I know this comes up every so often on random posts... but how far would porting a slightly more modern web browser to NS from something that's OSX native (and obviously open source)? I ask because I just jumped off my NS 3.3 slab onto my OSX box to actually post. I love using my NeXT station... and sometimes all I can use it for is a little light surfing. And that's getting rather difficult as we're what, 12+ years out from the birth of OmniWeb 2.5. Any thoughts? How delusional is this?
DISCLAIMER --> Please keep in mind that I am a user and a mild tinkerer... and coding beyond "hello world" is usually outside my realm of ability (as much as I try to expand it).
I'd guess that though it might be possible to get Firefox ported across that the performance would be a joke.
Running iCab or Nutscrape on my 840av is a joke and slows the thing to a virtual crawl and that's a 40mhz 040. Add to that the pain of perhaps adding Java or Flash to the equation and you'd wait an eternity to load some pages.
Just my guess of course and I'd love a decent browser myself.
If someone were crazy enough to try, I'd suggest they go for a more stable browser than Firefox, perhaps a much smaller member of the Mozilla/Gecko family. I've been told by a close friend who is one of the Firefox development team, more than once, that Mozilla is a lot more stable.
What is the most recent tool chain NS3.3 has ? eg, GCC, Make etcetera ?
The state of these dependencies is what will decide which browser to choose to attempt porting.
This has probably been discussed before as well.
Tenzin
heck, I'd be happy with a good port of elinks2 with a native frontend. It supports most stuff quite well, does tabbing, javascript etc. small memory footprint and is very fast. I used it on a 486-75/12mb laptop for ages.
The OS the Web was invented on probably can't read it's inventor's blog. Tim BL (
http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4)
I can barely read it using Netscape 4.8 on Mac OS 8 on a PPC.
This is worse than the Mosaic homepage, now NCSA Bounce page, not being readable in Mosaic 3
This is bad, NeXTSTEP, Openstep and Rhapsody definitely need a browser that can read at least CSS and Javascript, and pages written in WebObjects.
When I next speak with my friend on the Firefox team, I'll ask him what will work on 25 MHz 68k with a maximum of 128 Mb ram, on systems with GCC 2.7. It won't be much.
Tenzin
I've always used OmniWeb 2.7b3 with the OpenSSL add-on. It's better than Mosaic and Netscape 4.x (under Solaris), anyway. Though posting, indeed, requires some hoops to be jumped through, partly due to the seemingly short-term caching mechanism of OW: for instance, for this forum's software (phpBB), first I compose my response in another app (TextEdit.app) - you'll see why in a moment. Then, after clicking Post Reply, I'm asked to log in again though of course I'd already logged in when I first came here this evening! Now I quickly paste my response into the response screen and hit Submit - because if I compose my response in the response screen, usually taking a few minutes to do so, hitting Submit leads to - the forum software's login screen again! I found if I post quite quickly, the response will actually go through...
Ah, well, I still love all the rest of the SW available for NS...