Otter Browser Aims To Bring Chromium To Decades-Old OS/2 Operating System

"The OS/2 community is getting close to obtaining a modern browser on their platform," writes Slashdot reader martiniturbide. In an announcement article on Monday, president of the OS/2 Voice community, Roderick Klein, revealed that a public beta of the new Chromium-based Otter Browser will arrive "in the last week of February or the first week of March." XDA Developers reports: OS/2 was the operating system developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the intended goal of replacing all DOS and Windows-based systems. However, Microsoft decided to focus on Windows after the immense popularity of Windows 3.0 and 3.1, leaving IBM to continue development on its own. IBM eventually stopped working on OS/2 in 2001, but two other companies licensed the operating system to continue where IBM left off -- first eComStation, and more recently, ArcaOS.

BitWise Works GmbH and the Dutch OS/2 Voice foundation started work on Otter Browser in 2017, as it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep an updated version of Firefox available on OS/2 and ArcaOS. Firefox 49 ESR from 2016 is the latest version available, because that's around the time Mozilla started rewriting significant parts of Firefox with Rust code, and there's no Rust compiler for OS/2. Since then, the main focus has been porting Qt 5.0 to OS/2, which includes the QtWebEngine (based on Chromium). This effort also has the side effect of making more cross-platform ports possible in the future.

Cool!

[MachineShedFred]

So where's my port for Classic MacOS on PowerPC? Because that makes about as much sense as putting any effort at all into OS/2 in 2022.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[Nermal6693]

Otter has been ported to Risc OS, which also lacks pre-emptive multitasking, although I have no idea how the memory model compares to Mac OS. A port might be possible...

Re:

[dryeo]

The weakness is shared memory, especially shared memory below 512MBs, which was all OS/2 client supported until version 4.5. There's still some 16 bit code which is limited to 1GB of address space.

Re:

[dryeo]

Well pay for it, that's how the Otter port is being done. Besides, can you even purchase Classic MacOS and run it on close to modern hardware? OS/2 in the form of ArcaOS is currently for sale and the betas (not for sale yet) work quite well on most of the newest hardware as long as the framebuffer is in the lower 4GBs. UEFI, GPT partitions supported.
Posted from Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; Warp 4.5; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/45.0 SeaMonkey/2.42.9esr

Re:Cool!

[LostMyBeaver]

I think you probably were not asking legitimately and rather using Mac OS as an example.

Mac OS Classic was a nightmare to write browsers for. Even with Carbon API in the later days, it more or less lacked any tools suitable for making it stable on the platform. There are a few things which really matter :
- memory management.
- threading

Mac OS Classic had truly terrible memory management, possibly (but debatably) worse than Symbian which was truly a mess. As for threading, in later versions, it had a kinda sorta thing. Mac OS Classic was also a cesspool for security. Running a javascript JIT on the platform could actually never have been secure.

OS/2 on the other hand is ... tolerable. The architecture was actually surprising well designed and thought out. With the exception of using Ring-1 for additional virtual memory protection which for security was a blessing but for coding could be a problem at times, it could have ended up being a really great alternative to unix.

OS/2 suffered many crazy problems. And it seems they still suffer those problems. Lack of compiler developers. They had brief visits from different compiler makers. Every company seemed to dip their toes in the OS/2 waters, but no one ever really stuck around. And these days, a lack of a rust compiler means that no one has invested in implementing LLVM for the platform as Rust is kind of a freebie if LLVM has been ported.

Now, just so you know, LLVM is one of the easiest compilers platforms to port. .NET is possible, but it's REALLY hard with a massive number of hooks. Mono is a little better, but it requires a lot of runtime work. And Java... it's a little funny, but Java is really easy to bring up on new platforms so long as the processor was already supported and even then writing a new JVM from scratch isn't particularly difficult. But LLVM is a LOT easier to port than Qt is.

OS/2 has some interesting tools which makes porting software to the platform pretty easy. For example, they have a somewhat full Win32 porting layer (and Win64 is really just Win32 with addons). So, thanks to some great community efforts (I think the project was called Odin32 or something), you can port the vast majority of Windows programs to OS/2 with little effort.

A true Qt port to OS/2 is also not that awful for certain aspects of it. Porting Qt has always been a little difficult. But if you place a little effort into first porting qmake and making a reasonable toolchain template for qmake then it's mostly a matter of having a somewhat modern C++ compiler to take care of the rest. Makefiles have always been a nightmare but due to Qt's really cross-platform design, they solved that problem better than most. So, then there's porting from Win32 to presentation manager. PM is actually very similar to Win32 with regards to SDKs. So, I think the main issue we're likely to see there is that OS/2 never ended up with a good series of native APIs for many things. Also, Qt can paint almost entirely in OpenGL and if you understand Qt, you realize that Qt paints pretty much all aspects of the GUI. So, that means it could be possible to get the majority of the platform running without worrying about PM except for the parent windows and the event handlers.

Chromium is a strange beast though. I suppose this would be true for any modern browser. For optimal performance, there's the Javascript JIT which is going to be complicated to port to a new platform, but you can run it in a much slower interpreter mode which exists for debugging. So, disabling the JIT should be a single flag. Then there's the media platform. I haven't looked at Qt to see whether they use the Chromium media tools or the Qt ones in recent times. I'd almost imagine that since Qt has a pretty interesting pluggable media API, they could be using the Chromium one for everything now. That said, painting media is a trick. Rendering to OpenGL isn't difficult, but lipsync is. Which means audio is going to be a trick. I've never pe

Re:

[dryeo]

WebRTC is planned, already have video camera support and audio (I think only the USB audio is suitable for WebRTC), the other audio is a port of Alsa, works pretty good for playback, needs extending for input and as Webcams are usually USB...
As for compilers, OS/2 uses OMF as an object format, which LLVM doesn't support. With GCC, we convert the aout objects to OMF. Work is being done to fix the OpenWatcom linker to link ELF, works for plain C but hard for C++.
No OpenGL (well old software based) so everythi

Re:

[madbrain]

OS/2 audio can be decently fast. Lipsync was not an issue at all, between the DART and DIVE APIs, running on bare metal. On a VM, it's pretty hopeless, unfortunately.

I love OS/2, and used it on my desktop from 1992 until 2007. I was one of its most fervent advocates. I do not think it has much of a use nowadays. It was great technology, way ahead of its time. Sadly, Microsoft won the desktop OS battle, but with much anti-competitive behavior. They should have been broken up, and likely would have been, if n

OS2 users?

[Falconhell]

The OS2 community, does this mean both of them?

Re: OS2 users?

[NXIL]

Could be OS3 soon if this new browser works!

Re:

[ZiggyZiggyZig]

I wonder about the specs of the average computer running OS/2 in 2022. Chromium is a real memory hog, requiring 8GB or more just to start, which makes it impractical to run on a 32bit platform (which OS/2 is).

Re:

[dryeo]

Memory is the problem. Most users today do have lots of memory, which here means.
Total physical memory: 12,169 MB
Accessible to system: 3,241 MB
Additional (PAE) memory: 8,928 MB
Unluckily the PAE memory is only useful as a ram disk.
The Simplebrowser example program runs OK with a limited number of tabs open but realistically the move to 64 bits is what will be the end of OS/2 eventually, at least as far as modern programs are concerned.

Re:

[nospam007]

"The OS2 community, does this mean both of them?"

There still are companies who use old Phone system running that, railways and such, who don't have the budget to replace 100.000 phones on a whim.

Re: OS2 users?

[guruevi]

I just wonder what it has cost over the years to maintain these systems through the current vendors vs having just taken the plunge to VoIP 20 years ago.

I had no idea

[RitchCraft]

That OS/2 lives on to this day. I purchased Warp back in '94 and was very happy with it. I wish IBM would not have dropped the ball on consumers though with their lack of driver availability. I would have kept using it if not for that.

Re:

[dryeo]

Yea, even today there's very limited WiFi, no Bluetooth and such. There is support for most current sound, Ethernet, AHCI, NVME, USB3, Printing with CUPS, with UEFI and GPT in beta. Video is 2D, with VBE driver, mostly only working with ATI or Intel, including current.
Best on a desktop as well as various laptop stuff doesn't work well.
No Hyperthread support either as it is SMP, limited to 64 cores.

Re:

[grebweak]

Purchased Warp? I remember a point where IBM reps at an event literally threw install CDs at the audience (I got three). A very good OS to, a shame it failed.

Re:

[RitchCraft]

Yep, purchased, nice shiny box and all. I wish I still had it. I believe I sold it on eBay sometime around 2002. I'm a sucker for buying and trying operating systems. I have a boxed copy of Lindows laying around here somewhere!

Re:

[drinkypoo]

It hasn't made sense to dick with OS/2 since Linux and the BSDs got good.

Re:

[ukulele-hans]

I used OS/2 up until Spring 1998. The writing on the wall had been very obvious for years, but I really wasn't interested in Windows. My first reaction after installing R5.1 was "What the heck am I getting myself into!" But a few weeks later, KDE 1 was released, and Linux started to become a very realistic alternative.

Re:

[Wolfrider]

^^ This. I used Warp back in the day until putting a space before an REM statement in config.sys literally caused a boot fail. DOS handles this just fine. Really started getting into Linux after that.

Warp's multitasking was ahead of its time for the era, and having access to REXX was nice if you were into mainframes like I was.

Re:

[Fuzi719]

I was also a big OS/2 fan back in the day. I had Warp, loved it and there are facets of it I still miss (the Object Oriented file system, for instance). Oh how I wish it had not been abandoned by IBM back then. It would be so much better than the Windows we have now, I think.

Let me know ...

[Insanity Defense]

Let me know when it is on FreeDOS.

Re:

[lsllll]

Yes! If they could throw something like this [github.com] in there for images and video, then they have my 100% attention!

I've actually seen OS/2 in use in an enterprise...

[mmell]

...way back in the early '90s. But, uh . . . I don't remember history quite the same way TFA does . . .

Microsoft decided to focus on Windows after the immense popularity of Windows 3.0 and 3.1, leaving IBM to continue development on its own.

Uh, Microsoft pulled a swiftie on IBM - after several years of partnering with IBM and sharing a great deal of IP (both ways), Microsoft saw the right moment and released Windows 95. Up until then, OS/2 had a compatibility layer built in to allow it to run much MS-Windows code. The official story (from what I can Google) is that IBM decided not to release the compatibility layer for Windows 95 in an effort to force people to choose one OS or the other (hopefully, theirs).

That's BS. I remember this - IBM got sharpied out when MS said "hey, we got what we needed. We're done with you now". IBM was quite unhappy that MS had intentionally changed their OS to break the compatibility layer. There was a fair bit of press about it (an amazing amount; IT didn't generate a lot of news back then). IBM's official stance was that they weren't going to argue with MS-Windows because they still viewed PC's as a niche market, and not worth the effort on their part. Despite inventing the x86 PC, they didn't feel like this was in their wheelhouse (so to speak) so they just let it go. After a few years of active effort to destroy it from MS, I'm amazed there's anything left of OS/2 in the real world.

Re:

[aerogems]

OS/2 actually lived on for a number of years after that, but it was only marketed to businesses. I forget what they renamed it, but it was effectively OS/2 Warp 5.

But, like everyone else, I'm surprised there's still enough people using OS/2 to make this kind of effort. There are worse ways people could spend their time to be sure, but this seems like kind of a waste of time.

Re:

[bjhavard]

OS/2 actually lived on for a number of years after that, but it was only marketed to businesses. I forget what they renamed it, but it was effectively OS/2 Warp 5.

It was called "Warp Server for e-Business". Silly name but I still have a VM of it working on my Linux desktop.

Re:

[tlhIngan]

OS/2 actually lived on for a number of years after that, but it was only marketed to businesses. I forget what they renamed it, but it was effectively OS/2 Warp 5.

But, like everyone else, I'm surprised there's still enough people using OS/2 to make this kind of effort. There are worse ways people could spend their time to be sure, but this seems like kind of a waste of time.

It's still supported today. It became eComStation for a while as a lightweight OS for internet appliances, and now it's still worked on

Re:

[dryeo]

IBM was only licensed to use Windows up to version 4.0, Win95 was version 4.095. Also up till Warp V4.5 (earlier on Warp Server), OS/2 only supported a 1 GB (with half for the kernel) address space due to still having some 16bit code. Microsoft hard coded some DLL's to load above that in WIN32s 1.30 breaking things before Win95.
It is still used here and there in enterprise, running railroads and such. The NY subway only migrated away in the last couple of years for example. Arca Noae seems to be making mone

Re:

[mmell]

A testament to superior design - even after all MicroSoft could do to extinguish OS/2, there were more than a few places for it. There were some software products for OS/2 (including, no doubt, numerous "homegrown" ones) which have become legacy because it would be too difficult or too expensive to fix something that ain't broke.

Re:

[dryeo]

Yes, 30 years back when it was designed, it was a pretty solid design. The story is that 49 odd days after release, IBM was inundated with support calls, due to so many systems being up since release and a system time roll over bug.
There's still machines chugging away in closets and such, as long as memory don't leak, it just ran on and on until the hardware fails.
Even now, Arca Noae seems to be making money selling it, and they must have enough commercial customers as there aren't that many hobbyists left

Re:

[tlhIngan]

A testament to superior design - even after all MicroSoft could do to extinguish OS/2, there were more than a few places for it. There were some software products for OS/2 (including, no doubt, numerous "homegrown" ones) which have become legacy because it would be too difficult or too expensive to fix something that ain't broke.

The design was excellent. It was a modern OS (protected memory, pre-emptive multitasking) that was 32-bit, but could handle 16-bit driver with aplomb.

Windows 95 got real cranky real

Re:

[G00F]

To add to that, I remember IBM starting to market OS/2, even on TV, till they got hit/threatened with lawsuits. Then they they just placed OS/2 on the back burner for many years.

Still got my OS/2 warp box around here somewhere. Came with a microphone where I could say open netscape.

I remember playing Doom 2 and hexen in windows side by side in "realtime" on my 486 dx 100mhz 8mb ram. But it was a lot more work to make a lot of things just work IIRC.

Re:

[ukulele-hans]

Decades ago I worked with someone who was at the status meeting where Microsoft gave IBM the shaft. Up until then, there was that partnership. IBM presented first, and then the Microsoft rep came up and presented their status. The IBMer's realized the implications of Microsoft's status, effectively ending the partnership, while the Microsofties present were smiling giddily.

oh boy!

[guygo]

Maybe my dream of a video editing platform that runs on CP/M will come true!

Re:

[fibonacci8]

You should get a real machine for video editing, like an Amiga with a Videotoaster Flyer.

Re:

[b1ffster]

I actually managed to get one of these in the 1990's. Swapped it for a 386 orange screen laptop. Bad trade :-(

Re:

[b1ffster]

Try ASCII-Art or ASCII-Animation :-)

Doom II

[puddingebola]

Now if they'll only release Doom II for it, it'll be complete.

Re:

[martiniturbide]

There is PRBoom+ for it.

No compiler?

[PCM2]

There's no Rust compiler for OS//2? Maybe that's the first problem they should address. How hard would it be to port a frontend that compiles the Rust code to C?

Re:

[butlerm]

There is not likely to be any major difference between a Rust compiler that targets x86 on Windows and one that targets x86 on OS/2.

Re:

[dryeo]

The object format is the big difference, OS/2 still uses OMF.

Re:

[butlerm]

I imagine generating Linear (LX format) executables for OS/2 might be an equally significant problem.

Re:

[dryeo]

Not really. Even the ancient LD (GPL v1 with RMS as principal author) that comes with our GCC can bind a LX header to an aout binary and it'll run, likewise it can do some magic and make a working DLL.
In practice the way it works with GCC (currently 9.2.0) is you get aout object files output which are turned into OMF object files by emxomf then the flags massaged by emxomfld to use the system linker, which now a days is the Open Watcom linker, wlink, which we have the source for and needed due to the IBM li

Re:No compiler?

[martiniturbide]

We had been told that is very hard to get Rust ported since OS/2 is 32bits only.

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

Not to mention the pile of other dependencies needed to build rust.

Re:

[dryeo]

Need to port LLVM first, then there's the problem of linking with about a 3.5GB address space.
Shit our GCC 9.2.0 still outputs aout which is then converted to OMF32

Was the Mosaic repository down?

[thesjaakspoiler]

Because that thing runs on about anything if you can compile it.

Obligatory OS post

[b1ffster]

Where's my IRIX port ?

Appreciation

[bill_mcgonigle]

I like how there's a time Warp story adjacent to the OS/2 story, and also that these nerds are making a stand. I'm not persuaded by their passion but it's wonderful to see.

someone ...

[cascadingstylesheet]

... has a news alert for "otter", lol

Does this mean

[Reeses]

my BeBox could finally get a usable browser?