The Iyonix-only version 2 of the RISC OS Firefox port was released this weekend. Developer Peter Naulls made the open source web browser available for free download after generous punters donated a grand in cash to the project in little over a fortnight. A second release could be posted online in time for Christmas day if Peter secures more funding. Version 2 has no RISC OS-style menus, the iconbar icon has been removed, and the while browser does support secure ‘https’ websites, users will have to manually verify the identity of certain sites. Peter also hopes to use the NetSurf Unicode engine in a future release to display non-Latin characters.
An incredible amount of work would be needed to make this stable and more integrated. Seemingly by one person alone as the source code changes appear not to have been made available (isn’t that breach of license?)
RISC OS is suddenly finding itself colliding with modern requirements and gorwing pains are begining to show. The way things are going, RISC OS could soon be the next Amiga.
“Seemingly by one person alone as the source code changes appear not to have been made available (isn’t that breach of license?)”
My understanding is that all changes are made in the underlying libraries that allow Firefox to run, and all of these changes are freely available (including source). Whilst Peter has presumably done large amounts of work to get the libraries and Firefox to work together, there are many other contributors to these libraries (and the GCCSDK) as well. The GCCSDK copyright file contains quite a few names of people who presumably deserve credit:
http://www.riscos.info/websvn/filedetails.php?repname=gccsdk&path=~…
I believe the Firefox code itself may not necessarily need to be modified, which I think is why there’s no problem with the license.
Perhaps instead of porting each app, somebody could start a closely integrated port of GTK, that looked and felt native.
It could have the menubar drawn as a middle click popup rather than at the top of the window, and perhaps you could even use calls to the real Acorn toolkit to actually draw the buttons and text.
Rox-filer already manages to make GTK’s open/close dialogs into RiscOS-style drag and drop affairs, so I’d imagine that this kind of thing could also be built right into the library instead of the usual GTK open/close windows.
Not sure if that would be feasable or even possible, but given that there are so many GTK apps already, it would surely make RiscOS a lot more useful.
(and yes I know Firefox itself doesn’t really use GTK, but Epiphany does…)
Rox-filer already manages to make GTK’s open/close dialogs into RiscOS-style drag and drop affairs, so I’d imagine that this kind of thing could also be built right into the library instead of the usual GTK open/close windows.
It would certainly be nice if someone would code the ability to have RiscOS-style file dialogue boxes and menus in GTK and Qt apps, too.