[IAEP] [OLPC-AU] Browse is old

[Jerry Vonau]

On Sat, 2012-03-03 at 23:52 +1100, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
> Browse is old and not useful for a lot of newer content. Our
> communities are creating content in HTML5, an effort that we want to
> encourage.
> 
> However, Browse is based on the Gecko in engine in Firefox 3.6, which
> is far behind the times. I know that is is being ported to WebKit [1]
> as part of the GTK+3 transition. However, it'll be at least a year
> before we roll out a GTK+3 version of Sugar in our schools. What can
> we do in the interim?
> 
> We can load a different Web browser, especially since now since saved
> files can be shared with the journal via the Documents/ directory [3].
>  The best I've found is an Opera wrapper from Flavio [2]. It scores
> much higher than Browse for HTML5 compliance [4], but nowhere near as
> much as Firefox 10 or Chromium 17. Also, Opera is proprietary
> software.
> 
> Sridhar
> 
> 
> [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/WebKit
> [2] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4503
> [3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.94/Notes#Easier_file_exchange..
> [4] http://html5test.com/
> 

The biggest blocker for browse supporting HTML5 right now is that latest
urlrunner that does support HTML5 from fedora(the last update before
becoming EOL'd) is blocked from installation by olpc-os-builder by
having the rpm present in the olpc rpm repositories.[0] I'm unsure if
there are any changes done to the rpm by olpc or if this is fallout from
building the olpc rpms for both i386 and arm while arm was in
development.

Jerry

[0] http://mock.laptop.org/cgit/local.11.3.1/tree/RPMS