what we all need is a new web browser

I'd pay big money " for a copy" for a updated webrowser for hpc pro and im sure others would too, i can never belive no one has developed one .....

I too could do with a decent browser.

I am a developer of sorts, and have been fritzing about looking for something to port. Unfortunately, nothing presents itself immediately as a good target for porting. Anything will be a lot of effort...

Let's forget Firefox. Whilst it would be simply great, the effort would be massive and the resulting application may not be performant on the HPC. There is a subproject called Minimo, but at the moment that's Linux only. This may be worth considering.

Dillo, which is a lightweight yet fully featured browser, would be superb. It's written using glib and the gtk, so will not be a trivial port. However, the application is "only" 350kb, so it's a good candidate for HPCs IMHO.

Links, which is a more feature rich version of Lynx, is worth considering however again it's not based on Win32 so is not an easy job to port. Also, development seems to have stalled, and some features that we'd want are not really supported.

Browsex, despite the dodgy name, is worth looking at but it is not the smallest browser. I don't know much about this, but it's worth looking at in more detail.

My next task will be to review the architecture of the above programs in detail, find anyone else that's interested in porting the applications, then start rolling my sleeves up and getting on with the job

However, before starting this there's a couple of projects that I need to clear off my plate...

If anyone can help, please shout!

Cheers,
Nick.

I've also looked at this issue in some detail, and I also came up with Dillo. HOWEVER, it does not support jscript. There's been talk about it for over a year on their forums, but nothing yet. There was a jscript "hook" put it about 2-3 months ago, doesn't do anything, but will at least parse it out. There is an open source jscript interpreter (an offshoot of Mozilla), that's "monkey-something", "somthing-monkey", I don't recall just offhand.

Someone added HTTPS earlier this year - but still isn't "mainstream". You can recompile and enable the "experimental" HTTPS, but that's the only way to get it.

BrowseX also looked very promising - but as you said - kinda big.

Any new browser would need to be able not only to handle the HTTPS protocol, but also to be able to decode secure channel encryption.
Without it you'll never get into any site. So inevitably the thing would require integration into the WinCE schannel API. Otherwise the browser will never be able to handle root certificates :. not get into secure web sites in the first place.

How about tring to get the the source of the conduits pocket browser and revamping it.... wont work on sh4, but i had a jornada at one time and it seemed pretty good....

We've asked conduits about it, they're not espeically interested in creating a specific port of it so it would seem.
They won't open source it though as it's still an active product.

MIPS and SH3 users can get Conduits PB 1.6 from:
http://www.conduits.com/download_list.asp

Perhaps we should do this the proper way...

What are the requirements of a browser? From this, we can see what's out there and take a project forward if feasible:

+ Must support basic browser features (cookies, etc)
+ Must support SSL and certification necessary for HTTPS
+ Must support JSCRIPT (or a subset of JSCRIPT)
+ DHTML, CSS...
+ PNG, GIF, JPG
+ Privacy options (popup blocker, etc)
+ Must be lightweight (small installation footprint)
+ Must run in small memory space (680s have 16MB, 710/720s have 32MB split between RAM and object store)

Options:

Dillo
Browsex
Links
Links Hacked
Minimo

Any others?

Dont forget must be feasable for all screen pallet's 256-65,000, some pallets can not be modified to show more colors , and some screens are just mouse curser w/out touch screen.... proccesers are mips, sh3, sh4, strong arm, x86.... Resonable OS versions to port too would be? windows ce 2.0 - 2.11 hpc pro & HPC 2000 windows ce 3.0

Sdk's i know of avalible for download are hpc pro and hpc 2000


testing on a actull device would be easy, seems that eveyone intrested would have a diffrent device .... id be happy to use my compaq Aero 8000 sh4 hpc pro, i have 64mb of ram but still have my 16mb chip for testing with less emeory installed as well.....Steve

I think it may be sensible to draw the line at 65k colours, CE 2.11+ machines... 256 colour issues should not be insurmountable, but I think we leave CE to sort them out

I'll volunteer as the Intermec 6651 tester (if I don't trade it off). I had a hacked version of Netfront running on the 6651 and it was close to perfect for me.

Conduits hasn't updated their PB for what, 3 years? I hardly call that an ongoing project. What about Netfront from Access? IIRC, they dropped anything older than ARM PPC2002 from their portfolio.

On aonther note, I'll be doing some research to see if I can upgrade my 6651 to 256mb. HPC2K can use 256mb, no? 32mb per process? Perhaps a small footprint browser might not be so crucial to all users.

As above, except for the popup blocker and:

+ Subset Support for VB Script. You want hotmail right ;-)
+ CSS 2.0 Support
+ XML / XHTML
+ HTML 1.0, 1.1
+ Independant User Agent of PIE. Mozilla 4 or 5 standardised
+ BMP, 2BP
+ Proper caching (Look at PIE, it converts all cached images into BMP files, what a RAM space / processor waste)
+ Plug-in API (Someone may want to add flash for example)
+ SSL makes use of the Microsoft SChannel, with MD5 support. (Saves on install footprint)
+ Favourites system makes use of the CE Favourites (Why database it when there's a shell integrated system there already)

Why not a popup blocker? Well CE isn't usually a Window'd system. Allowing JS to specify window size and you would never close them. The calls in the JS handler need to route everything as PIE does to a new Window. That can be delt with using an option "Allow automatic url redirection in new sessions".

Just everyonce in a wile i'll get a pop up thats center of screen and it's usally a very simple grey box with black font that say's you win so and so....but that doesnt very often, Steve

Edited by thcrw739 2004-10-04 10:13 AM

I'll be happy to test it on my Sigmarion I w/ 168mhz MIPS

And if it wouldnt be to much trouble some Java would be nice too, i Know it worked nicely on the Diamond Mako i had (aka) Psion Revo Plus and the Opera broswer i had.....Steve

arrrrgh, a project hasn't started and already there's feeping creatures!

Java is a "nice to have", as is client side VBScript. Most of the others mentioned are probably essential for a fully featured web browser.

Given that some/most of the open source browsers don't meet the list, we probably need to scale back a tad from it.

Are there any other developers out there with time and inclination to take this on as a team?

Cheers,
Nick.