Submitted by Syllable 0.6.4 has been released. “Syllable 0.6.4 contains many new features, enhancements and bug fixes from previous releases. Highlights of this release include a new version of ABrowse; the web browser has been re-written using the WebKit engine. A new version of Whisper, and the Contact address book is now included. A large number of usability and user interface fixes, largely curtesy of Anthony Morphett. New drivers for the SysKonnect Yukon1 network cards & ACPI CPU management and updated drivers for Radeon, GeForceFX, SiS and Trident video cards, HD Audio, Intel & VIA SATA controllers and Realtek 8169 network cards. The usual clutch of bug fixes and enhancements.”
Kudos to the Syllable team.
However, plz drop the ABrowse craze a port a proper browser (FF)
However, plz drop the ABrowse craze a port a proper browser (FF)
That’s a debatable statement. Many of us (inlcuding myself) prefer WebKit/khtml to Gecko.
“That’s a debatable statement. Many of us (inlcuding myself) prefer WebKit/khtml to Gecko.”
That’s not the point. The point is that the ABrowse team will never ever be able to keep up with FF.
a.k.a: a user wants a browser with the features he has come to expect (flash, scripting, ajax, etc) rather than a slightly better rendering engine.
Flash support has nothing to do with the rendering engine really. WebKit supports most scripting on the web.. can you be more specific about what standard features it’s lacking?
a.k.a: a user wants a browser with the features he has come to expect (flash, scripting, ajax, etc) rather than a slightly better rendering engine.
Scripting, AJAX, and Flash are browser-independant. Even if they DID port Firefox/Geck, they still would not have had Flash.
ABrowse team? Damn, I wish!
Flash isn’t part of the browser and is not a W3 standard, and ABrowse supports “scripting”, AJAX and everything else very nicely, being based on WebKit and all.
Even if a working port of FireFox magically appeared on Syllable it would be more work to maintain that than the WebKit port & ABrowse. Seriously, FireFox and Gecko are huge, and WebKit gets us the same features in a much smaller footprint, so why bother?
Absolutly correct, not only are FireFox and Gecko huge, but they are also a PITA to support on alternative platforms*. The main devs focus on Windows, Linux and Mac, and they don’t write the code portable at all:
* almost no abstractions or interfaces, just macros depending on platform
* force new dependencies which in some cases arn’t even viable on alt. OS’es
* more ‘hacking’ than coding
IMO WebKit seems to be more aware on all of the points above as well as actually encouraging ports.
*) In fact, I’m not even sure there will be a Firefox 3 on BeOS.
That’s certainly one of my biggest bug-bears, and you’re right: Gecko and Firefox have them in spades.
“Absolutly correct, not only are FireFox and Gecko huge, but they are also a PITA to support on alternative platforms*. ”
The Haiku folks made it work without that much effort.
“The Haiku folks made it work without that much effort.”
You’re right on the first part of your claim, but wrong on the end. Yes they do (thanks guys!). But with *much* effort.
Edited 2007-07-17 09:30
The Haiku folks made it work without that much effort.
Haiku didn’t have to do an awful lot about Firefox itself; it already ran on BeOS r5 and Zeta. And since Haiku is binary compatible with r5, it was only logical for Firefox to eventually run on Haiku.
The Bezilla-team, which is not directly connected to Haiku, is responsible for the BeOS/Haiku port of Mozilla’s products. It just so happens that I am one of them, and probably the one that knows Firefox best of those. AFAIK we are the only port of Firefox that is moderatly successful and at a very high price in invested time.
Here are a few wiki entries I started:
http://wiki.bebits.com/page/BuildingFirebird
http://wiki.bebits.com/page/BuildingCairo
And here is our dev. blog:
http://community.livejournal.com/bezilla/
So I assume you feel as though Safari and Konqueror should also be dropped in favor of Firefox? They are KHTML based too. In fact, the iPhone should immediately drop iSafari and move to Gecko too. Right?
“So I assume you feel as though Safari and Konqueror should also be dropped in favor of Firefox? They are KHTML based too. In fact, the iPhone should immediately drop iSafari and move to Gecko too. Right?”
You obviously didn’t read my post. I think comparing the resources of Apple and Syllable is kinda lame.
“You obviously didn’t read my post. I think comparing the resources of Apple and Syllable is kinda lame.”
Exactly!
Apple got the resources to maintain a port of Firefox. We don’t!
Yes, Apple have far more developers, time and money than we do. Which is good for us, because we get to use the result of their work in ABrowse. So we don’t need the same amount of developers, time and money.
Have you applied for a account to webkit.org’s SNV? Maybe you could send the patches for the Syllable port to them? (If you didn’t do that already.)
One of the WebKit engineers has already got in contact via. the mailing list and offered us SVN access etc. Arno is the WebKit maintainer, so hopefully he’ll take them up on the offer.
So do I!! That is precisely why I’m making fun of you, because that’s what you’re doing — who do you think maintains Webkit?
I’m pretty frustrated with firefox as it is right now. It’s the absolute most resource hungry application I run, and it’s non responsive to boot!
It needs to go on a diet and it needs more competition. I certainly hope the work here will help fix some of the bugs seen in the webkit port to linux.
On another topic, trying to figure out which architecture syllable runs on…I guess it only runs x86 32-bit? Any work on 64bit?
It would benice if they and other OS projects actually put some hard information like that into their FAQs or hardware compatibility lists.
Edited 2007-07-17 04:24 UTC
Yes. There has been no work on x86-64 yet, and there is some work that is needed to the kernel before it could even begin properly.
Sorry about that. It was on our “About” page but I’ve recently been working on the website and having yet moved that information to our FAQ.
It will never be responsive in it’s current state. It’s single threaded in the way that one thread handles rendering (incl animations), messaging and receiving input. This is never good and when you start to open a few tabs or windows it degrades and shows. Notice that it’s totally unresponsive for a short while when opening a new tab.
Gecko has very good standards support, but it’s beginning to annoy me. Gecko uses more RAM than WebKit and since YEARS (!) there are some hefty performance penalties on websites with fixed background graphics. And since more and more website seem to use such graphics, that bug becomes more evident to me every day. See http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/complexspiral/demo.html … On my older iBook causes scrolling with a Gecko browser 100% CPU consumption. A WebKit browser like Safari or Shiira scrolls though the same page with 60-70% CPU consumption.
Don’t even ask about MySpace. A bitch to browse with a Gecko browser. Smooth with Safari.
After Safari for Windows was released an Apple claimed it to be the fastes webbrowser on earth, a bunch of people ran benchmarks to proof that FF is really faster.
Honestly: I don’t care what benchmarks say. I don’t notice a differnence on most sites. But as I said, there are some websites that perform very bad with Gecko.
I’m glad they ported WebKit.
Next step Gnash?
It’s a great browser, but it does have limitations. Specifically, the XUL user interface isn’t native on any platform. Now, it’s really good on several platforms (Windows, OS X, and Linux), but that still doesn’t make it native.
If you’re an alternative OS it might make a lot more sense to choose an easily embeddable rendering engine inside a native GUI. WebKit offers them that opportunity. If they wanted to port Firefox, they’d have to get XUL running on their platform which is no small task – and running with near-native performance and consistency to be considered good.
These people know the API kits they’ve helped create and choosing WebKit doesn’t loose them much, if anything. WebKit is arguably better at scripting, ajax, and HTML rendering than Firefox. And, as people have pointed out, flash has nothing to do with it being Firefox or not. Safari on Windows and Mac does flash fine.
Just downloaded and loaded up the live cd. I must say, it has exceeded my expectations. I’ve been following this project since the AtheOS days and have been pulling for it to follow through on its potential. It looks like they stand to do just that.
– Tried it out on a Dell GX620 and all the hardware seems to work. Network, video, hard drive detection, sound. All looks good. The default video resolution was a bit low but that was easily changed.
– Was able to set up ABrowse to use my company’s proxy and get out to the internet proper. That was a very pleasant surprise.
– Doesn’t really need to be said, but the system was very responsive.
Unfortunately, I’m not able to test out a broader range of applications (whisper, contact, coldfish, etc). Maybe when I get home. I did notice a couple rough edges in the UI but at this stage, it’s not setting off any red flags. I’m more than happy to let that slide when the progress ‘under the hood’ shows through as clearly as it has over the last few iterations.
Overall, excellent work, Syllable devs.
I’m glad you liked it. We try quite hard to get Syllable to run on a wide a range of hardware as possible, and it’s no coincidence that my ability to track down and acquire hardware has been honed to a fine skill. As it happens my build machine is a Dell GX280, which is very similar to the GX620: I think the SMBus controller is the only item left which is not supported by Syllable.
I hope you’ll take the opportunity to try out Syllable on your home computer. We always appreciate any feedback and bug reports.
Edited 2007-07-16 21:35
Always when I read about syllable news on OSNews I found it very interesting. But I think the time has come to test it on my machine, because it sounds more and more interesting for me =)
You seem to be missing the point. I will be very explicit (redundant to previous posts) ABrowse uses Apple’s WebKit rendering engine, so the only part written by the Syllable team is the interface, all of the RENDERING code is written by Apple/KDE.
seems mostly nice, except networking didn’t work (dhcp problems?)
Now with WebKit ported, will you add some kind of Dashboard like functionality to an upcoming Syllable release? Most Dashboard widgets are just HTML+CSS+JavaScript. Some Opera Widgets should work as well.
I’m going to smack the next person who calls SVN.. SNV!!
LOL. I’m flashing back to the shenanigans bit in Super Troopers.
What, you mean it’s not called Snubversion?
Gawd, that was just a typo.
its funny that so many people are complaining about firefox being slow and whatnot, because wasn’t one of the original goals to not turn into mozilla in terms of performance. Wasn’t that the whole point of the fork?
Well you can’t have something speedy if the backend isn’t optimized. Gecko is huge and I think Mozilla.org should rethink which way they are heading with the rendering engine. Things should be optimized there first then focus on other things like the UI, later.
Edited 2007-07-17 12:57
I thought there were two main problems that justified firefox:
1) people wanted just the browser and not have this super big suite where a browser crash will bring down the email
2) mozilla’s UI was too bloated and confusing. Now, unbloating UI doesn’t necessarily mean less memory but it makes firefox easier to use.