> OpenBSD, which uses X11 that Chromium already has a native backend for, has thousands of lines of patches they have to maintain (and spend hours and hours rebasing every upgrade).
Wow, you're not kidding. https://github.com/openbsd/ports/tree/master/www/chromium/pa... is positively scary.
Please have a closer look at those patches. 98% of it is constituted of C preprocessor ifdefs. This means that most of them just enable the same features as Linux alongside other operating systems. Most of it is purely code configuration. Haiku instead reimplement many parts of WebKit, instead of relying on mature code. This is the reason why the WebKit performance on Haiku is so poor.
Re:Haiku R1/beta2 has been released
by waddlesplash on Thursday June 11, 2020 @02:51PM
(#23492103)
You do realize that WebKit has no native graphics API, right? It uses Cairo under GTK, CoreGraphics under macOS, etc. etc. So we created a Be API implementation, and yes, it needs more optimization. But you are acting like we are reinventing the wheel here or something...
We have no interest in trying to port Chromium. Even OpenBSD, which uses X11 that Chromium already has a native backend for, has thousands of lines of patches they have to maintain (and spend hours and hours rebasing every upgrade). Haiku would have to maintain far more than a few thousand lines, as we would have to add a new graphics backend at the very least.
Firefox is better in this department, but has a codebase larger than Haiku itself, and none of us have any expertise there. If someone knowledgeable about Firefox's codebase wanted to port it, we'd be happy to help where we can, but there's only so many of us.