The status of the new QtWebEngine/Chromium based browser, update 12...
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- Written by Roderick Klein
- Category: VOICE
Bitwise works GmbH ( "Bitwise") and the Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation decided in October 2017 that OS/2 and ArcaOS needed a new web browser. Bitwise already ports and maintains a lot of open source projects; by now they maintain more than 260 DLLs which are used to compile and run open source applications on OS/2 and ArcaOS.
This screenshot is from the 27st of July 2020 from BWW developer Dmitry on his development system:
While this is not the targeted Falkon web browser yet, what this screenshot shows is that the QtWebEngine DLL is loaded by a Qt Web Browser demo application. The new QtWebEngine DLL that the Falkon browser will be using can be found here: http://rpm.netlabs.org/test/Qt5WebCd.7z , unzipped its 350 MB big!
So the DLL is not displaying data via the browser yet. The primary reason this is not yet working is unforseen issues with the toolchain on OS/2. Our tools are old. With this we mean the GCC compiler and the wlink.exe. The following issues in 2020 so far had to be addressed to get this new QtWebEngine DLL compiled on OS/2/ArcaOS:
* Needed GCC 9.2.x compiler, QtWebEngine DLL needed the new GCC compiler features (this alone took about 2 months extra).
* Significant updates to LIBCn DLL, wide character support needed to be added for example.
* More DLLs ported to OS/2/updated to get the QtWebEngine to compile (ffmpeg, icu, libxml, etc).
* Open Watcom Linker WL.EXE had to be updated (and more updates to follow).
* AOUT to OMF converter EMXOMF.EXE used to compile with GCC needed updates (more to follow).
Portions of our toolchain: The GCC compiler and the Open Watcom Linker have never been used on OS/2 for compiling such large DLLs (hundreds of megabytes). The QtWebEngine DLL on a high end system with an Intel i7 CPU and with an SSD takes 12 to 16 hours to compile. The project is huge but also it takes that long because the tool chain needs updating. Compiling the same code on MacBook with a similar CPU takes about 4 hours, updates tools.
Paul Smedley had provided a base line of patches for GCC and Dmitry has expanded and improved these further. Currently Steve Levine is working on updating the WLINK from Open Watcom and other portions of the toolchain to speedup compiling.
As was explained in the Warpstock Europe 2020 presentation done by Dmitry and me (Roderick). Compiling programs on OS/2 is not plug and play like it is on other platforms. The video can be found here, goto 4 hours and 25 minutes, the BWW presentation starts at this porint.
Once the QtWebEngine DLL is working and displaying the rendered data the new browser will not take long. The reason for this is because the vast mayority of the code of the browser uses is in the Qt DLLs and the QtWebEngine DLL.
These updated tools will now make maitenance of OS/2 ports easier in the future. But with webkit working we will get access to new applications such as possibly the Teletegram Desktop application and possibly adding webcam video call support to OS/2. And a new mail client long term! But for now we expect Thunderbird to remain functional enough on ArcaOS. Once we are current with QT we want to stay current also with porting new versions of QT and the QtWebEngine DLL.
Anothe reason this taking so long is because QT had not been worked on on OS/2 for a couple of years! It has taken a lot of work to catch up on the backlog! One projects that proves *if* you keep your port current is the Open Office project! We as a community can keep our browser then current in the future!
We however need your donations to move forward with this big task!
* Buy sponsor units through the OS/2 VOICE Foundation at
http://www.os2voice.org/membership.html#bww; all proceeding of these
units will go towards the browser project.
* Support BWW directly on a monthly basis via Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/bwwbitwiseworks.
We are also selling some unqiue OS/2 items on ebay. Alle money from these sales will be donated to the new browser project. More items will be added tomorow so keep on on this ebay link!
Thank you,
Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE foundation
VOICE / Bitwise works new browser update 11
- Details
- Written by Roderick Klein
- Category: Software
An update on the current status of the QT development:
1. All parts of the QTWebEngine are finished, including the QT integration
with the Chromium engine. The code can be compiled when Chromium, where is
depends on, is finished.
2. All of the build tools required to build Chromium have been ported to
OS/2 and are working.
3. Chromium itself is now being worked on, which is about 50k of source
code files. To get this to compile also requires fixes and additions to
dependencies like LIBC
There has been good progress on the project, nevertheless there is still a
lot of work to be done. The current estimate is it will take about 2
months to get QT including all the web parts compiled and then some more
time to do bugfixing.
We still need funding to get this done. The VOICE coffers are almost
empty....
Click on the link below and scroll down to find the QT sponsoring options.
http://www.os2voice.org/membership.html
Best regards,
Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE foundation
VOICE / Bitwise works new browser update 10
- Details
- Written by Roderick Klein
- Category: Software
It has been a while since the last update regarding the new web browser being developed for OS/2 and ArcaOS. For those people reading about this for the first time, here is a short summary.
BitWise Works GmbH (hereafter refered to as "BWW") and the Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation decided in October 2017 that OS/2 and ArcaOS needed a web browser. BWW already ports and maintains a lot of open source projects; by now they maintain more then 260 DLL's which are used to compile and run open source applications on OS/2 and ArcaOS.
A lot of these DLLs have been ported to our operating system solely to keep the Firefox web browser running on OS/2 and ArcaOS. In fact, the last few years BWW has only been able to work on the Firefox browser and not much else. The main reason is that the Mozilla foundation kept making massive changes to the Mozilla products and it was difficult to keep up with them. In addition, in 2017 Mozilla switched to the RUST compiler to build Firefox; we do not have this compiler on OS/2 and it will most likely never exist on our platform.
For this reason the project was started to update the Qt framework on OS/2 and ArcaOS. Qt is a C++ framework that is used to create desktop programs, like an email client, an editor, a video player or a browser. Qt makes it easy to build applications on different platforms like Windows, Mac, Linux and of course OS/2. However, Qt itselfs needs to be ported to OS/2 first, and that is what BWW has been working on for the past 2 years. Currently we have version 5.13 available for OS/2 and ArcaOS (available through the Arca Noae Package Manager).
We need Qt 5 on OS/2 because of one component of the framework: Qt WebEngine. This large DLL contains the core code of any modern webbrowser and is essentially the same engine as used by open source Chromium, Google's Chrome and Microsoft's Edge webbrowser (no, this does not mean the Qt WebEngine sends data to Google or Microsoft; it is an open source project that does not have any vendor backdoors). We will use Qt WebEngine to bring the Falkon browser to OS/2.
An added bonus is that the Qt libraries also enables other developers to port more software to OS/2. For example, Gregg Young from the US uses Qt (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ75OV6iz0Y); Elbert Pol from the Netherlands also tests Qt and ports applictions to OS/2 and ArcaOS. However, a large project such as porting Qt cannot be done by volonteers alone; this needs paid developers, such as Dmitry Kuminov from BWW.
We had hoped that the Falkon browser for ArcaOS and OS/2 would be released in December of this year. Unfortunaly, we had some setbacks. In previous postings I explained how complex it can be to port software to OS/2 and ArcaOS; it is not just a matter of compiling the code on OS/2. In some cases new DLLs need to be ported to our platform or updated. This in turn required an upgrade of the available GCC compiler (the program that turns human readable code into machine language) from 4.9.2 to 9.2. BWW also ported this version to our operating system as it was needed for the Webkit DLL. So as an added bonus we have the latest GCC compiler for OS/2 as well. It is expected to take another 1 to 2 months before a beta of the Falkon browser can be released to the public.
(Edit 29th of December 2019: I forgot to mention the orginal ports of GCC are provided by Paul Smedley. BWW reported they tweaked some of the patches and recompiled GCC and tested it).
You should consider Seamonkey and Firefox technically dead on OS/2. More and more websites use the latest HTML techniques and have stopped working or will stop working on OS/2 and ArcaOS. You may already experience websites now that are broken or do not display at all, weird SSL error messages, et cetera.
We need the OS/2 community to contribute to this project. BWW is company based in Austria; only the main developer Dmitry is currently being paid. Silvan Scherrer and Herwig Bauernfeind work free of charge for the company and even put in extra money so Dmitry can work on the project full-time. That is why we need your continued support for this updated browser. It has been a long journey but soon you can use your favorite operating system again with a browser that will work a lot better simply because it is up to date.
While you may not understand all the technicall details you can visit the following page to see how many DLL's are being kept up to date by BWW here: https://www.bitwiseworks.com/news/
You can support this important project in two ways:
* Buy sponsor units through the OS/2 VOICE Foundation at
http://www.os2voice.org/membership.html#bww; all proceeding of these
units will go towards the browser project.
* Support BWW directly on a monthly basis via Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/bwwbitwiseworks.
On behalf of the OS/2 VOICE board and BWW we would like to wish everybody a healthy and great 2020!
Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE foundation
New web browser for OS/2 is within reach!
- Details
- Written by Roderick Klein
- Category: Software
Currently Qt 5.13.1 (the latest version from the Qt Company!) is being worked on to be released in the coming days. Qt has been released in RPM format and is being used by other developers. The Dutch OS/2 VOICE foundation started with this journey with with BWW and the OS/2 community in October 2017. We first of all wanted an up to date set of Qt DLL's for OS/2 and ArcaOS. The Qt Toolkit is a big collection of DLL's that provide a lot of GUI elements. We can port a lot of a QT applications to OS/2 and ArcaOS using this toolkit.
The Qt project has so far been in line with the time frame BWW published in the roadmap about 9 months ago! BWW is now working on porting the Qt WebEngine DLL to OS/2, which is part of the Qt Toolkit. The WebEngine module in Qt is the core engine of a web browser. This is what loads and renders webpages to be displayed on your screen. ArcaOS and OS/2 users will have in December of this year early access to a port of the Falkon web browser! You should simply be able to visit websites again without any issue's!
What we again would like to emphasize is that with Qt it does not matter which browser we port, it matters that we use Qt WebEngine. The Chrome web browser from Google uses a web engine called Chromium and it's exactly the same thing Qt WebEngine uses behind the scenes. The Chromium engine is so good that even Microsoft has decided to started using it: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/06/microsoft_edge_chromium/
For people concerned about privacy, the WebEngine DLL does not contain code that will send data back to Google (such as the Google Chrome browser does)! Of course when you visit Google.com with the new Falkon browser that will send your search requests to Google. But the ported browser does not have any "call home" code built in to contact Microsoft or Google.
As you all understand we more donations from the community finish this browser port! So please donate! OS/2 VOICE has been paying BWW about 2500 Euro per month, yes one developer working full time as coder costs money! I (Roderick Klein) as chairman of OS/2 VOICE has started to sell OS/2 donated software and other computers items on Ebay to collect additional funding https://www.os2world.com/past-news/79-general/22594-going-going-gone-os2voice-items-for-auction.html. This is an example of what was sold, items have shipped already!
Please make your donation here: http://www.os2voice.org/membership.html#bww
This article is a joint publication of OS/2 VOICE and BWW.