This is a thread for gecko ESR102 development. Currently the development is not yet completely public, only the known changes for embedlite-components and sailfish-browser have been pushed to github, to sailfishos-esr102 branches. The gecko-dev repo changes still need a bit of cleanup before I will push them to github.
Current development status is that all patches have been applied and gecko builds but some parts of the patches still need fixing (mostly the theme support but probably also other thing can be broken but which can be only tested after rendering websites works). That brings us to the biggest issue left which is the rendering pipeline in the embedding part of the code and possibly also changes to patches are needed. At the moment browser does start but fails to render webpage content to screen but in debug log it can be seen that the webpage is there and when scrolling the content it tries to draw it but nothing happens.
Per my build swarm question for ESR91, is this aspect described anywhere? How are y’all working and compiling this repo these days - some (or most?) change builds taking hours like flypig’s experience was is certainly unsustainable, right?
I currently just build it on my laptop using 8 build threads, at this point it’s very rare that I have to do full rebuilds (because all patches have been applied) so I can just do relatively quick partial rebuilds to test my changes.
Dear @mal i just noticed this message in SFOS-Forum together with Sailfish-Browser. How is the stand with the ESR 102er release? Can we test it somewhere? Or contribute in a way? (I can’t programm). Thanks for your hard work for the community!
Is there any update on this? Is there anything the community could help with? There are more pages every day not working with the current version sadly…
Just gone through the community meeting minutes. The only place ESR 102 is mentioned is in connection with an update to Rust. There is nothing about release progress for ESR 102, or timescales, or a description of the major things yet to be done.
I think the last formal announcement on ESR 102 availability was that it would NOT form part of the next Sailfish release (5.1), but maybe the release after that. In any case ESR 102 is already nearing 4 years old and officially already End Of Life.
It seems to be a huge amount of work for Jolla to upgrade the stock browser to a subsequent ESR version, so much so that they can never even hope to keep it up to a reaonably current version. Therefore, as soon as we get a new version it is already years out of date and web siites progressively stop working.
Many folks, provided they have AppSupport, turn to Android browsers instead (I use Firefox Focus), but its a shame there isn’t a more sustainable way of providing a modern native browser wirhin SFOS.
This is a problem that has been around for years with no viable solution identified other than constantly playing catch-up (which must be a huge and ongoing drain on Jolla’s resources).
What a nice and constructive comment! You do it and see how easy it is.
While certainly very impressive, Jolla did decide to tackle what flypig decided to skip - uplifting to webrender.
Sooner or later that needs to happen, and it will help for the future.
As far as i gather, that is the current main blocker - and it seems they have not allocated time to it for a while.