Perhaps your posting will add weight to my pleas for more testing. > > Another thing: you must have downloaded and tried numerous development > (CI) builds. How many have given you trouble? > IME the development builds are pretty stable. I generally update NS every couple of weeks or so and have been doing so since the CI series started: I could probably count the troublesome versions on the fingers of one hand. I keep a copy of the last stable release in any case, and can revert to that in the (rare) event of problems. Good to see development is proceeding energetically: the platform doesn't have too many alternatives to NetSurf. I've used Peter Naulls' Firefox port in the past, and the Otter port fairly intensively over the past 3 weeks and, while the latter is promising, it is not yet responsive enough for day-in, day-out use on a low-powered computer such as a Pi or Iyonix, IMO, and I imagine a considerable amount of work would be required to make it so. We really do need NetSurf! -- George
Re: NetSurf progress
In article <41035cf02c7.007bd...@davehigton.me.uk>, Dave Higton wrote: > In short, I feel very much encouraged by recent progress, and I > hope you all do too! Yes. Thank you, all of you, fror your efforts. -- Stuart Winsor Tools With A Mission sending tools across the world http://www.twam.co.uk/
Re: NetSurf progress
On Tue, Nov 03, 2015 at 22:42:09 +, Harriet Bazley wrote: > There's still the issue (for her) of sites that provide a working non-JS > alternative but where you don't get to access this when Netsurf claims to > support Javascript then doesn't actually submit the form when you click on > the button, etc I can appreciate this is a pain. Once we have events working in the new JS implementation well enough that we feel 3.4 could come out; we're going to switch the "JS always on at startup" back off, so that users have control once more. Until then, keeping a couple of different verisons around is probably best. I would never give a CI build of software to my mum and not expect problems -- she's a bug magnet :-) D. -- Daniel Silverstone http://www.netsurf-browser.org/ PGP mail accepted and encouraged.Key Id: 3CCE BABE 206C 3B69
