Presto...and its all gone

I am sure you will all join me in wishing good luck to Zen and his new OpenBSD and PowerPC coding adventure. I will do all I can to pick up the slack but the Zen master is unique in his knowledge and depth of PowerPC architecture, the Dr is but a eager student. I am also transitioning jobs at the moment, and starting up a new veterinary clinic is no easy matter. Zen's mighty Stormtrooper G4 (actually a blue and white G3, heavily modded with only the best hardware upgrades) is heading my way soon, complete with a fresh install of 12.04. I plan to put OS X and OS 9 (yes, I think there is still a place for the classic Mac OS in this world) on separate drives and to good use, and pass my old school and new found knowledge along to all who come this way.

As noted by countless others on the web Opera has announced this week that it is switching over from its own Presto rendering engine to the all-mighty juggernaut that is Webkit. Why should PowerPC users care about this, you might ask? Opera abandoned PowerPC OS X and PowerPC Linux back in 2010. Well, the reason is this: a quick run down of Webkit browsers show that it is fast becoming the defacto web browser standard, and as the good Dr. Kaiser has just noted on the tenfourfox development blog, that is more than a little troubling. Think Internet Explorer 6 if you need any recollection of what a defacto web standard looks like. God bloody awful.

With Presto going bye-bye, in 2013 for major browser rendering engines there are: Trident (Internet Explorer and Maxthon, IE was obviously long abandoned for PowerPC), Gecko (Firefox, Seamonkey and for now anyway, Camnio) and Webkit (Safari, Chrome, Chromium, Iron, Midori, iCab, Omniweb, Roccat, Surf, luakit...and on and on). Increasingly, mega corporations Apple and Google dominate the web, the mobile space, and Webkit is the sharp tip of their spear. Even if webkit is opensource, Apple and Google are most certainly in it for the cash mo-oney (dollar dollar bills, y'all), and that could spell dark days in the years ahead for FOSS software. Gecko is still mighty competition for Webkit, but soon it will be nothing but Firefox and community supported editions like tenfourfox, as long as Dr. Kaiser can keep up with Mozilla's twists and turns that is.

As users of a decidedly third tier platform we need all the browser we can get. That's why I became quite hot and bothered when I happened upon Netsurf, a open source browser built primarily for the RISC OS with its own rendering engine. I had only vaguely heard of the RISC OS, its a fascinating UK based operating system dating back to the 80's. Netsurf runs on almost every OS on the planet (though not on well on Windows, apparently) and will even run in a framebuffer, with no operating system or GUI requirements. It is quite modern as far HTML and CSS goes, but with no Javascript support. That, as many will tell you, is ultimately not a bad thing for a third tier OS. There is a Mac OS X PowerPC port of Netsurf, its a couple generations old but despite everything I could throw at it I couldn't get it to run on my ibook G4. I've downloaded the source code and am making it my first attempt at a compile, wish me luck. If I get it to run on Mac OS X PowerPC, I'll move over to build it for PowerPC Linux as well. If that works....who knows, maybe...dare I even say it....a Mac OS 9 port? All hail Classilla, but if there is any OS in desperate need of another browser option its the classic Mac OS.

Update : A little more digging on UK Netsurf forums and I've discovered no compile of Netsurf 2.7 for PowerPC is needed, however to even use it you need to download and install Xcode (3.1.3 is what I could find) from Apple's developer site. Xcode sets the MIME type of the CSS for Netsurf, without which the browser crashes on startup. To say this is an inelegant solution is putting it....mildly. You will also have to have an iTunes account or register a new account with the mothership to download Xcode. I haven't used iTunes in so long that I forgot my login!

My first impression of Netsurf for PowerPC: Not anywhere near as fast as webkit, most pages do not render perfectly, but all and all its not a bad little browser. Will not be my browser of choice for 10.5.8 anytime soon, however that right now is Leopard Webkit. I will now turn my attention to learning more about Framebuffers and Codewarrior in preparation for an OS 9 assualt.