Last weekend there was a small "hack weekend" meeting of some NetSurf developers in Manchester. I thought it might be encouraging to spread some information.
If you have been downloading Continuous Integration (CI) builds, you will probably have noticed that there have been over 25 of them in the last few days. This represents the progress that NetSurf has been making, both in adding new functionality and in fixing bugs. One bug that has been reported multiple times is that NS seems to loop for ever when Javascript is enabled. It actually didn't loop for ever - it just took longer than most people were prepared to wait. The culprit was a regular expression evaluator - not where most of us would expect lots of time to be spent. Recent versions have shown an enormous speed up in that particular part, which translates to a large speed up in page loads as a whole. Some bugs that caused crashes when Javascript was enabled, have been fixed. The main thrust of the work at the moment is in adding Javascript functionality using the Duktape library. When all the Javascript features that were there with the previous library have been replicated, NetSurf version 3.4 will be released. This will also add new Javascript functionality. Many other bug reports concern the layout. NetSurf's layout engine needs to be rewritten. This work will start some time after release of 3.4 - though how long after is not yet known. I would urge you to download CI builds of NetSurf and try them. Always keep a known good version that you can go back to in the unlikely event that a new CI build fails. And, most of all, keep the bug reports coming in! We looked at many of them over the weekend, and were able to close quite a lot, in most cases because more recent versions work and do not exhibit the reported problems. NetSurf is fully capable of creating bug reports using the Mantis issue tracker, including attaching files and adding notes. If you have a problem, ask on this list for help. In short, I feel very much encouraged by recent progress, and I hope you all do too! Dave ____________________________________________________________ FREE 3D EARTH SCREENSAVER - Watch the Earth right on your desktop! Check it out at http://www.inbox.com/earth
