plaes.org

As our campus is using Chillispot for local LAN management one sometimes has to fire up a browser to see why nothing is getting through. Because Webkit-based Epiphany has a bug that doesn't properly load the login page, I have to start up a second browser, fetch some random url to see whether my network session has been expired and finally log in if it's the case.

I got a bit tired of this so I made myself a Chillispot auto-login script :)

I also found a Murphy's law that might summarize what I feel:

Whenever you need a crucial file from the server, the network will be down.

This bug took a month of back-and-forth, but finally it has landed...

2009-10-06  Priit Laes  <plaes--plaes.org>

    Reviewed by Gavin Barraclough.

    Linking fails with "relocation R_X86_64_PC32 against symbol `cti_vm_throw'"
    https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28422

    * jit/JITStubs.cpp:
    Mark cti_vm_throw symbol as PLT-indirect symbol, so it doesn't end up
    in text segment causing relocation errors on amd64 architecture.
    Introduced new define SYMBOL_STRING_RELOCATION for such symbols.

The patch itself can be seen here. Next up is bug 29244 which might take even longer...

Yesterday xan released WebkitGtk+ 1.1.2 (with follow-up 1.1.3..) together with Epiphany 2.27.0. As this is the first official version which only supports only the Webkit rendering engine I decided to take a look.

My feelings so far are mixed - new version is missing some of the everyday features I have got used to (so I have filed a bunch of bug reports), but in general it feels faster and lighter (might be because of these missing features :P) plus it comes with a built-in WebInspector (which itself comes with a crasher bug that's easily reproducable) :)

But Ephy/Webkit is here to stay.