Yesterday I learned Drobe, THE site for Risc OS and Acorn news was closing as its news service, thus remaining in archive-only mode. I have never used Risc OS or an Acorn and there is none in my classic computers collection but it is still sad news.
But I digress.
I cannot remember how but somehow, via Drobe, I discovered Risc OS had an Internet browser called NetSurf and it was available for Linux now. I backported the latest version (2.1) for Hardy and Jaunty.
Rendering-wise, it’s not too good. Plugins did not work for me and I’d say JavaScript is not working either. But there are some interesting points: NetSurf has its own rendering engine, split in several libraries:
- Hubbub, an HTML5 parsing library
- Instead of using libungif/libgif like everybody else does, they have their own GIF library (libnsgif)
- TinySVG library (libsvgtiny)
- BMP library (libnsbmp)
- CSS library (libCSS)
- DOM library (libDOM)
- and more
Everything is MIT licensed.
Summary: NetSurf 2.1, libnsgif, libnsbmp, libparserutils and libhubbub are now available for Hardy and Jaunty from my PPA