browser still broken on linux, or just me?

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slowmaker
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browser still broken on linux, or just me?

Post by slowmaker » Wed Jun 16, 2021 1:24 pm

Just today tried the to put a browser control on a stack under linux for the first time, encountered significant hang time; in fact it never actually placed the control successfully, nor responds to user interaction after that. Had to kill the process.

Initial quickie searches indicate the web browser was a problem for LC on Linux for a long time; did the known issues ever get fixed?
Trying to get some idea of what direction to start digging/flailing wildly in, i.e. is this a part of the old issue(s) still around, or 'just' something screwy in my particular setup.

I'm using Indy 9.6.2 on a Manjaro linux box.

linux distro specifics, per "lsb_release -a"
LSB Version: n/a
Distributor ID: ManjaroLinux
Description: Manjaro Linux
Release: 21.0.7
Codename: Ornara

Anybody else? or just me?
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. - Albert Einstein (LIFE Magazine (1955 may 2), p64)

bogs
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Re: browser still broken on linux, or just me?

Post by bogs » Wed Jun 16, 2021 3:46 pm

I don't think it is just you, and I don't think it is fixed anywhere else.

I personally have never gotten the browser to work in general on 'nix, I have read others *have* had some version of the browser work. I don't spend enough time (well, any really) in a version that has the browser, so am not really qualified to tell you how to proceed.
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Re: browser still broken on linux, or just me?

Post by jacque » Wed Jun 16, 2021 5:46 pm

Under "known issues", the release notes say "The browser widget does not work on 32-bit Linux." I'm not sure if that applies to your setup.
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slowmaker
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Re: browser still broken on linux, or just me?

Post by slowmaker » Wed Jun 16, 2021 6:02 pm

64 bit here. apparently does not work at either bit-ness.

I did wonder if maybe the revBrowserOpenCef() way might work, but no dice there either, just immediately crashes (I was originally trying to drag the widget over; that's what hangs).

ah, well. Thanks for the responses, folks :)

I'll chew on it a bit more -- sometimes in the past there have been things that turned out to just need me running a different compositor, etc -- but I don't have a very hopeful feeling on this one.
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. - Albert Einstein (LIFE Magazine (1955 may 2), p64)

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Re: browser still broken on linux, or just me?

Post by FourthWorld » Wed Jun 16, 2021 6:10 pm

CEF has been described as a dying project, and AFAIK there is no more viable embeddable option in the Linux community at this time.

For the few things I need a browser for in a desktop app, I've been using the user's preferred browser as a helper app, launching it with URLs as needed. My needs are thankfully modest with browser dependencies in native apps.
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slowmaker
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Re: browser still broken on linux, or just me?

Post by slowmaker » Thu Jun 17, 2021 12:13 pm

Fortunately this wasn't a need, more of a passing thought of using a quickie app to corral my daily web-comic reads in a LC stack.

I know I still could, by pulling down the page and parsing out the part that has the image; just a bit more work than I'm willing to allot time for right now.

Perhaps another candidate will show up someday; if CEF is really a dying project, then LC will have to find something that works for the other OSes, which should bleed over to Linux if the solution they find supports it.
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. - Albert Einstein (LIFE Magazine (1955 may 2), p64)

ClipArtGuy
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Re: browser still broken on linux, or just me?

Post by ClipArtGuy » Thu Jun 17, 2021 4:32 pm

The browser "works" for me in linux, but you have to drag the widget out and hover over the stack with the mouse down for 5-10 seconds before releasing. I have no idea why this works, but it does, at least in current LTS kubuntu.

slowmaker
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Re: browser still broken on linux, or just me?

Post by slowmaker » Fri Jun 18, 2021 12:40 pm

ClipArtGuy wrote:
Thu Jun 17, 2021 4:32 pm
The browser "works" for me in linux, but you have to drag the widget out and hover over the stack with the mouse down for 5-10 seconds before releasing. I have no idea why this works, but it does, at least in current LTS kubuntu.
That's interesting; in the course of trying this, I found that mine is a little different, and also found the root cause of the original problem: my mouse is getting flaky!

So it turns out that the left mouse button is getting some intermittent uncontrolled bounce in it (sounds much more technical than "it's getting flaky", doesn't it?). That appears to have been the reason for the original craziness, the equivalent of a gazillion mouse clicks within a second or so.

note all of the below is after switching to a good mouse
Now, the drag and hover solution: mine appears to be opposite, I had to click and hold on the browser widget icon in the toolbox for a little longer than you might expect, then it will drag and drop without hanging.

For comparison, I created a new stack and went through all draggable items in the toolbox except the browser, and found that none of the others have that problem (the player icon would not drag at all, but I'm not sidetracking on that right now). They can be clicked and dragged immediately.

Further tinkering showed that I don't even really have to hold, but I do have to sort of click and wiggle (the icon, not me) a tiny bit in the toolbox before the browser icon appears cleanly and then I can drag and drop normally.

So...I'm wondering if this is a horsepower issue, so to speak? Maybe the browser widget takes a bit more oomph in the background to initialize even the act of dragging it onto the stack. Moving and releasing before it has gotten caught up might be creating some havoc in the message order that isn't getting handled cleanly.

It does seem to make everything a tad sluggish once it is on the stack. I haven't tried creating a standalone yet, so there is still the possibility this is an IDE-only issue. Maybe today, we'll see.
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. - Albert Einstein (LIFE Magazine (1955 may 2), p64)

ClipArtGuy
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Re: browser still broken on linux, or just me?

Post by ClipArtGuy » Fri Jun 18, 2021 4:08 pm

It's been a while since I actually used a browser in a linux stack, but I'm glad you found a sort of workaround. From my memory, a linux standalone with a browser widget functions as expected, without lag.

Now as to WHY this works, I still have no idea, but in the wise words of Joe Dirt "It just does." :D

slowmaker
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Re: browser still broken on linux, or just me?

Post by slowmaker » Tue Jun 22, 2021 5:57 pm

Finally tried the standalone experiment; no dice.

It took several tries even to get the standalone built without crashing. Once built, it fails to do anything on execution except generate a bunch of process IDs and burn about 3% CPU, according to htop.

I think I've satisfied my curiosity enough for now. Between my own experiments and the comments of others on both this thread and others, I think it is safe to say that the browser widget is a sorta-kinda-sometimes-YMMV thing on Linux, and that's probably not gonna change.

Erm, just to be clear to anyone who stumbles across this thread that may be new to LC on Linux: I'm not running LC on one of the approved Linux platforms, so the above isn't super surprising. Mildly disappointing, but not surprising.
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. - Albert Einstein (LIFE Magazine (1955 may 2), p64)

bogs
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Re: browser still broken on linux, or just me?

Post by bogs » Tue Jun 22, 2021 10:36 pm

slowmaker wrote:
Tue Jun 22, 2021 5:57 pm
Erm, just to be clear to anyone who stumbles across this thread that may be new to LC on Linux: I'm not running LC on one of the approved Linux platforms, so the above isn't super surprising. Mildly disappointing, but not surprising.
I really don't think that would make much difference, but I will test it out if you like heh.

*Edit - LOL !

I had been meaning to look into James Hale's docset maker / reader again, which I had really enjoyed using during the time I was testing it, to see if anything was new to me in it. This is on an 'buntu box (granted, running XFCE) and what to my wondering eyes should appear? I can tell you it wasn't a fat guy riding behind reindeer :P
aPic_LCB-browserWidgetError.png
Ahhhh.....hmmmm...yup, still broken!
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bogs
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Re: browser still broken on linux, or just me?

Post by bogs » Sun Jul 11, 2021 1:36 pm

OMFG ! I can't believe the solution to this would have eluded me for this long, but I think I finally found the answer of all places on Max's Lc wiki Image

I want to personally thank whoever the nameless contributor was in the comments who posted this solution! Image
widgetWorkingQ4OS1.png
Holy cats Batman !
If you follow those directions, however, you *might* get an error (depending on the distro being used) because of a missing dash. If you install it by the listing in Synaptic though, it did indeed seem to solve the problem.
widgetWorkingQ4OS2.png
'Dis mus be da plaze...
At some point, if a library that isn't even standard for a particular supported desktop is going to be required, someone *might* want to at least add it to the list of requirements in the release notes just for completeness.

I'll be spending the rest of the morning testing out various distros to see if this does indeed solve the issue for the vast majority.

Test so far (Will update as tests are done) :
Q4OS Trinity desktop - Lc 8.1.9 - fixed
Xubuntu 18.04.5 LTS - Lc 9.6 - fixed
Mint (Mate Desktop) 20.1 - could not get Lc 9.6 to work properly, so tested with 8.1.9 - fixed
MX Linux 32 bit - Oddly enough, I couldn't get 8.1.9 to install, and installed 8.1.2 instead. Browser worked out of the box, go figure.
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Re: browser still broken on linux, or just me?

Post by wsamples » Sun Jul 11, 2021 6:37 pm

I'm glad that works for you but it seems not to be as magical as implied. While I did have the browser working in Arch under Plasma, it does not work in my current Arch installation running openbox. libgconf-2.so and libgconf-2.so.4 exist in the file system. I don't know what differences between the two installations might be the actual cause of the variable behavior I see under Arch, but it isn't related to this particular lib.

bogs
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Re: browser still broken on linux, or just me?

Post by bogs » Sun Jul 11, 2021 9:44 pm

Not sure about Arch, which is one of the few distro's I've never gotten around too, so will have to look at it next weekend (will likely not have time this week).

I know that in Deb based distros, libgconf pulls in 2 more packages through Synaptic (treat recommended as required setting). I'll play with Arch to see what it looks like.

None of the distros I tested on above were plasma either, which may also be part of the problem, so I'll try that first. Which kde is plasma, 4 or 5?
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bogs
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Re: browser still broken on linux, or just me?

Post by bogs » Sun Jul 11, 2021 10:45 pm

After running through a failed installation for the better part of an hour, I at least remember *why* I didn't have any Arch ISOs available to test with hahaha. I'm going to test a different plasma distro, and see if it is an issue there.
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