QT5 web engine chromium for OS/2 alpha build

Googles chromium browser engine is an integrated part in newer QT versions. The Port of QT 5.3 to OS/2 includes the QT Web engine which is based on chromium code. A first unstable alpha build was recently done after fixing the build stack and compiler/linker issues.

QT5 web engine chromium OS/2 port alpha

There is more work required to fix some larger and minor issues:

• host cert check against trusted root certs not working
• IPC currently disabled
• Audio backend not working

Firefox 45 ESR Alpha: first steps done

In April the OS/2 port made some progress to get the first Alpha build of Firefox 45 ESR running:

Firefox ESR 45.5.0 for OS/2 Alpha

Some notes about the latest patches and comments:

• the off-main-thread-composition (OMTC) code path currently does not work and the feature is disabled for now
• adapt the new fontlist code, changes over the fontlist pango code in 38ESR
• fix problems because of symlinks in the profile dir
• disable plugin-container.exe to fix the 100% CPU load after it get’s called
• future GL support on OS/2 for Firefox based on the ancient OS/2 port of Mesa (software based rendering only)
• future WebTRC support, needs better USB support (drivers) and the port of the webtrc code in Firefox

The have been some updates to external base dll required for Firefox to run. There is a new issue with the rpm build because of python issues. There’s also a plan to create a new launcher that will call the firefox.exe from a fixed path in the /usr directory tree, fortunately there will be a non rpm release (zip release) that will ship with a standard firefox.exe that can load its dlls from the Firefox root dir and the firefox dir itself can be on any drive and in any dir you like. There is also a plan to make the zip release available before the rpm install issue get’s fixed.

Mozilla’s Firefox Future

Mozilla Research is actively working on the servo browser engine for its next gen browser “project quantum”. Servo is written in Mozilla’s new system language Rust that has some advantages like memory handling, code safety and better performance. Servos aim is to take advantage of the current hardware, that is both the CPU and the graphics for again better performance. Mozilla is now adding parts of the servo project written in Rust to the current Gecko code of Firefox by replacing components written in C/C++. How that plays out for future OS/2 ports of Firefox.. we will see.