NetSurf 3.3 Released

The NetSurf team are pleased to announce version 3.3 of our browser

It can be downloaded from the website http://www.netsurf-browser.org/

The release is principally aimed at improving stability rather than features but does include some important security updates so we encourage everyone to upgrade. The website contains the detailed changelog for those interested.

I seem to have a problem with 3.3…

I wrote and put up

http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/BBC/AudioFactory/AudioFactory.html

yesterday. It looks fine with FireFox and NetSurf 3.2, but NetSurf 3.3 fails to fetch Fig3.png for some reason. It says it is fetching, then times out after 30 sec leaving a blank area with just the alt text for the image.

However if I try the same set of files stored on my home machine, 3.3 renders the page fine and shows the Fig3 image OK.

Is this a bug in 3.3 or have is something wrong with the page? Its puzzling that 3.2 works OK.

Jim

Jim – I have found that recent test versions of NetSurf (going back a few months) have a tendency to drop images from pages. I am not sure if it is a timeout problem, or something else. It is very noticeable if you load a page containing a number of thumbnail images (say 24). Several of them will not display. Clicking the reload button almost invariably then loads the missing ones.

Just to add, after making a post here just now to another thread, when the page reloaded after posting, some of the ‘avatar’ images were missing. A reload then resulted in them showing for every post on the page. I am using v. 3.4 #2696 at the moment.

Clicking the reload button almost invariably then loads the missing ones.

I tried that a few times and still no Fig3. :-/

The question is if it might make more sense to try a development version or simply go back to 3.2 until this is resolved?

Jim

The question is if it might make more sense to try a development version or simply go back to 3.2 until this is resolved?

Try both. The change is a very quick and easy process.

Just remember that, if you want to go back to an earlier version, you need to delete the current installation of Netsurf in order to make sure that the Newer option doesn’t prevent files from being overwritten with older version. There’s no configuration information in the app.

Just remember that, if you want to go back to an earlier version, you need to delete the current installation of Netsurf in order to make sure that the Newer option doesn’t prevent files from being overwritten with older version. There’s no configuration information in the app.

Bit late to tell me. I’ve already used 3.2 and 3.3 alternately to compare and confirm that 3.2 works whilst 3.3. gives the problem!

That said, I copy a basic !Scrap from main HD to ramdisc when I boot up the machine. So I get a fresh copy of the same start point there every time. When I upgrade I move the old version to a subdirectory and put the new one in its place. Not seen any problems doing that with versions before now. Just have to take care when running the ‘older’ version hidden away to make sure that’s the one being pointed at.

As things stand I can’t see any advantage in 3.3 for me. So I’ll probably just hide that and go back to using 3.2 until this gets fixed.

Jim

Greetings all, from sunny (ha!) Sheffield!
3.3 is giving me a “Cache Bandwidth too low” message. Going back to 3.0 doesn’t. Is this anything I can fix? Or a bug?

Running on RO 5.21 on a Pi2

Cheers!
Ruth

I think the “Cache Bandwidth too low” message is a warning that the read/writes to SD card aren’t fast enough for it to be used as a cache.
I think it would be better to use Memphis as a ram disc, use the save scrapdir option and move the !cache into the scrapdir.
Then the cache w©ould be quite nice.
It’s been irritating me more and more recently too.
So I don’t think it’s a bug (it could be), but it is definitely irritating.
The other fix is to get an iMX6 ;-) slightly more costly!
Someone has mentioned using FAT on an SD card is much better, due to caching etc. in the filesystem.
So that maybe another idea?
Anyone else have ideas on this?

Currently in York….Sun? What’s that?

You should be able,to stop these messages appearing if you set the Disk Cache to 0 in Netsurf’s preferences.

@Malcolm: indeed: my Pi’s RAM is /massively/ faster than the SD card, as is the USB stick for that matter. According to PowerTec’s !Speed tester, the Read comparison (SD card vs. RAM) is 14MB vs. 111.7MB on 512KB blocks, falling to 0.73MB vs. 13.9MB on 1KB blocks; the Write situation is even worse, 9.3MB vs. 115.2MB, and 0.29MB vs. 15.4MB Write. The USB stick is a bit slower than RAM, but not much. I’m not so keen on using RAM discs for ScrapDir functions, but it would be great to be able to use the USB stick. I have no idea how to set this up.

Greetings all, from sunny (ha!) Sheffield!

Currently in York….Sun? What’s that?

From a childhood in Walkley Bank (S6) sun is what came through the lifting/clearing smoke/smog on Bank Holidays. Surprise was returning some years later and discovering the town hall wasn’t black stone.
Have to return at intervals for Hendersons.

On topic – as David said Disk Cache 0 kills the error reports. Might be interesting to see if Colin’s USB changes affect the transfer rate enough to stop Netsurf complaining.

Unfortunately not. I run netsurf with a 64k memory cache and 0 disc cache.

I think all you would need to do is copy !Cache out of Resources onto the USB stick and either get !Boot to “look” at it, probably not wise on a removable device – or just clickty click it before you run !Netsurf.
I quite like the idea of having ScrapDir in RAM – memphis has the ability to save/load it on quitting/running.
Having ScrapDir on an SD card fills me with dread due to wear rates – it makes a large difference to !NewsUK (but I put an option in for Use RAMDisc for people who don’t like using RAM for ScrapDir)

I think I’ll try adding some commands to netsurf !RUN to run it out of RAM. If nothing else it will be interesting to see if it’s any quicker.

Using Memphis as the cache location does seem to make netsurf faster.
But it still whinges about it being too slow…
I think that is unlikely.

I’m sure I read somewhere that the NetSurf folk discovered that RAMFS was so slow about transferring blocks of data that it could be faster to fetch again from the internet. Don’t know if that applies to Memphis, and it will depend on your internet connection speed also.

I’ve used !Scrap on ramfs for years and – apart from the size limitations – it has worked fine. When I did speed comparisions a few years ago for audio recording processes it seemed pretty fast. So I have no idea of why NetSurf might whine about it.

But then I revered to NetSurf 3.2 because I found 3.3’s habit of not bothering to fetch and render all the images on a page made it a pain to use. I hope this is fixed. Seems a weird kind of bug to have evaded the developers. I’d have thought it would have poked them in the eye and been fixed before 3.3 was released.

Jim

Cache Bandwidth too low

Any way to shut this up without disabling caching?

The only way the disc cache is going to be slower than my broadband is if I put the cache on a USB floppy disc.

Using memphis does help, the warning comes up rarely.
Also using cache on SD isn’t a great idea.