Nate1d ago

Fun with MATLAB (for school). I've been dogfooding my little browser #Sunstone for a while now, and that includes using it for school. My Linear Algebra course is forcing us to use MATLAB (why not GNU Octave, or NumPy?) and things seemed to be going fine until it came time to export the file to pdf. Press the button, nothing. NADA. I figured it's something to do with Sunstone not being feature complete yet, or a WebKit incompatibility, so I go to open it in Firefox instead.

First I get an error. There appears to be a session running already, and my license only allows one session. Would I like to close the previous session? Sure. The result? An infinite loading screen that never finishes. Ack. Try on Chromium. Same. In desperation I download the Linux installer. I don't really want to install proprietary software on my computer, but I have assignments due. Go to run the installer. It immediately fails with an address boundary error. Nice. It's cool that they decided to support Linux, but apparently they fucking suck at programming and definitely aren't using a memory safe language to write the installer.

I go back, make sure to log out with all three browsers and delete history, cookies, and cache. Log back in with Firefox. It still thinks a session is running. Would I like to close it? Sure. The loading page pops up again. Several minutes later, it fails. Ok, this is progress, it usually just keeps loading forever. This time it's saying that the previous session failed to load, and would I like to open a new session? YES, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES, OPEN A NEW SESSION BY ALL THE GODS AND MONSTERS, I NEED TO FINISH MY FUCKING HOMEWORK!?!?!?!

I seriously hate proprietary software. That was a two hour detour that I really didn't have time for. I don't understand how ordinary people think this is ok or acceptable. I definitely don't understand how people can complain about Linux being hard when this is the sort of shit they are dealing with in the proprietary software ecosystem. Linux is fucking easy in comparison.

Show threadNate

What I think was actually going on with the original issue (the "export to PDF button does nothing), is that javascript is trying to open a dialog window. WebKitGtk pops a signal, and if there is no signal handler I guess it decides to just ignore the script. At least that's my guess based on what I saw after finally getting back in with Firefox. Now, I have a lot of feelings about the appropriateness of writing entire applications as web apps, but I'm in the extremely small minority that thinks a Web Browser should be a document viewer and nothing else, so obviously I'm going to be looking into this closer. That's a war that was lost years ago.

On the subject of #Sunstone, the fixes over the past couple of days included keeping the sidebar size constant when resizing the window, making the open/close state of the sidebar persistent, and fixing a bug where tabs had no name if the document being displayed was not an html document. I also made the sidebar tabs reorder if you do a drag and drop with the regular tab bar or the tab overview. Still haven't implemented drag and drop for the sidebar tabs though. It's going to be a series of small fixes like that for a while, I was getting behind on classwork and need to stay focused. Shame, I'd much rather be writing code, which I seem to do very little of in the pursuit of my CS degree....

Mar 22 at 4:33amWeb