Re: [9front] netsurf news

[Stanley Lieber <sl@stanleylieber.com>]

On February 9, 2021 7:30:48 AM EST, telephil9@gmail.com wrote:
>Hi,
>
>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".
>
>First, I would like to thank Ori for taking care of keeping the tree in sync with upstream, Sigrid and 
>Michael Forney for their various patches.
>
>Build:
>- All dependencies are now vendored in the organization repo so no more reliance on our beloved ports.
>- Framebuffer frontend is gone as I don't have the time nor interest in maintaining both ports.
>
>Performances:
>This was the major drawback of the port and was mainly caused by my initial event scheduler implementation
>along with the webfs backend. Both were rewritten to fix slow loading times.
>In addition, special care has been taken to ensure redraws are done only when and where (ie screen area) necessary.
>With all of this done, netsurf now has reasonable performances.
>
>Image support:
>- image support is now enabled by default.
>- basic SVG support has been added (still needs some work).
>
>Plumbing:
>- netsurf supports incoming plumb messages and will either open the page or (like mothra) forward the link content
>to the image port (for images and ps/pdf documents)
>- text plumbing is also supported
>- any unrecognized link url (e.g. mailto: or gopher://) is sent to the plumber
>
>UI:
>- menu2 changes based on where you click (web page, link or image)
>- mouse text selection is now possible in address bar (thanks sigrid)
>- rio-like text selection with double-clicks
>- mouse chording for snarf/cut/paste
>- native keyboard shortcuts (^U, ^W, ...) for address bar and html textfields
>- ^B focus address bar, ^G focus the web page
>- "galaxy brain scrolling"
>- native looking tick (or is it called caret ?) in html forms
>
>New features:
>- configuration is saved in $home/lib/netsurf (you can change homepage_url from there for instance)
>- file downloads
>- text search (look in menu2)
>- web search (search in menu3). Search engine can be changed from the menu in the top-left corner of the window and is saved across sessions.
>- bookmarks support
>- history support: all time history is available through menu3, session history is available by right-clicking the 'back' button
>- ability to enable/disable javascript through menu3 (js/nojs)
>
>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.
>
>--phil
>

thank you!*

*once upon a time I had to use the plan 9 port of charon to configure the js-only web forms on my wifi dongle.

sl