Now I know there are alternative browsers for the N900 (Fennec for one) but those tend to either suck or be based on fairly old versions of their rendering engines.

My idea is to:
1.Find the version of mainline Gecko that matches with the Gecko version being shipped on the N900 (in the microb-engine package)
2.Having found this, identify any patches on top of mainline in the N900 Gecko version (whether they be patches that ended up in mainline Gecko later or whether they were Nokia-specific or otherwise dropped
3.Figure out which of the patches from #2 are actually necessary and forward port those to a more modern Gecko version
4.Make the other changes to the modern Gecko required to get it to function as a replacement for microb-engine and make it work as a browser
5.Reverse engineer the pieces that talk to the browser (flash player, maps, a couple others) and see if they are tied to the browser's APIs in ways that will break with a newer Gecko
and 6.Using reverse engieering and whatever else, find a way to make the stuff in #5 work.

It would be really great to get micro-b updated!

But you should also ake a look at the efforts marxian did with his qml-browser.
Maybe it helps in any way or even is the way to go?

Well this every n900 user wanted for ages now btw isint the ui closed and more of a problem ?

yes qml browser is nice but it nowhere like microb i mean microb feels like a part of the os the user experince and i doubt that something like qml browser could ever be a default but for sure it could be the best third party browser available

I don't know, QML-Browser's UI looks very much like MicroB. It looks and feels like tbe hottest candidate for a true replacement. If only it did not crash on start on Thumb

@Pichlo ri8 but then isint it qt stuff i mean default apps are based on some other kingpin stuff na
btw they are just my opinion and i want a better browser be it microb or whatever better stuff but microb is something the majority wants

jonwil: as you may know I was pretty active on #embedlite, there are a couple of my patches upstreamed to gecko etc. I was hoping that at some point I will be able to wrap upstream gecko Gtk embedlite implementation in what microb needs.

It turned out all the effort was because of jollaphone, they even dropped q4 support some time ago.

I assess your idea to simply forward port the patches in maemo's gecko to upstream as not feasible - not only the code has changed dramatically, but there is a crucial piece of it which is missing for maybe 3 or more years - GtkMozEmbed. This is what microb eal uses to embed gecko.

On the other hand we don't really need to replace microb, as it is just an UI. What needs to be done is - we get a recent engine, port it to maemo and implement this http://browser.garage.maemo.org/docs/eal/

As freemangordon stated, gtkmozembed would have to be updated or reimplemented. Below is the reply to an email to the maintainer of the embedlite github repo from 13 feb 2014. This was the reason I stopped work on the qt4 replacement.

Which is not really possible if we want GLES accelerated graphics, as Gtk does not provide/support GLES context. There are some efforts to support OpenGL in Gtk(https://git.gnome.org/browse/gtkglext/), I tried that on n900, but the performance was abysmal

Year ago I was told that mainline gecko should still have all interfaces except legacy location/map which is used by some nokia/maemo closed plugin. Anyway some of closed microb parts are not closed, just need to dig on garage...