[weblacky]

Well I sound like an old man but I wish the web visual layout had been better standardized from its inception. By that I mean a basic agreed layout (you could change it, of course, but just to conform). Like left-hand sidebar, top menu with dropdowns, so like 3 main frame elements, etc.

If the visual look of pages were more similar (like finding "play" on an old DVD TV menu, assuming hitting play button player doesn't work, when you're trying to get Grandma to see the play control on her new movie at home). People could still come up with their own elements. But if a layout had been an early standard there wouldn't be the need for much of this scripting BS for controls.

Then with less customization you'd have less issues and older browsers could still see the basics you'd need because those elements were specially set aside during the early days to allow standardize business/company pages and navigation. Not images with hotspots.

Even if you came from the print industry, it's not hard to imagine the web at the time being like a printed brochure (unfolded), fine, then since you can click on hyperlinked elements and go places, you could still do that.

I guess I'm seeing like more what gopher and other network-based search agents were back in they day and where the data presented on the screen. If that had been thought of more, I'd like to think we'd not have the free for all we had in the early 2000's with scripting and navigation. A little standard oversight would have saved us that worrible evolution.

Heck...we still don't have it. Wouldn't be easier for small/personal businesses if be had some basic standard templates that ALL browsers could display natively and then you can script/mark the content to be inserted into a standard web template and view in browser (browser-run so it looks right on each platform)...instead of having to MAKE the damn layout...just reuse a standard one (also could have done auto-screen sizing and such). The marks/tag of the content could even anchor the links from navigation to the page and such and have the browser collect/correlate/display a navigable interface on your platform, using customer content. Why wasn't this part of the web?

The fact that stuff like that was NOT put into browsers is what basically makes me just not want to touch this whole web page mess. If you had a standard...I'd have gladly used it and left the special effects to the young people.

[lalle]

What about offloading the work to modern machine? What ever became of the Dodoid D1 project?

[Raion]

What about offloading the work to modern machine? What ever became of the Dodoid D1 project?

Dodoid's D1 is essentially canceled. Dodoid has other priorities and wasn't able to get the offloading working. Similarly, there's no good solutions for this. A PCI/ethernet interface has a limited bandwidth. Really, the only remote protocol that would potentially work is RDP, which is partially RE'd and implemented in some forms.

No, I have some option for future development on IRIX, but in general it's not going to let anyone use FB or youtube.

[stormy]

I wonder how easy it would be to simple configure a Raspberry Pi on the network to accept X forwarding, then simply having a scripted-shortcut in Irix where you just double-click it and it logs into the Pi and displays Firefox through X forwarding.

That's the only way you'd get a 'modern web' experience on old hardware. It's kind of 'cheating' depending on how you look at it, although it does use X forwarding for a great purpose, probably it's intended purpose (using a more powerful machine to do the background work in an X environment)

But, if we want it native on the machine the best option we currently have is Netsurf-Motif. I can confirm that it is super fast and I can browse most forums with ease.

[Raion]

X forwarding isn't effective. You see the big reason is that there's bandwidth and latency issues. For things likely static applications is not that bad but for a web browser it's pretty janky.

X over a network uses full size bitmaps. So if your window is 800x600 it has to decode and display 60 of those a second to make a smooth experience. That's simply unfeasible.

RDP would probably be smoother than that or VNC, the latter of which is marginally better. It's a shame that IRIX didn't stick with NeWS because PostScript would work better.

As for netsurf motif I'm going to be packaging that sooner or later, just wrapper up in libdisk stuff right now. You should try our HTTP gateway system for it, it should give you a pretty nice experience.

[jgunnoe]

I've dorked around a bit on this subject.  I settled for proxy renderers with a few wget scripts in tow for browsing and downloading to my SGI lab.  There are a few out there, I most recently used this:

https://github.com/tenox7/wrp

obviously YMMV, no dynamic content of course, just renders at the time of the site hit.

[vishnu]

Back in the nekochan days, we tried porting Dillo to IRIX, but the multitudinous use of variadic functions in Dillo, which MIPSPro doesn't support, made it more or less impossible. All those functions would have had to be rewritten, which would almost have amounted to a complete rewrite of the source code. Anyway, even though their website is still up, Dillo has been twisting in the wind for years.

[o2o2o2]

I wonder how easy it would be to simple configure a Raspberry Pi on the network to accept X forwarding, then simply having a scripted-shortcut in Irix where you just double-click it and it logs into the Pi and displays Firefox through X forwarding.

That's the only way you'd get a 'modern web' experience on old hardware. It's kind of 'cheating' depending on how you look at it, although it does use X forwarding for a great purpose, probably it's intended purpose (using a more powerful machine to do the background work in an X environment)

But, if we want it native on the machine the best option we currently have is Netsurf-Motif. I can confirm that it is super fast and I can browse most forums with ease.

So this is quite easy. Any unix with gui will do - in my case one of my boxes running Rocky. My IRIX is on 10.1.1.90, rocky on 10.1.1.41:

ivan@irix> xhost +
ivan@irix> ssh 10.1.1.41
ivan@10.1.1.41's password:
ivan@heavy> export DISPLAY=10.1.1.90:0.0
ivan@heavy> firefox &

The result:



I usually connect to Irix remotely via XMing from a Windows box. Then on the Irix box do as above but set DISPLAY=<windows-box-ip>:1 (XMing is set up to be screen 1). This works quite well as it offloads pretty much everything away from the old 100MHz R4000 so I can even watch videos although it does top out at some 5-6 FPS.



I also have remote machine's filesystem mounted via nfs so downloads are readily available on Irix.

---

With the above setup, here is a super simple script to run the browser. If you set up your keys correctly between Irix and FFHOST (any linux box with firefox on the path), this will just run. Otherwise, it will ask you for the FFHOST password and then run.

I've saved this to /usr/bin and added a to desktop & Icon catalogue and voila! a modern browser on Irix!

Code:

#!/usr/freeware/bin/bash

FFHOST=10.1.1.41
FFHOSTUSER=ivan
RDISP=10.1.1.90:1

xhost +

ssh $FFHOSTUSER@$FFHOST "export DISPLAY=$RDISP ; firefox "

[jpstewart]

So this is quite easy. Any unix with gui will do - in my case one of my boxes running Rocky. My IRIX is on 10.1.1.90, rocky on 10.1.1.41:

ivan@irix> xhost +
ivan@irix> ssh 10.1.1.41
ivan@10.1.1.41's password:
ivan@heavy> export DISPLAY=10.1.1.90:0.0
ivan@heavy> firefox &

That's unnecessarily complicated. Use SSH's built-in X forwarding instead of messing around with xhost and setting the DISPLAY environment variable. Either add "ForwardX11 yes" to /etc/ssh/ssh_config on the IRIX machine to permanently enable it, or use "ssh -X" instead of simply "ssh" to enable it on a case-by-case basis. Then there's no need for xhost or the export commands, and no need for a custom script.

[Raion]

Remote X on SGI is broken unfortunately on modern systems. . modern versions of X on Linux and BSD do not allow mixed endian x clients/servers.

There are potential workarounds for this but out of the box is a giant pain in the ass