WebPositive

WebPositive

WebPositive 1.1-alpha in Haiku
Developer(s) Andrea Anzani, Stephan Aßmus, Rene Gollent, Ryan Leavengood, Michael Lotz, Maxime Simon, Adrien Destugues
Initial release February 2010
Stable release 1.1-alpha (15 November 2013 (2013-11-15)) [±]
Development status Active
Written in C++
Operating system Haiku
Engine WebKit
Available in Multilingual
Type Web browser
License UI is under the MIT license, WebKit is under the BSD/LGPL
Website WebPositive User Guide

WebPositive (also called Web+) is the graphical web browser included as part of the Haiku operating system since version R1 / Alpha 2. It was created to replace the aging BeZillaBrowser[1] (a port of Firefox 2) with a native WebKit-based browser.

Currently, there is support for most HTML5 features, including <audio> and <video> support,[2] while geolocation support is still being worked on.[3] WebPositive does not currently support any form of plugins, although developer Stephan Aßmus has suggested that he may look into plugin support in the future.

Origin

One part of its name is a tip of the hat to BeOS' simple NetPositive, while the other points to its modern foundation: WebKit, the open source HTML rendering library at the heart of many other mainstream browsers, like Apple's Safari. By making use of WebKit as its engine, WebPositive is able to keep up with the latest web technologies. [4]

History

In the Google Summer of Code 2009, Maxime Simon, mentored by Ryan Leavengood, was commissioned to work on a WebKit port[5] for Haiku, initiated by the work Leavengood had done for a bounty on the Haikuware website.[6] This led to the development of the HaikuLauncher prototype browser, which demonstrated the functionality of the WebKit rendering engine but did little else.

In February 2010, Stephan Aßmus took on the task of improving the HaikuLauncher web browser to make it more usable.[7] This led to many preview releases before a relatively stable version (r488) was integrated into Haiku R1 / Alpha 2. In that same year, Ryan Leavengood took over as the lead developer of WebPositive.

Earlier versions of WebPositive used cURL[8] services but they were slow and had many other bugs, one of the majors bugs being that cookies overloaded at times. It became clear that cURL could not be used in WebPositive. It was then that Adrien Destugues, or PulkoMandy, was given a contract in October 2013 to work on WebPositive so that he could fix the bugs. This led to Destugues becoming the lead developer for WebPositive and HaikuWebKit. Destugues replaced cURL with Haiku's Service Kit in the core of the application, which was earlier worked upon by Stephan Aßmus and Christophe Huriaux in the Google Summer of Code 2010, and Alexandre Deckner in 2011. Destugues has also made big improvements to WebPositive's HTML5 support in WebKit, such as already implementing support for datalists and color input. Destugues' constant work on HaikuWebKit and WebPositive results in a faster WebPositive with fewer bugs.[9]

References

  1. ↑ http://svn.haiku-os.org/oldhaiku/haiku/branches/features/32bit-wchar_t/docs/userguide/en/applications/apps-bezillabrowser.html
  2. ↑ https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/pulkomandy/2014-04-04_webkit_weekly_report_26_video_support
  3. ↑ https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/pulkomandy/2014-09-26_webkit_weekly_report_46
  4. ↑ "User guide". haiku-os.org.
  5. ↑ "Wrap-up Reports 2009 : Google Summer of Code, Haiku Code Drive". Haiku (operating system). 2009-09-21. Retrieved 2011-12-27. |chapter= ignored (help)
  6. ↑ vom Dorff, Karl (2007-07-18). "Webkit Port". Haikuware. Retrieved 2011-12-27.
  7. ↑ Holwerda, Thom (2010-03-04). "NetPositive Gets Successor: WebPositive Emerges". OSNews. Retrieved 2011-12-27.
  8. ↑ http://curl.haxx.se/
  9. ↑ https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/pulkomandy/2013-08-29_working_webpositive

External links

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