Saturday, December 18, 2010

Qt browsers in Haiku

If you've been following my comments on this topic of late, you'll know that all Qt browsers that I've tried in Haiku (either R1A2 or r39792) have crashed with a frequency sufficiently high to make the browser essentially unusable.
For each of these versions of Haiku, I had to install Qt 4.7.1 either because the version of Qt already installed (R1A2) did not allow Arora to start or (r39792) because no Qt at all was installed.
When I compiled Qt myself in r39848, I found a markedly reduced rate of crashing although crashing was still an annoyance.
Today, I installed a newer nightly (r39883-x86gcc2hybrid) and in this Qt 4.7.1 seemed to be already installed.
So, I installed Arora 0.11.0 and the Weltweitinnetz browser (both from SPM).
Remarkably, in using both over about 4 hours, I got only 3-4 crashes (mostly with Arora). This really is a huge difference.
So much so, that I'm posting this from Arora in r39883 without any fears of losing my post.
Examining the information available, I'm forced to conclude that the Qt 4.7.1 which had been available in SPM was perhaps corrupted. Only when I avoided its use, was I able to significantly reduce the incidence of crashing.
Certainly, this has brought Arora from being almost unusable in R1A2 to being my preferred browser over Web+ in r39883.
The main reason for my preference is the very useful Bookmarks bar in Arora together with the right-click options provided for navigation.
Now Weltweitimnetz is an equally fast browser in r39883. Indeed, it and Arora are almost indistinguishable.
I did notice, however, that while the Google Translate Button for English works perfectly when placed in Arora's Bookmarks Bar, in Weltweitimnetz it does not.
Another interesting feature is that both Arora and Weltweitimnetz seem to share the same configuration file because making a change to the Bookmarks bar of one browser automatically induces the same changes in the other.
I did go back to R1A2, reinstalled Qt 4.7.1 and both Arora 0.11.0 and Weltweitimnetz and tried both. However, as before, crashing occurred with both browsers so I think I'll stick with Web+ in R1A2.

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