[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Browse is old

[Peter Robinson]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 4:58 AM, Sridhar Dhanapalan
<sridhar at laptop.org.au> wrote:
> On 3 March 2012 23:52, Sridhar Dhanapalan <sridhar at laptop.org.au> 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/
>
>
> Bernie raised an interesting idea. Would it be reasonable to backport
> the WebKit Browse to the OLPC OS 11.3? We could statically link the
> dependencies in the bundle.

Personally I think it's unlikely as the webkit Browse depends on newer
versions of webkitgtk3/gtk3/glib2/gobject-introspection that just
aren't in Fedora 14 and in a lot of cases conflict with the versions
in Fedora 14. Browse depends on things that aren't even in Fedora 16
so it would likely be a lot of work to get it working, even as a
static build.

Peter