Re: [9front] netsurf news

[Romano <unobe@cpan.org>]

Quoth telephil9@gmail.com:
> After a somehow long hiatus I recently resumed work on the netsurf port and I feel that given 
> the number of changes this deserves some kind of "release notes".
> ...
> Bug fixes (main ones as this mail is already long enough):
> - libcss issue leading to netsurf crashing on some sites
> - fix js and svg crashes due to too harsh fp rules (thanks ori)
> - scrolling was not clipped to page bounds (thanks mforney)
> - various drawing enhancements (thanks mforney)
> - force user-agent to fix some sites not rendering properly
> - html frames not rendering properly
> 
> Please share any bugs or feature requests you may have.

Thank you so much to you, Ori, Michael, and Sigrid for working on
this!  Do any of you have Paypal or anything I can use to donate to
you?  I am trying to divorce myself from os x dependency, and wed
myself to 9front.  This is a big step for me towards that, since at
times I'll need a browser that does better than mothra for
presentation.

I had initially built the netsurf port back in June or July of last
year, and the performance issues were a show-stopper for me.  I am now
at least able to browse around basic sites and the performance is
reasonable.  One thing I have found, however, is that using JS
"appears" to suicide the process.  I use scary quotes because the
behavior persists after restarting the process and going to sites that
beforehand loaded fine without JS, even with nojs configured (e.g,
google.com):
	netsurf 7081021: suicide: sys: trap: misaligned pc pc=0xffffffff812d1155

After a minute or two, things generally clear up and I can start
netsurf and go to the sites (with nojs again--using js triggers the
suicide yet again).

I am running on rpi4.  I have left a snap (~65MB) @
https://fallglow.com/david/2021-02-11.netsurf.snap , if that helps at
all.

I also tried using 'new window' in menu2 when over a link with url
parameters, and that produces an rc error:
1. Go to http://www.google.com
2. Hover over 'News' at the top, and menu2 click 'new window'
3. rc: line 2: token '=': syntax error

I tracked it down to netsurf/frontends/plan9/utils.c and have this patch, which works for me and hopefully is correct:
--- /mnt/git/object/a3de9f6c49521cbce2ff751b43bf4e30f8428660/tree/frontends/plan9/utils.c
+++ frontends/plan9/utils.c
@@ -185,7 +185,7 @@
 		fprintf(stderr, "rfork failed\n");
 		return;
 	case 0:
-		snprintf(buf, sizeof buf, "window %s %s", "netsurf", url);
+		snprintf(buf, sizeof buf, "window %s '''%s'''", "netsurf", url);
 		execl("/bin/rc", "rc", "-c", buf, 0);
 		fprintf(stderr, "exec failed\n");
 		exit(1);

Minor feature requests are to have the double-click in the address bar
to select all, have the address bar scroll the text (for really long
urls), and to have the 'stop loading' as a menu3 item.

- Romano