Re: Boiling the Oceans [was Re: GNUstep Live on OSnews]

[Ivan Vučica]

Context of this discussion is offering a representative desktop to users. It started due to comments on osnews, right?

If we are discussing what kind of browser we would have to offer to make comments less negative, then something that cannot run "monstrosities" is not the answer.

Actual users want the "monstrosities".

And _javascript_ is not even the toughest nut to crack in these cases. DOM and a zillion other standards are.

For something that can browse docs on a Raspberry Pi, sure, SWK is good (I didn't dismiss it in the previous email, I'm not doing it now). But unless I can offer the browser to my aunt and she can use it to message my nephew using Facebook, I cannot expect them to use it. And even if I replace Gmail, I would be upset if I couldn't order stuff from Amazon.

That is not even taking into account things like intranet services or government websites.

We can talk about Dillo or NetSurf or SWK in context of reading documentation or tech enthusiasts being very, very aware of the limitations. But not in the context of majority of users who have very different needs than "I want to run this on RPi". If they are unable to open "monstrosities", I would not consider solved the problem of the browser on a reference GNUstep system or a live CD.

On Wed, Aug 2, 2017, 20:05 Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola@libero.it> wrote:

Hi,

Ivan Vučica wrote:
>
> That is, if we added manhours which we don't quite have, and SWK could
> become usable on, say, top 50 sites of the modern web, it would no
> longer be lightweight
>
> Would you consider it lightweight once it could run Facebook desktop
> experience? Or Google Docs? No matter what one may think about
> particular products, sites like this are what's important for a
> regular user to consider something a browser.
>

It should not support them! not in full experience at least... to use
those monstruosities you can barely use Firefox.
That is why I usually have two browsers installed on all of my systems.

As I wrote, being an GNUstep version of NetSurf or Dillo would be a
medium term goal for SWK+Vespucci and I think it would be useful and
cater to people who like  simple and fast thigns.
As said, something I can run on my Raspberry easily. It should be
capable of displaying GS documentation for example. Wikipedia "well
enough" without full stylesheets. It should be able to make searches in
things like duckduckgo

No _javascript_ or, medium-term, simple enough _javascript_ to perform some
basic operation that are useful

Otherwise it would be indeed a full reimplementation. After all, there
is not such difference in "weight" between the major browsers. I think
Gecko is one of the best, but not the fastest. I don't like the chrome
engine at all, even if it is embedded inside Opera, however it excels in
certain things.. Even IE 11 has its superiority to the other two. But
once you punch these through big interactive sites (like cloud sites)
they all will require tons of memory and at least 2 Cores.

I explicitely chimed in when I saw NetSurf cited.

Riccardo