Gecko esr91 work (former "Flypig's gecko dev diary")

Happy to see such great news after your hard work. Your diary is an good lesson in “Never give up”.

And what is a hot, dazzling, lazy summer afternoon :sunny: :beach_umbrella: against a good fix of a thrilling crash :beetle: ?

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I’ve read your latest blog post, @flypig. Congratulations to you for your achievements!
You are doing a really great job! Thanks a lot for your efforts!

You wrote that it might be time to build installable packages for the very brave amongst us. Will you provide some rpms?

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Thanks for all of your support here; it really motivates me to persevere. Thank you especially for all of your kind offers to buy me a drink (@rob_kouw, @gabrigubin, @Firefox84, @lukas_jolla2015, @cypherpunks). The fact you offer is a big motivation and if we find ourselves at a Sailfish event together I’ll happily take you up on it! But honestly, everyone here has been super-generous with comments and offers to help and I very much appreciate it.

To @jauri.gagarin.II and others who asked for installable packages, I’ll try to make something available. Following @rainemak’s suggestion at the latest community meeting I’m hoping it can be built on OBS so that all the dependant packages can be offered together.

I’ll be sure to post here when there’s news on this.

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Very nice recent achievements. All pieces seem to fall down into places. Of course, with a large help from your side ! Congratulations.

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Dear @flypig, I and many others are very grateful that you have tackled this big task. I think this closes a big gap for many towards native apps only.

There was a question in the English Telegram channel about the possibility of opening tabs in the background. This does not seem to be implemented at the moment. Someone suggested to ask you: do you see a way to implement this after the bugs are fixed? Is it purely a UI thing? Or is there something that needs to be implemented in the background?

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Dear @flypig, I would be very happy to use a new browser with a cover which does not change with the content.
(You could show one of these nice AI generated flying pigs, for instance.)

Of course, in the meantime I’ll be practising my patience. No rush. Amazing what you solved during this project anyway.

Good luck with this hanging cover!

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I agree, it’s a low-down priority. But getting it working on Sailfish OS 4.6 is a bit more critical and sadly that’s not quite there yet. Thanks for being so patient. And that applies to everyone, I know how frustrating it must be having to wait.

Thanks for your kind words @jauri.gagarin.II and sorry for not replying sooner. As far as I’m aware you’re correct that this isn’t currently possible. It’s possible to have hidden tabs which don’t appear at all (although they can’t be triggered by websites) and based on my experience of those, I’d say background tabs wouldn’t be too hard to implement. Do you know if there’s a standard way to do this using JavaScript on other browsers? When it came up in discussion, was there a particular use case in mind?

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I believe that is something that is implemented on the UI/Settings side in all browsers, and there is no way for a website or URL to control this.

Mozilla uses the browser.tabs.loadInBackground and browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground preferences AFAIK.

One use case (for me) is while reading a page (lets say an article) which includes links for more information. I want to finish reading the article even if some of the links are interesting.

In an ideal “open in background tab” world, I could just click links as they appear, continue reading the original page, and later go on to already-loaded pages from the opened links.

Currently, I have the option to either open such links in a new (foreground) tab,
disrupting my reading flow (and potentially even causing a reload or re-layout of the original page when I go back to it), or finish reading the original article and then go back up to find the links again.

(Foreground tabs have the additional issue that you have to wait for them to begin loading before you can switch away from them.)

Another use case is search result lists, where you also maybe want to open a couple of them in the background and revisit them later.

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Opening a link to a new background tab is a feature I’ve thought of too.

My desktop browser use case is opening a news site and opening selected news articles to background tabs, and then close the news site. Then I just read an opened article and close it until there’s no more opened articles left. (Middle-click the links, and then scroll-and-close until done.)

That is my best knowledge too. This is entirely an UI / user thing as far as I know. There’s <a target="_blank|_top|_parent|_self" but that doesn’t take foreground/background into account - the page silently opening a new background tab is something that should not be allowed (unlike pop-up windows, selectively).

Great work getting audio and video working and especially tracking down the crash! Reading the blog has become a morning routine for me - I’m afraid I’ll have to find something else to replace it in near future :wink:

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Happy anniversary :partying_face:
I should have posted it 2 days ago…

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@flypig for the rust versioning;
see Initial implementation of `up-streamer-rust` by PLeVasseur · Pull Request #8 · eclipse-uprotocol/up-streamer-rust · GitHub
file Cargo.toml line 19

you can actually pin the toolchain version on rust workspaces…saved me really alot of headaches :slight_smile:

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Thank youvfor considering this :slight_smile:

Regarding the standard way, I really have no idea. Fortunately there are people like @nephros and @direc85 around, who know more about this than me :slight_smile:
And they already covered both of my use cases for opening tabs in background.

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Thank you for the great bug hunting these days. Your diary shows the energy needed to finish such a work.

When you create test packages will you also provide a package for Sailfish webview embedded in normal apps?

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Yes, that is included also, according to packages listed in e.g. day 325 blog post.

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I am happily writing this post with an esr 91 based browser on sailfish 4.6. Thank you @flypig for your tireless effort to make this happen. My first impression is, it feels faster, and “crisper”, on the browser and on webview dependant apps, but also with some quirks.
I’ll report back on anything interesting after I’ve tested it further.
Thanks again to you and everyone involved in this milestone. :clap:

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Thank you @nephros, @direc85 and @jauri.gagarin.II for explaining about background tab opening. I’d actually got the wrong end of the stick (I thought the request was about websites being able to open background windows using JavaScript, rather than humans doing it!) so I’m really glad you clarified. It makes much more sense now!

Thanks for noticing the anniversary @hschmitt! I had missed it myself until I saw your post, so I enjoy the fact you noticed!

@hanswf, thanks for your query. The packages are now available and @direc85 is correct that this covers WebView integration as well. There’s a workaround needed for the email app, but the details are in the installation instructions. I’ve already noticed bugs myself and I do want to emphasise the fact that there will be bugs. Please expect bugs!

But for the brave (I’m looking at you @Helge!) thank you for trying it. I’m glad you’re getting a positive feel (I like your description of it being “crisper”; that was my impression too, but until you said it I couldn’t pin down the right adjective!). If you get time please do post issues about the quirks and bugs.

Finally, @tortoisedoc, thank you for this advice about pinning the Rust toolchain. Unfortunately I’ve not had a chance to try it, but if it does what I think it does, that’s going to be really helpful!

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Thank you so much for making this possible, @flypig and all the others working on this!
I followed the guide and until now I only experienced minor issues, in general it works very well! If I notice reproducible issues, I’ll file a bug report.
It seems that the infrequent browser crashes at some sites are resolved, can that be possible? And yes, it feels crisper. And I can finally browse forums like the framework support forum on my phone again :slight_smile:
I am super happy, that is a huge step for the whole platform!

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I also tried the released packages on my Xperia 10 II (a dev device) and after a quick test it seems to work just fine! I didn’t have time to try anything other than some Internet browsing and running the captcha test in Whisperfish (it uses WebView) and so far I didn’t run into issues – I’ll keep poking around though.

It’s also great to have the debug symbols available, but let’s hope they are not needed :grin:

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ESR 91 is really a great achievement! It looks faster and I’m really thankfull to @flypig and all other devs.

I noticed hydrogen isn’t able to connect to the Internet. I tried other apps using the WebView (hutspot and fuoten), they work as expected.

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Many many thanks for this huge work, @flypig!
I’m willing to try and give some feedback, but I realize while installing that, packages are for aarch64.
If you planned to make them available for armv7, I’ll be back and try them with pleasure.

Best regards and again a big bravo!

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