Qt and Falkon

[baden.ku...@gmail.com]

I just read the other day that Bitwise has succeeded
in porting a recent Qt engine to OS/2 which should
allow porting the Falkon browser over.

I thought I would check Falkon out on Win10, and I
was very impressed, as my expectations were minimal.
The stability hammers M$ Edge/Explore and Firefox.
This is exactly what the OS/2 community needs. I hope
there will be sustained maintenance for the browser, so
we need not worry about its continuity.

Does anyone know what the release time frame for a
useable Falkon on OS/2 will be? I will have no problem
donating substantially to the cause, as this is
essential to OS/2's continued existence.

thanks,
Baden

[Dave Yeo]

On 02/07/20 09:01 PM, baden.ku...@gmail.com wrote:
...

> Does anyone know what the release time frame for a
> useable Falkon on OS/2 will be? I will have no problem
> donating substantially to the cause, as this is
> essential to OS/2's continued existence.

They were hoping that it would already be released but it turned out
that our GCC 4.92 was too old to compile the webkit part of QT5 so they
got side tracked with porting GCC 9.2. This is close to done and once
done shouldn't take to long for the first builds.
Latest news at
http://articles.os2voice.org/category/software/25-voice-bitwise-works-new-browser-update-10.html
Dave

[baden.ku...@gmail.com]

Hi Dave:

I was assuming the port was completed:
https://www.os2world.com/cms/index.php/past-news/80-news/software/22725-gcc-9-2-released-new-milestone-for-os-2-development


Baden

[Paul Smedley]

Given I gave Dmitry the latest diffs for GCC 9.2.0 it shouldn't have
been too big a distraction!

Cheers,

Paul

[war...@gmail.com]

On Friday, February 7, 2020 at 10:01:12 PM UTC-7, baden.k...@gmail.com wrote:
> Does anyone know what the release time frame for a
> useable Falkon on OS/2 will be? I will have no problem
> donating substantially to the cause, as this is
> essential to OS/2's continued existence.

Seems to be a couple to 6 mo off per VOICE. Donations accepted to get it paid for.
Matt W.

[baden.ku...@gmail.com]

Does anyone know if there is a schedule and budget for this project?

thanks,
Baden

[Pete]

Hi baden

I am sure I have seen a budget and timeframe sometime in the past but
cannot find a link to it at the moment...

Have a read of latest os2voice news https://articles.os2voice.org/


Regards

Pete

[LSoens]

On Sat, 4 Apr 2020 18:57:46 UTC, "baden.ku...@gmail.com"
<baden.ku...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Does anyone know if there is a schedule and budget for this project?
>

https://www.bitwiseworks.com/ and scroll down.
The roadmap is qt5 -> new browser. All I know about it's finished when
it's finished :-) Hope sooon.

Regards
Lothar

--
lothar .dot. soens .at. t .minus. online .dot. de

Wegen Unregelmäßigkeiten im Betrieb fährt die Bahn heute pünktlich.
Due to irregular service all trains go on schedule today.

[baden.ku...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, 5 April 2020 05:04:39 UTC-5, LSoens wrote:

> On Sat, 4 Apr 2020 18:57:46 UTC, "baden.k...@gmail.com"
> <baden.k...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Does anyone know if there is a schedule and budget for this project?
> >
> https://www.bitwiseworks.com/ and scroll down.
> The roadmap is qt5 -> new browser. All I know about it's finished when
> it's finished :-) Hope sooon.
>

I just encountered a discouraging development. I was previously suspicious of relying on Falkon, as it even though it is good, it appears to be a one man show with limited resources and minimal updates. Relying on it would be risky at best.

Today, I went to renew a registration, and none of the browsers on my OS/2 (ArcaOS) would work. I then went to the Win10 netbook, and used Falkon to process the renewal. I then wanted to mail the completed PDF form using Gmail. But, Gmail would not work on Falkon. I instead used Firefox. I checked, and the Falkon Win10 version is the latest from over a year ago.

I really think any remaining development interests should seriously reevaluate the browser path and situation in OS/2. An OS without a functional browser has no viable future.

Baden

[Dave Yeo]

Google was/is blocking Falkon with the claim that it is insecure.
Considering Gmail works with FF45ESR, which likely has its share of
vulnerabilities, it seems like a BS solution.
Unluckily, we have a shortage of developers, so have to take what we
can. What is really going to be a killer is as we move to a 64bit world,
all browsers are getting impossible to port as they just need too much
address space to link.
Dave

[Lars Erdmann]

Hi Dave,

are you talking about building the browser or running the browser ?

[Dave Yeo]

On 06/21/20 12:44 AM, Lars Erdmann wrote:
> Hi Dave,
>
> are you talking about building the browser or running the browser ?

Right now it is linking the browser. To quote dmik,
...
The link command included 3426 object files and 545 static libraries
(which in total include around 10 000 object files). It took around 6
hours before emxomfld did its work and passed execution to wl.exe which
just hung (causing a cold reboot).
...
Given that there are 1487454 weak aliases, there must be many million of
symbols that are put in the hash table.
...
He did optimize emxomfld to bring it down to 5 minutes :) but wlink is
still crashing.
Even linking Mozilla's xul.dll was taking the full address space here
for a while, without VIRTUALADDRESSLIMIT=3072, wlink would fail with an
out of memory error. Also with only 1.5 GBs of ram, I discovered our
swap file has a 2GB limit, giving a swap file full error.
Mozilla eventually started concatting cpp files together and
disassembling static libraries, so feeding the linker about 10,000
object files IIRC.
Dave