HTML5 Broadway Backend Is Seeing Renewed Attention Ahead Of GTK 4.0

[phoronix]

Phoronix: HTML5 Broadway Backend Is Seeing Renewed Attention Ahead Of GTK 4.0

It's been a while since last hearing anything about the GNOME/GTK Broadway back-end that provides HTML5-based user-interfaces for rendering within web browsers. The HTML5 Broadway work has been revived ahead of the GTK 4.0 tool-kit release...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTK4-Broadway-Progress

[jacob]

GTK4 is going to be extremely interesting from a technical point of view. Let's just hope that the release management won't be as shambolic as it was for GTK3.

[bitman]

HTML5 for UI sounds cool. Maybe that memory leaking bug will make a comeback. Maybe desktop will feel like an electron app. Exciting times..

[Mateus Felipe]

Why people still insist on using HTML for interfaces?

[Vistaus]

GTK4 is going to be extremely interesting from a technical point of view. Let's just hope that the release management won't be as shambolic as it was for GTK3.

I can't believe it! Someone on Phoronix who doesn't hate GTK!

[cb88]

It's like how can we make the desktop as slow and bloated as possible... CSS shoudln't even be anywhere near a the desktop. *nobody* literally nobody *needs* that.... The fact that GPUs are pretty much required to render GUIs that would have rendered just fine on 50Mhz machines 25 years ago is insane.

[Britoid]

It's like how can we make the desktop as slow and bloated as possible... CSS shoudln't even be anywhere near a the desktop. *nobody* literally nobody *needs* that.... The fact that GPUs are pretty much required to render GUIs that would have rendered just fine on 50Mhz machines 25 years ago is insane.

The CSS is used for styling, the format it's written in it doesn't change the speed of it (android uses xml files).

[cb88]

The CSS is used for styling, the format it's written in it doesn't change the speed of it (android uses xml files).

That's blatantly wrong... CSS is *much* slower than theming that was implemented in QT1-3 and GTK1-2, BeOS, MacOS Classic and Windows.... because there was no CSS it was just written to draw the theme directly. Could something akin to CSS be made to be fast... probably but part of the problem with CSS is that it makes it too easy to write slow themes.

[jacob]

I can't believe it! Someone on Phoronix who doesn't hate GTK!

I know, it's intolerable, isn't it.

[dkasak]

Sweeeeet. I'm supporting a 3-month project where broadway is our only available way of bringing up the UI ( client won't allow tunneling X through ssh ). It's an absolute God-send in cases like that. I mentioned in a previous post, but when the dust settles, we have a 'broadway session manager' to open-source ... which includes a regular html login service ( which sets an auth cookie ), forking of a new app ( configurable ) and broadway session, and a proxy that redirects authenticated clients ( via the auth cookie ) to whatever port they were assigned on login.