Newsdetails

Effectively the new browser that has been worked on by Bitwise Works Gmbh (BWW)
is being tested by the first beta testers. The OS/2 VOICE foundation and (BWW) would like to thank the OS/2 community for contributing financially to
make the the development of the new browser possible. Some people have been able to find a copy of the new browser and have indeed found out that the
new browser does not work, known issue's are:

* Copy paste/support
* Audio playback with video (this should be fixed coming week).
* Video playback
(We had no readme file in this ZIP file of this test version of the browser).

The browser was publicly demonstrated at the virtual Warpstock 2020 on the 7th of November.
You can see the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoL47Y5ZDoU

* So far testing done by me and BWW and the first beta testers. is that the web browser delivers on its promise *key promise* that we can load websites again
ArcaOS and OS/2 users could no longer open with Firefox 45. The problems with Firefox 45 not being able to load webpages, not being display web pages correctly or not being able to fill in form, these issue's will just increase.

* What is important to understand is that the portion of the web browser that renders the page to be displayed is what is the key component.
The Chromium rendering engine is what VOICE and BWW focussed on with this project. For now it looks we will go with the Otter Browser.
We had previosly stated the Falkon browser would be ported. Doing so would take another month as this would require a KDE library to be ported
to OS/2. This would not be beneficial. We can choose from different QT based browsers the OS/2 community could use if somebody else wishes to port another browser front.

* Also the new browser will be pretty resource hungry. If you can run the new web browser on a Pentium 4 based system such as Thinkpad T42 is doubtfull. This is for two reasons: 1) The browser is much more resource hungry because of the size of the rendering engine itself. 2) Websites require more computing computer power to render the page for you before its displayed. The website are much bigger. Having a system with 2 CPU cores will be very benenficial.

* We do not have lot of browser add ons in place for the Otter Browser. The main focus for the OS/2 VOICE and BWW has been to get a new browser launched
that will display modern websites on ArcaOS. To many people had to boot in Windows and Linux or use a tablet to visit websites that no longer work in Firefox 45.9.

We need your continued support to push out a browser for public usage.
Please consider making a donation:
www.os2voice.org/membership.html

Thank you and best regards,

Roderick Klein
President OS/2 VOICE