Browser for Risc OS?

I’m wondering that there is no modern browser for Risc OS. I mean a browser which works with all www pages. Something like Chrome, Firefox, Edge or Seamonkey.

Micky

Think of a four letter word that is an old fashioned girl’s name, that is also a plant in the family Iridaceae, that is also the name of a part of an eye (specifically the coloured bit).

When you have that word, you’ll have the name of the RISC OS port of WebKit. Talk to Andrew again… ;)

PS: Chrome? On RISC OS? Chrome? That “does whatever the hell it pleases to the markup and you can’t turn that nonsense off” data grabbing piece of 💩 made by the world’s second greatest data fetishists whose sole existence is to blatantly weaken internet privacy just so they can 💰 a little more on the overpriced mass delusion that is advertising.

That Chrome?
On this OS?

That’ll be the day I ⚰️.

[for extra irony points – written in Chrome on Android 😂]

Snip Rick rant

Stop dragging threads off topic.

ROD have a WebKit port in a browser called Iris, I think it was going to be freely released, but that was the info from five years ago.

;) citation? Firework-emoji. For me, Rick’s response is about right.

Iris is in development, and once completed, it will be released to the public. To get access to it, visit the Store (Plingstore-OtterBrowser-Iris).

FOSS is not necessarily “free of charge.”.

I’m wondering that there is no modern browser for Risc OS. I mean a browser which works with all www pages. Something like Chrome, Firefox, Edge or Seamonkey.

Most answers can be distilled down to RISC OS. What’s that? Best Ask Mozilla, et al. Why there’s no Firefox?

So, the closest to the aspiration of “works with all pages” is Iris, Otter and Netsurf- each has its strengths.

This means, buy OBrowser and get Iris Beta?

Micky

ROD have a WebKit port in a browser called Iris,

Second sentence in Rick’s first post.

This means, buy OBrowser and get Iris Beta

At present, yes.

Yes, that’s what it means. One thing I will say is that printing a page of browser content- is one of its strong points. The faster the machine, the better- think Pi4 or something similar.

You could use Vnc to access a browser on another computer- think TigerVnc and Avalanche as an example.

One of the annoyances of Chrome, Firefox and doubtless other browsers is the way they handle bookmarks. I see a bookmark as a label (piece of text, but could be an icon or something) indexed by a URL. It is pointless having more than one bookmark for a given URL, unless the bookmark also reflects some added context. When a bookmark file is imported it should overwrite pre-existing bookmarks, not reduplicate them. But sadly it appears that Chrome simply reduplicates. The differences in the way browsers handle bookmarks makes changing browsers a clumsy business.

There have been a few threads like this recently… someone innocently asking about something which feels quite key. And the answer is often one or a mix of visiting some obscure URL, talking to someone etc. Essentially jumping through hoops. I wonder if people give up before this point? Are there other solutions? Maybe more ‘full’ distros (I suspect that was the idea of RISC OS Direct). Or maybe some one-stop-shop landing pages.

Speaking of browsers, I saw this the other day… a new browser, building on top of Qt: https://ladybird.dev. It could be an alternative to Otter/QuipZilla?

ROD have a WebKit port in a browser called Iris, I think it was going to be freely released, but that was the info from five years ago.

Yes. Taking the proverbial now, with the ‘still in beta’ line. Even the author thinks it’s past version 1.00. Maybe they ran out of 0.99 decimals.

This means, buy OBrowser and get Iris Beta?

Or you can buy some hardware from rcomp and get an even more beta version thrown in. Odd, given that it’s not their product.

I know, I know. One of the directors or ROD also runs rcomp. That makes it alright to conflate their respective products.

At the risk of annoying Peter with off-topicness…

The differences in the way browsers handle bookmarks makes changing browsers a clumsy business.

These days, elsewhere, you aren’t supposed to export/import bookmarks as files. You’re supposed to sign into an account and ‘sync’ bookmarks, history, open tabs, etc between devices.

The fact that you can have URL files whose run action is to open the browser at a given URL makes the traditional bookmark system redundant. Many years ago I kept all my bookmarks this way. I pointed out that the filing system already provided quite a decent way of organizing the URLs a user wants to remember, and it was unnecessary for each browser to reinvent this particular wheel. But I was shot down. I guess my point was more relevant for RISC OS where software must cooperate than for other systems where the needs of security force everything to work in their own boxes.

The fact that you can have URL files whose run action is to open the browser at a given URL makes the traditional bookmark system redundant.

Not really, because it’s a far less convenient interface than a browser’s Bookmarks menu or autocomplete in the URL bar.

But I was shot down.

It’s an okay way to begin a browsing session, but I think I’d quickly find it annoying to have to go to something different (the Filer), which in my case would probably mean clicking the device and walking the directories each time (as I don’t like leaving Filer windows open in case stray keypresses do unwanted things).
It’s much simpler to have a list directly in the browser.

Oh, and… oh my… the disc space wastage of all of those files that are maybe 128 bytes tops…
(run DiscKnight in verbose mode, see what the “minumum object size” says, multiply by the number of shortcut files that you have)

Disc space wastage of all those files that will fit in the containing directory’s allocation unit?

Maybe a RISC OS port of the Brave browser if the SDK is up to spar.

Maybe a RISC OS port of the Brave browser

First step would be a pure Chromium port. Not likely to happen, not least because…

if the SDK is up to spar.

It is not. The GCC port is largely out of date and only a subset of language frontends is supported. An LLVM port does not even exist. DDE is only able to build a very small selection of carefully curated plain C libs that care about those basic compiler technologies from the 90s. Add the deficiencies of RISC OS in post 80s OS technologies like multi-threading, FSes, Unicode, UIs etc. and you might begin to understand how difficult it is to port modern software to RISC OS. Iris nicely illustrates that.

I now have Iris. Most of the pages works. There are some problem pages, but not to much.

It is a modern browser. A little bit slow, but not to slow. The IrisRAM version is much faster.

Forget the other Risc OS browsers. They run stable, but 95 percent of the pages did not work. I think those browsers are useless in most of the cases.

Iris is beta, it crashes from time to time, but this is the right way for a browser.

Micky