[haiku-development] Re: Cairo and FF3 (Was: Who wants to help develop a Haiku native web browser?)

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 3:43 AM, Fredrik Holmqvist
<fredrik.holmqvist@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 2009/2/25 hey68 you <hey68you@xxxxxxxxx>:
>> What is the status of porting Firefox 3.x to Haiku?
> It halted the day they forced all platforms to use Cairo. Cairo is
> ported, at least an old version, but so far no one has got it to pass
> the tests. Unfortunatly they hardcoded it in almost everywhere, so you
> have to drink the Cairo coolaid. Afaik there are no devs that are
> interested in working on it anymore either.

Well... I'm not much of a dev, but i'm interested in messing with Cairo :)

Cairo does have more uses than just FF3 - so IMO it's worth porting either way.

I've got the git master/head compiling on gcc2 Haiku, and with a few
more nasty hacks (disabling assertions in the core Cairo code) it even
runs the tests without crashing. Many of those tests do fail pretty
miserably at this point, unfortunately. It seems the beos-surface
backend is very unfinished - but Cairo does also support an SDL
backend - and maybe we can focus our efforts there first. I'll look
into that tonight if I can. I suspect that most of the test failures
are due to the rendering using the beos-surface code.

I have yet to post my progress on HaikuPorts - but I mostly have
patches ready and will try to do so by this weekend.

>> Will it be able to load up faster than current FF (Bon Echo) 2.0.0.18?
> Probably faster than the current CVS 2.0.0.18 builds. Otherwise no,
> Firefox 3 has added more bloat and work in the wrong direction to
> provide fast startup. It might be faster internally though, although I
> guess that will not be the case for our port as probably Cairo will
> eat up any performance available.

For those who haven't tried one of the new "non-Firefox" 2.0 builds
with the NSPR patches - I suspect you'll be pleased with the
performance improvements that Fredrik has made ;)

> Personally I think WebKit is the way to go, they seem to know about
> designing software and even try to encourage and help ports. Chrome I
> don't know about, but Ben Goodger who is the technical lead is from
> Netscape and Firefox so it will probably go the same way as Firefox is
> now.

Ditto, I personally think Mozilla is going the wrong direction by
locking into dependencies like Cairo at this stage in the game - but I
suppose they are less about innovation and portability right now and
more about solidifying their core product into the markets it already
supports and trying to keep up with the other players in the game.

I think what the FOSS world needs most now is a solid, cross-platform,
clean rendering engine + javascript engine that can be plugged into
just about browser design - I think WebKit is the closest thing out
there to fill that gap right now - it definitely seems far above
Gecko.

- Urias

Other related posts: