Hi,

I've installed Opera Mobile and Firefox in my N900 and, though their page rendering and Javascript engines are very very good; I do not find them as useful and comfortable as the built-in MicroB browser.

So my question is, do you know if MicroB is still being worked, has been opensourced or if there is some project that tries to mimic its user experience while rendering using some more modern engine (e.g. WebKit or latest Gecko releases)??

Thanks in advance!

For MicroB, the engine is open, the UI is closed.

I don't really know why WebKit is in any way better than Mozilla's engine, but that's just my uninformed off the top of my head thought.

No one's working on a recode of the MicroB UI as far as I know - which would be the easiest way I would think towards upgrading the engine - since the UI being closed source probably means you can't just plop in a completely different engine like WebKit (an upgraded Mozilla Firefox engine might be doable, though honestly, I don't know how it needs to be compiled, so someone more knowledgeable can probably state more accurately what could actually be done. MohammadAG briefly worked on a QT web browser that looked very similar to MicroB iirc, but last I asked him he stopped doing anything with it a while ago.

That's a shame because MicroB, in my opinion, just lacks text reflow to fit on the screen.

MicroB actually sorely misses mouse support. Was it not for that, it would be the perfect maemo browser.

freemangordon had a browser project, but lacked the resources to continue it himself, and it seems he also lacked volunteers to help him with project.

Maybe I should start development again, but still not sure what will be the result handling such HUGE project alone. BTW isn't there any QT/QML desktop browser, maybe it will be easier one to port it to maemo?

Wrong.

Even on 770 it was possible to install alternative Webkit engine instead of MicroB.

There is a wiki page that describes browser architecture. Don't have time know to find it.

Correct, but you should rewrite the whole eal layer. And UI will still have the same functionality.

UML diagrams

http://www.webwizardry.net/~timeless/10/

I think a full browser would be a very huge task to accomplish, specially with the lack of developers for the N900. If it was a shared project across Meego and Maemo, a QML based web browser could be nice. Other option could be backport Meego's web browser.

I would suggest to try some hack in MicroB to update the engine maintaining the UI or replace the closed source UI with an OSS reimplementation

Porting a Qt web browser like:

QtWeb
Arora (Seems to be unmaintained)
Reckonq (KDE dependencies could be a problem)

Is also a viable (though painful) path.

But this is not for fremantle and tablet-browser-ui from diablo (which the above is applicable for) does not run well (at least the ancient source on garage) on n900.

I've been playing a lot with microb while developing extmou, starting a new browser project was not an easy decision (having in mind that i find microb very good)