NetSurf State of Play?
I was just wondering, what it the current state of play on NetSurf? I still use it very regularly, and greatly appreciate the work being done. But whatever is being done, isn't making any visible difference. It's stable, pretty reliable, but whatever is going on under the hood is not materially affecting the sites I visit one way or the other. But because of that, I'm not hitting any new bugs either, so I have nothing to report and no new feedback to offer. But that lack of feedback can easily make it seem like the work that is being done is going unnoticed. I don't want the devs to feel unappreciated - the work being done /is/ appreciated, but it doesn't seem to be changes I'd expect to see differences from. A (very) quick look in the June commits email archive did not highlight anything likely to cause drastic effects. It all looked like internal technical refinements. The progress info on the web site hasn't been touched in a very long time. NetSurf is mature enough that's it's understandable that development has slowed - I'm curious what is being worked on at the moment. Could we have a summary? -- Simon Smith ___ netsurf-users mailing list -- netsurf-users@netsurf-browser.org To unsubscribe send an email to netsurf-users-le...@netsurf-browser.org
Feature req: completely turn off saved web page app iconsprites/replace with generic?
When you save a local copy of a web page with NetSurf you get an icon file which is a tiny thumbnail view of the entire web page. I don't like these very much - I find them untidy. Given that you can control whether or not iconised windows use thumbnail images, it's a bit odd that one has no control at all over the 'saved page icons'. I'd prefer a generic 'saved web page' app icon, or nothing at all, giving the RISC OS default icon. If a web page provided an .ico file, I guess many people might prefer to use that. Is it possible to turn off the 'IconSprites' line in the mini !Run files NetSurf provides you, which currently reads IconSprites Obey$Dir.!Sprites Filer_Run Obey$Dir.index Providing better control over this does seem like a legit use for a configuration option. I'm a bit surprised that !Run file (and/or an option Boot file) aren't available as editable resources. At present I'm deleting the unwanted Sprites files and tweaking the !Run files by hand, which is a chore. Thanks. -- Simon Smith | Once more unto now | Is the winter to be or | 'Tis the east (Exit.) | -Wm. Shakespeare, abridged
Re: Mac OS X
In message 20130519091644.gc6...@kyllikki.org Vincent Sanders vi...@netsurf-browser.org wrote: We continue to compile for the Mac OS X cocoa frontend on both PowerPC (OS 10.5 leopard) and x86 (OS 10.6 snow leopard). The Continuous Integration (CI) system uses two real mac mini computers[1] as build slaves as Mac OS X cannot currently be reliably cross compiled for. snip One data point coming up: I use MacOS 10.5.8 on an x86 iMac. The machine has an oldish NetSurf on it, but I was actually getting fed up enough with slow performance from Firefox to demote it to G+ and YouTube duties only and seriously try an updated NS as my preferred Mac OS browser. (To date I've only ever made casual use of it on the Mac platform.) But I also have VirtualAcorn, and an Arminix, and NetSurf already is the preferred browser in those two cases, so I have ample workarounds if you do decide to knock your old build environment on the head. I did have to obtain an updated version of Xcode before NS would work for me at all on the Mac. But as long as I can get hold of the very last Mac build I'd be entirely happy. I am already grateful for all the work you guys do. -- Simon Smith | Once more unto now | Is the winter to be or | 'Tis the east (Exit.) | -Wm. Shakespeare, abridged
Long URL annoyance
One longstanding UI gripe I have with NetSurf (in fact, I think it's about my only serious remaining gripe) arises whenever a link has an overlong URL. The first part of the URL appears to the left of the bottom scroll bar. But if the URL is obnoxiously long, as often happens, the right part is truncated and AFAICS there is no way to access it. I /really/ hate not knowing where is a link is going to take me, or not being able to tell the filetype of something without starting to download it. A fix which would mitigate matters is if the proportion of the lower scroll bar (or, even better, the absolute size in pixels) allocated to the horizontal scroll was configurable and/or persistent from window to window. I am getting quite tired of shrinking the h-scroll and then following a link, only for the new link to come up in a new window with the old 50% horizontal-scroll bar width! I do wish it would at least follow the size setting of the window it was opened from, particularly as I find it fiddly to select the tiny 'hotspot area' of the h-scroll bar width slider. I appreciate that some URLs are impossibly long, and only a multi-line URL display would ever be able to fully display them, but in the meantime there are several ways you could mitigate the problem. (e.g. a key shortcut that toggles full-length (or at least a longer) URL display, a hovering link display tooltip, using the !Help application to display the link, etc.) Personally I would be happy to have the URL given a whole line of its own, even though that would sacrifice some vertical screen space, because I feel this info is important enough to justify such a usage. And a full line would usually be sufficient space, whereas on my setup half a line often isn't. If the devs accept bribes for this kind of feature, please just let me know your pricelist. I'd be happy to pay in beer... -- Simon Smith | Once more unto now | Is the winter to be or | 'Tis the east (Exit.) | -Wm. Shakespeare, abridged
Re: Geminus
In message 52500d9910...@timil.com Tim Hill t...@timil.com wrote: In article b832055052.c.n@virgin.net, ChrisF c.n@virgin.net wrote: In message 3991e54f52.jess@itworkshop.invalid Jess Hampshire jesshampsh...@gmail.com wrote: Hi What settings should work correctly with geminus on an Iyonix? Not sure what you mean. I assumed what was meant were Geminus' Settings. :-/ Geminus iconbar menu Choices Settings (Should Netsurf work correctly with all accelerations activated for it?) Netsurf has limitations which are a constant source of tasks for the guys who work on it. However, I use R13065 at the moment and it is stable as far as I am concerned. Geminus and Netsurf have never conflicted on my computer. I notice only that I have all three things unticked alongside Netsurf. probably did that but don't remember when or why. Perhaps it's time to try them ticked againseems okay. I'll report back if anything untoward happens. I had problems with the incorrect sprites being displayed, and on advice turned the three checkboxes off. This was surely at least three years ago, and goodness knows how many builds. Turning the checkboxes on again with r12201 (yes, I'm rather behind), the old problem of incorrect cached sprites being displayed immediately came back again. So that's what to look for - load some picture-intensive sites and see if you start getting fragments of images from one site spuriously popping up on the others. I'll retry once I'm on a current build again. -- Simon Smith | Once more unto now | Is the winter to be or | 'Tis the east (Exit.) | -Wm. Shakespeare, abridged
Re: NetSurf for Mac OS X
In message mpro.lk2h4u1d300fd.pit...@pittdj.co.uk David Pitt pit...@pittdj.co.uk wrote: David Pitt pit...@pittdj.co.uk wrote: Tricia nix...@waitrose.com wrote: On Thu, 21 Apr 2011 01:40:05 +1200, Michael Drake t...@netsurf-browser.org wrote: The Mac OS X port is now available: http://www.netsurf-browser.org/downloads/ I have just tried NetSurf 2.7 for Mac and it downloads and unzips but won't run. The error message is Base style sheet failed to load. It then quits. I am running OS 10.5.8 on a G5 PPC. [snip] The same happens here, but with OS 10.6.7 on an Intel iMac. Disappointing, as I was so pleased to see the port for Mac OS X. Now here's a thing, would you believe it NetSurf 2.7 is fine here on my 10.6.7 Intel iMac. I never saw the error on first running NetSurf but the first thing I did was to change its home page to a local file. And then I remembered I have another Mac, a Mac mini under the tele and that DID show the 'Base style sheet' bug. A crash log is at :- http://pittdj.co.uk/temp/MacNS.zip After an awful lot of mucking about the last thing I did was to run Maintenance.app set to clear the following :- Application Cache Launch Services dyld's shared cache Then NetSurf ran. I've now tried all the cache-cleaning I can think of (can't use Maintenance.app as it's Max OS 10.6+ and I'm on 10.5.8) and I still can't get round the 'Base style sheet error'. I can temporarily trick Netsurf into running by selecting a local HTML file, using Open With, and then browsing to and selecting the NetSurf app. Curiously NetSurf is /not/ a recommended application for HTML files on my system, so I have to deactivate the 'recommended application' bit before I can select it. In this state all I get is a blank window, but I can then access NetSurf's other windows, and can do things like view the hotlist or the NetSurf version number, or configure the default homepage to another URL. On the other hand, as soon as I try to display any web page, whether local or remote, the style sheet error kicks in and NetSurf dies. I was also able to confirm that the program's default entries for preferences, its hotlist and so forth are created OK. David, may I ask what your 'local file' was? Simple web page? Complex web page? And in particular, did it have an associated local style sheet or any embedded styles in it? Thanks. -- Simon Smith | Once more unto now | Is the winter to be or | 'Tis the east (Exit.) | -Wm. Shakespeare, abridged
Re: NetSurf for Mac OS X
In message 51c6e9c6d4t...@netsurf-browser.org Michael Drake t...@netsurf-browser.org wrote: The Mac OS X port is now available: http://www.netsurf-browser.org/downloads/ Best regards, Oh, cheers, I was just about to ask about compiling on Mac OS. I was starting to think it was about time I gave NS a go on my other machine. This will save me a LOT of reading and head-scratching, and many of the other likely hassles of getting the thing to compile for myself. TYVVM to all those responsible! -- Simon Smith | Once more unto now | Is the winter to be or | 'Tis the east (Exit.) | -Wm. Shakespeare, abridged
Sloppy writing generates false positive spam warnings (was Re: aggravating pane)
On 18 Mar, Jim Nagel wrote in message 286dfbb551@nails.abbeypress.net: there appears to be no way to scroll right to read the rest of the text in the inner pane of this warning generated by Netsurf: www.abbeypress.net/TEMP/NS-certificatepane.png (12K). Those two very vague subjects of 'aggravating pane' and 'mobile Facebook' (sic) combined with the mostly lower-case, unpunctuated body text both looked so much like maillist spam to me that I nearly consigned the original poster to spam-filter oblivion without looking any closer. You need to write more properer than that, Jim; it's a bad idea to write so sloppily you generate false positives on people's spam filters. I'm not even talking about a computer-controlled filter here - this time you almost fooled the human. And if I'd actually bothered to set up a computer-moderated filter with the criteria I was mentally applying, you certainly would have been caught by it. -- Simon Smith | Once more unto now | Is the winter to be or | 'Tis the east (Exit.) | -Wm. Shakespeare, abridged
Re: Failed writing body
In message 3b5aaa4251...@rickman.argonet.co.uk rick...@argonet.co.uk wrote: On recent versions of NetSurf I keep getting the message: Failed writing body (0 !=7540) or something similar. This happens when I typed something and press enter. Eg a search item for Google. It is no more than an irritant, as it goes away if I clear the dialog box, enter a few more characters, and press enter again. It only happens on the Iyonix (5.16) Has anyone else experienced this nuisance. Yes, me, but I never really spotted any pattern to it. I'll look into the dialog box angle and see if I can find something more repeatable. -- Simon Smith | Remember remember, something something | Something something and something | For something something something something | Should something something forgot.
Re: Google Summer of Code Roundup
In message 1253180442.5804.281.ca...@duiker John-Mark Bell j...@netsurf-browser.org wrote: On Thu, 2009-09-17 at 00:15 +0100, Steve Fryatt wrote: I think the main problem here is that the majority seem happy to sit back, wring their hands and state how terrible this all is -- then wait for someone else to step forward to take on the work (or even demand that someone else does). As such, it seems to have been the usual suspects who have offered to help: those already doing other things. Certainly if I picked up NetSurf now, something else would have to give, which in all probability would just move the complaints from this list to another RISC OS forum a month or so down the line. Quite. This has been RISC OS' elephant in the room for the last 5 years or so -- there simply aren't enough active developers to do all the things that need to be done. I don't have a solution to this problem, but do think it's about time people acknowledged that it exists and review their expectations in that light. Returning to NetSurf, we really do appreciate the offers of help that we've received so far and fully understand that real life gets in the way :) May I ask what proportion of bug reports come from the users of different platforms, particularly RISC OS as that's the main one I use? And, sailing a little closer to the wind, what proportion of useful bug reports? I'd love to help, but I'd have to learn C programming properly first. I can do Hello World, with help, but beyond that is uncharted territory ATM... -- Simon Smith | A golden bird stands on a silver snake lying | in a pool of water. The snake drinks the | water, and the bird eats the snake. When | the water is gone, the bird dies.
Re: Running out of memory
In message 50919c6d84ch...@chrisjohnson.plus.com Chris Johnson ch...@chrisjohnson.plus.com wrote: In article 20090827234943.42023...@trite.i.flarn.net.i.flarn.net, Rob Kendrick r...@netsurf-browser.org wrote: On Thu, 27 Aug 2009 21:18:13 +0100 Richard Porter r...@minijem.plus.com wrote: Yes, I've noticed that Netsurf is gobbling up memory again. Last time I found it had three dynamic areas, and I had to quit it before anything else woud run. Just as a note, the number of dynamic areas it has means very little. But when they are 50-60 MB, then it can soon take significant fractions of memory when one only has 512MB in total on an Iyonix. Even when all pages are closed, the amount never decreases. The largest (of four) is currently 16MB, and I have done virtually no browsing today 8o( The Jobstoday website seem to have a knack of running netSurf out of memory cleanly. http://www.jobstoday.co.uk/jbe/vacancy/8y6TaE/9733473/35584595/932955502/0/onnufQ/0/1 The above link, loaded on a cleanly-booted system, shows no sign of ever displaying anything, but on my system it will use up a 128Mb DA and then 7 or 8 1Mb DAs before complaining that 'NetSurf is running out of memory'. There is constant network activity while it downloads I-don't-know-what over and over, but nothing ever displays. Seen on builds 9382 and 9506. I've already logged this as 'Galloping memory leak' (although the link in this email is a new example of the same problem), and trying with build 9506 now, the behaviour seems to be exactly the same as on build 9382. -- Simon Smith | A golden bird stands on a silver snake lying | in a pool of water. The snake drinks the | water, and the bird eats the snake. When | the water is gone, the bird dies.
Re: NS2.1 Unicode font library could not be initialized
In message 50769a0f19ba...@e-allen.me.uk Barry E Allen ba...@e-allen.me.uk wrote: In article 1246880870.32517.128.ca...@duiker, John-Mark Bell j...@netsurf-browser.org wrote: There are 2 kinds of scan: full and partial. snip A partial scan will occur if there are new fonts available. As the name suggests, it will only scan those new fonts, and nothing else. Netsurf scans and finds the font 'Lampoon Primary' every time I start it up? 3.0 (Dev) (06 Jul 2009 11-00) r8347 Are you sure the Lampoon Primary font is complete? My system keeps finding... Swz.Narrow I believe, which, on my system, isn't. -- Simon Smith | A golden bird stands on a silver snake lying | in a pool of water. The snake drinks the | water, and the bird eats the snake. When | the water is gone, the bird dies.
Re: Socket exhaustion - a possible lead?
In message 6b7a725f50.zen44...@zen.co.uk Simon Smith simon_sm...@zen.co.uk wrote: In message 505f6e90cet...@netsurf-browser.org Michael Drake t...@netsurf-browser.org wrote: In article b19b2a5f50.zen44...@zen.co.uk, Simon Smith simon_sm...@zen.co.uk wrote: I'm still managing to trigger socket exhaustion from time to time - in fact I think I'm getting better at it. 1. What version of NetSurf are you using? This was a known problem with development builds for a period a couple of years back. 2. NetSurf allows the number of simultaneous connections it makes to be controlled. What values do you have in the Fetching section of Choices... Connection? 3. Try reducing the values. Michael I'm currently on build 7512 of 14/05/2009 I usually update every 1-3 weeks. Max fetches 24 Fetches per host 20 Cached connections 6 I'm now on the fresh 2.1 release, and the problem is as bad as ever. In particular, using a recent URL from the pull-down list, then selecting another recent URL /in the same window/ before the first page has loaded also seems to trigger it. So it's very easy by various means to accidentally get NetSurf in a state where the next aborted download will drop the socket count to zero. A nuisance. -- Simon Smith Where there's muck there's hope.
Re: Missing up-arrow in menus?
In message 200905181949.06...@zamez.strcprstskrzkrk.co.uk James Bursa ja...@netsurf-browser.org wrote: On Monday 18 May 2009, Simon Smith wrote: My preferred desktop font is Homerton Medium, which does not contain a glyph for the hollow up-arrow sometimes used to indicate Shift in application menus. snip The Wimp should automatically use this symbol from the WIMPSymbol font if it isn't in your chosen font. WIMPSymbol comes in ROM. I can think of two possibilities: 1. Your Font$Path is missing the ROM fonts directory Resources:$.Fonts. Try *Show Font$Path to check. 2. You have a non-standard Homerton Medium that has an empty glyph for the arrow instead of no glyph. Homerton Medium is also in ROM, but you might have it somewhere else too. Run !NetSurf.FixFonts to check for this. Well, I too had been assuming the problem was somehow font-related, but in my case the culprit was ROOL's WimpSA module (downloadable as 'NewWimp' about a year ago, which I presume is where I got it from). This module extends the Window Manager to allow solid icons (ie without transparent pixels) to be used for the window tools. And it's been fixed since I downloaded it. But thanks to the those who tried to help. -- Simon Smith Where there's muck there's hope.
Missing up-arrow in menus?
My preferred desktop font is Homerton Medium, which does not contain a glyph for the hollow up-arrow sometimes used to indicate Shift in application menus. For example, NetSurf tells me that to save a page I should press F3, and to full-save a page I should press ... F3. I can get the symbol back by reverting to the system font, which I'd rather not do. Are there any other work-arounds? NetSurf is not the only victim, although it is the main app. I use that's affected - mainly because Netsurf actually troubles to mention the shortcuts it uses in its menus. -- Simon Smith Where there's muck there's hope.
Inaccessible history
Despite the delay it introduces into NetSurf's loading time, I like having a very long site history. It's currently set to 365 days (and I would like to set it to even longer). But if I select 'show global history', the window only goes back three weeks. So it seems that I'm having to wait an inordinately long time just for the privilege of an extensive URL auto-complete facility. Now, that's actually the only bit I really care about; but given that it's the only way I can access any history older than three weeks anyway, is it possible to separate the auto-complete history from the global history, or at least speed up the loading of the feature I'm using? If so, is it something I can do, e.g. by pruning the URL file? Or is the long loading delay more likely to be cookie-related? I haven't cleared them out for a while either. -- Simon Smith Where there's muck there's hope.
Socket exhaustion
I've noticed that recent builds of Netsurf (3 over the last 2-3 days) seem to exhaust my available network sockets sooner. Is anyone else finding this? I'm currently on r6605, and up until about 3 days ago I could go weeks without running out. My usual usage is dialup, connecting for minutes at a time, then disconnecting. I cycle through about a dozen regularly-visited sites, including an active phpBB forum. Rinse, repeat. It's as if the newer builds are behaving much the same as the older builds, but hit the socket threshold just slightly sooner. So the same internet behaviour that used to be fine (I'd hit the socket limit only every few weeks, on 'heavy usage days') is now triggering the problem noticeably more often. -- Simon Smith Time flies like an arrow, steers like a cow.
Re: Netsurf Hunger - for memory
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED] John-Mark Bell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 11 Mar 2008 10:00:07 +1300, Keith Hopper [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is there something wrong with Netsurf's memory usage?? Not to my knowledge. Yesterday I sent for a document - which came in at 20Mb - onlt to find Netsurf taking over 127Mb of memory before anything displayed. That's not exactly surprising. If the source document truly /is/ 20 *megabytes* in size, I'd appreciate a copy -- such things are almost never seen on the Web. When I eventually closed the window containing the document, Netsurf took another 4Mb of memory - and held on to the lot! That's simply heap fragmentation. Fixing that properly is decidely non-trivial. Well, the various games at parslow.com and the other MC sites (linked from parslow.com) allow you to dial-a-document-size up to about 10Mb by setting the start and size parameters appropriately. Games 3, 5, 26, and 70 are about the biggest and longest-running on parslow.com, but there are archived games of all sizes on all three sites, and also in the White Rose MC archive. http://parslow.com/mornington/move.pl?3start=24518size=100 http://parslow.com/mornington/move.pl?5start=10011size=100 http://parslow.com/mornington/move.pl?26start=8171size=100 http://parslow.com/mornington/move.pl?70start=12591size=100 Then there's the archived Really Bad HTML game which is a truly work of evil: http://www.dunx.org/cgi-bin/white-rose/forum?forum=Game85groupBy=idgroup=000before=80end= No browser could render that mess correctly, but it's probably quite a good smoke test - even displaying it without crashing and without leaking memory all over the place probably counts as a major success. -- Simon Smith The idea of an uncrackable digital rights management (DRM) scheme is fundamentally flawed. Encryption is about A sending information to B while ensuring that C cannot read it. In DRM, B and C are the same person.
SVG rendering - impressive start!
From the Libsvgtiny page, in teeny tiny text I spotted http://croczilla.com/svg/samples/tiger/tiger.svg Followed the link, and ... that's really quite impressive. I tried exporting an ArtWorks file of my own in SVG format and found you haven't done transparency yet, but even so, my hat is off to you gents for your work so far. Now, ArtWorks' SVG expert does have quite a lot of customisable settings. Would you care to comment on the optimum export settings to use, or is it going to remain a question of trial and error for the foreseeable future? Thanks -- Simon Smith The idea of an uncrackable digital rights management (DRM) scheme is fundamentally flawed. Encryption is about A sending information to B while ensuring that C cannot read it. In DRM, B and C are the same person.
