Websurf: GNUStep web browser based on Netsurf | Hacker News Reader

Websurf: GNUStep web browser based on Netsurf

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37 pointswmlive8 comments

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For two screenshots of the current version, please see:

https://wmlive.rumbero.org/Websurf.png

https://wmlive.rumbero.org/Websurf_Narcissus.png

Looks good though the menu is missing.

What menu? There is one on the page and app has its own menu as well.

I am all open for new browser engines. Firefox, Safari are the only true competitor to Chromes monopoly.

Netsurf is not exactly new. The project started in 2002 (or earlier, as part of RISC OS?) and 1.0 was released in 2007 [1]. The last stable release is from 2020.

[1] http://www.netsurf-browser.org/about/news.html

Acorn's own first-party browser was "Browse". The documentation viewer that came preinstalled on the RiscPC/A7000 machines shared code with this, and that's about as close as one gets to having a "built-in" browser on RISC OS. There were a few others - the ANT Internet Suite had one ("Fresco"), as well as ArcWeb, Oregano, Webite and Webster/WebsterXL.

What the link is basically saying is that the authors considered none of these to be a good basis for further development, and that's why NetSurf was started.

Of the browsers I've listed, I don't recall any of them having source code available, but Browse may have been part of the RISC OS source code that was released. Most of the browsers were commercial, closed-source products.

Does Netsurf not run well on GNUStep, or..? Just curious why the fork. (Not knocking it, it’s just not very clear what’s changed and so on.)

During my tests after initial installation it didn't prove to be very stable, unfortunately. But then again, it hasn't been advertised as being stable and is still very much work in progress.

This is a port of C based Netsurf ( https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ ) whose modular core allows it to be ported to other toolkits. According to the Netsuf website there are frontends for Amiga, Atari, BeOS, Framebuffer, GTK, RiscOS, and even Windows. Debian contains a GTK+ and a framebuffer variant of it in its repositories.

Websurf is thus not a new application written from the gound up in Objective-C but rather a port of Netsurf to the GNUstep GUI framework.

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