Wayfarer 8 - End of an Era.

After spending weeks getting WebKitGTK 2.46 to compile and then work, it's time to move on. Wayfarer will no longer have its WebKit core updated past the current version. The past 2 releases I've had to effectively fork more and more of the functionality since WebKit removed the Legacy/Win/Cairo target and started removing its dependencies, of which Wayfarer needs quite a bit. While 2.46 mostly works, I've been unable to track down the breaking change that causes most pages to fail sooner or later. Could be JavaScript, could be WebCore, could be caused by the fact that I've had to change the compiler since WebKit started using C++23 features and aggressively optimising parts with SIMD code. WebKitGTK moving to Skia for rendering doesn't help either. Meanwhile, the gap between the performance modern websites need and what our aging G4 and G5s can deliver keeps widening.

So where does this leave us? Well, the engine is still modern enough that the pages that currently work will continue working for a while, likely several years. Meanwhile, I intend to focus on providing a Linux/macOS hosted browsing service that will be able to render pages in Wayfarer as transparently as possible. And so, the next Wayfarer version will have an option to either load a page locally or remotely via CEF/Chrome.

Well, this was sooner than expected... But understandable, and as you said current engine will work quite ok for some years to come. And even keeping Wayfarer building/running with the current engine must have been a PITA so far. Thanks for your work!

Oooh... this is very sad news but I totally understand it.
I want to thank you for all that work.
But this just goes to show that MorphOS really needs to change the CPU architecture. In the meantime, I enjoy it almost every day.

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That would barely solve the performance issue and we would be back to square one within a few years.

Wouldn't tackle the compiler/infrastructure issues. For that you will need a full "nix" OS either external (which is what jaca seems to suggest) or as a foundation for MorphOS (aka QBox).

That's very sad to hear. Nevertheless Wayfarer stays the best webbrowsing experience you could get on MorphOS. Maybe you could make capsulated Web Apps, like you've done with the Webkitty part in Iris?

Something like a MorphOS Discord client, a bandcamp or itch.io interface app?

Perhaps at some point in the future the servo web rendering is usable enough for a decent browser. It got a WebRender backend for OpenGL accelerated drawing but also a software renderer as fallback. The project strives to be more cross-platform compatible than others and also gained more traction in recent years.

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I am monitoring alternatives, but none of them are mature enough to be able to replace WebKit.

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Would this be the way that AmiFox is using ?

a bug strange :when i search a adress that doesn t work with google

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I hope not

[ Edited by analogkid 21.10.2024 - 12:50 ]

It wouldn’t be WRP but the underlying tech would be the same (Chrome).

What about using some kind of VNC?

But you can already use that ... Just using TwinVNC to connect to my MacM1 here ;)

I mean it in a way, that VNC will just load the content of the website rendered on an externel server. Wayfarer will just act as a GUI around it.

I wonder why Amifox did not go that route. Standard VNC works even nicely on an A500+ with 020 CPU and Plipbox.

I opened https://www.morphos-storage.net/?id=2278680.
In the readme, there is the link: https://github.com/DusteDdk/Wizznic

How can I configure Wayfarer that it recognizes it as proper link, so that - after right mouse cklick - something like "open in new tab" is offerered...?

Thanks!

Wayfarer is back from the dead, with version 9 based on WebKitGTK 2.46.5.

Once again we're up to date with a WebKit base that's just a couple of days old. That said, this has been the worst rebase so far. I've lost hope a couple of times after trying several attempts at getting the errors fixed, including getting the code to build with older GCCs. 2.46.5 is the first release that no longer builds with GCC10, which has the unfortunate side-effect of build times increasing by the factor of 2. Not exactly helping when you're trying to fix this... In the end the main culprit was a bit of little-endian only code in the html parser that WebKit backported from Chrome.

I'm sure not all problems have been fixed, but v9 is now stable enough that I'm willing to release it to a wider audience. Report problems you see here and send any crash reports you get, please! Do keep v8 at hand in case something doesn't work or just to compare the behavior before reporting problems.

And enjoy the holidays with MorphOS :)

Thanks Jaca, that's unexpected but very welcome gift.

Wouldn't it help to first build and test a new webkitgtk version on big endian LinuxPPC. The endianess bug would have shown up there too and would have been easier to debug there?

@Georg

I'd do that if I could just type 'make' and get a build. As it is, I'd have to build a whole cross-compile environment for that, deal with all the dependencies and so on. A G5 is way too slow to build it natively.

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Iiiincredible, thank you very much!

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Just awesome, thanks for your work and Merry Christmas

Thanks a lot jacadcaps for this new mega update!

When i scroll a page the CPU go up to 80-90%, it's the same problem with the resize of the Wayfarer window or it's a different problem?

Could be optimized with OpenGL render or buffer maybe?

It's the only problem here for me. No bug for the moment.

What a great xmas gift! Thank you very much jaca!

Since yesterday there are some issues on every server with certificates (even morphzone):

"Server xxxxxxx.com präsentierte ein nicht vertrauenswürdiges Zertifikat"

Did there something chance in 2025?