Netsurf as native browser?
asked 2020-05-26 17:10:30 +0200
Netsurf just got a new release. It's a lightweight, yet capable browser: http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
Has anyone ever tried to get it running on Sailfish?
1 Answer
answered 2020-05-27 18:49:58 +0200
@aerique I installed it and tested it a bit. It is a lovely piece of software and does a great job, given the memory footprint and overall size of the package. I really loved it, and it would suit most of my own needs.
But it suffers from exactly the same deficiencies as the stock browser, while still lacking features that were available with the stock browser from day one. Just open the Github home page or the Bing home page (sorry, no advertisement intended!) in a recent Netsurf browser to see what I mean. Not even TJC displays properly, these pages display distorted or are even unusable. (Tested here with 3.10).
Let me stress that this is not Netsurf's fault, but the consequence of the abomination that "the web" is these days, where we need rendering engines that eat more memory (and bandwidth!) per displayed page than what was available on my whole computer back when I was really using Netsurf.
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Asked: 2020-05-26 17:10:30 +0200
Seen: 551 times
Last updated: May 26 '20
I used it some 15 years ago and it was perfectly usable back then -- but, well ... you know, 15 years ...
Running it on sailfish may be almost easy, but making use of it will be hard. It seems to offer GTK bindings, you would have to implement a kind of Silica/Qt bridge first.
Looking at what they have implemented in this browser shows that (like 15 years ago) it is lacking JavaScript support. Most web sites seem to transform into web applications/PWA, so you'll not be able to see much there.
Maus ( 2020-05-26 17:59:57 +0200 )editWhat do plan 9 and sailfish os have in common? Answer: they both lack good web browsers . More so in case of plan 9. Recently there is an ongoing effort to port netsurf to plan 9.
But seriously, netsurf does support javascript and the engine is duktape https://duktape.org/
binutzu ( 2020-05-26 22:43:16 +0200 )edit