$3800 for the winner

[arcticandyb]

So far just short of $4000 has been raised for the first person to convert Mozilla to the Amiga.. anyone started yet?

CNET reports on the DiscreetFX competition - scroll to the bottom.

[Dietmar]

What about changing the rules and offering the bounty to an individual porting the KHTML rendering engine (in form of a shared library)? That's doable and would have much nicer effects for Amiga and Pegasos than porting a monster application.

[DeXXo]

From CNET:

The company (commodore) was liquidated in 1994, but the Amiga PC has miraculously lived on, thanks in part to its diehard fans, who have refused to abandon it.

What diehard fans?  :-D  :-D  :-D

[MarkTime]

That's really quite debatable.

AtheOS has a KHTML port, the guy that wrote atheOS and the KHTML port....pure genius, not many like him.

But the AtheOS team has decided going forward in the future to port the gecko engine as they claim it is more portable.  

Fact is, the gecko engine, separated out from the mozilla app...which btw, mozilla is eol already....but the gecko engine is quite portable and a very competent rendering engine...and I believe this contest has said phoenix, firebird, or some gecko based browser would be suficient to win the contest.

No real need to change the rules, though KHTML would be very nice to have...in fact one person said he's already working on it...

I'm working on doing a browser myself...taking my sweet time about it...but nevertheless...I am working on a browser.

I'm doing a much simpler port of an earlier rendering engine that won't support css, though it would support javascipt and frames....
ahhh, maybe I'd join someone elses effort, assuming they get somewhere and I get somewhere and it makes sense.

[Dietmar]

>Fact is, the gecko engine, separated out from the mozilla app...which btw, mozilla is eol already....but the gecko engine is quite portable and a very competent rendering engine...

From what I've heard (and I don't claim to be an expert), gecko is better as in "compatible with more pages" but otherwise a real mess of code, even mocked by its own maintainers. Apple is reported to have choosen khtml for that reason. I've had a quick look at the kthml source code.  It's surprisingly small: download webcore from Apple and you will find khtml nicely contained in a 3.5MB folder ([edit:] plus 1 MB to detach from qt and use whatever Apple's OS is using).  I have not bothered to download gecko but found a much larger figure via google (7 MB?).

[realstar]

I have to agree with this somewhat.  After doing a bit of research, I think KHTML is a better implemented and slim html standard to support. Mozilla is ok, but honestly I have never cared for the various versions over the years.  I think KHTML has a better chance for being fast, efficient and doing a good job at providing
services to any software that might need HTML support.  Would it be possible to make a KHTML based MUI class perhaps?  That would be ideal.

[MarkTime]

Apple has chosen it, and I looked at webcore, and its great for Mac OS X, I think I'd start with the AtheOS port, rather than apples.

But nevertheless....many people have done gecko based browsers...as well as there are several khtml browsers, and now omniweb will be webcore based even....

While any good browser would be an improvement over the current amiga browsers....on the other hand, if they change the rules of the contest mid stream, they can expect no one to take the contest seriously....its not fair to someone who has done a lot of work, to pull the rug out from under them.

Besides gecko will make the basis of a fine browser, just pick one and move on....oh wait..thats what they did!  :-)

[mikeymike]

@ Dietmar

Two reasons, A: Mozilla uses the Gecko rendering engine, its not like you can just plug in another rendering engine and recompile the source, and B: After so many people have put forward money based on what they read to be the 'terms and conditions', suddenly changing them would mean (to be fair) you would have to refund all the funding and start again.

[Dietmar]

>Apple has chosen it, and I looked at webcore, and its great for Mac OS X, I think I'd start with the AtheOS port, rather than apples.

I'm not so sure. a) the AtheOS/syllable port is an older port b) I haven't heard about AtheOS before you mentioned it but after looking at its web page, it appears to be a Linux clone with a lot of Linux stuff already ported, including a minimal qt. Since qt is the gadget toolkit used by khtml, the AtheOS khtml port might still be based on that (just a guess) which would have made porting significantly easier. Apple, on the other hand,  already has done the untie-khtml-from-qt-and-linux job. One would basically be following their tracks, look at the changes they made, and substitute Amiga APIs. Apple's changes are commented in the source code.

[Dietmar]

>Two reasons, A: Mozilla uses the Gecko rendering engine, its not like you can just plug in another rendering engine and recompile the source.

Once a html engine has been ported, developing a browser around it is comparatively simple. In fact I think it would be better to reward the port of an engine rather than a browser because that would make sure that the engine is ported with re-use in mind (as a "component") and not embedded into/tied to a larger project. That would kickstart browser development.

[TurboLaban]

Since qt is the gadget toolkit used by khtml, the AtheOS khtml port might still be based on that (just a guess) which would have made porting significantly easier. Apple, on the other hand, already has done the untie-khtml-from-qt-and-linux job

Don't forget that Apples WebCore consists of the KHTML library plus the KWQ library. The KWQ library implements the Qt functionality needed by KHTML. The calls to the Qt toolkit is still in KHTML. A port to Amiga would require a similar adapter library as the KWQ to be created for Amiga. Apples library could be used as a reference...

--
Glenn Hisdal

[ne_one]

I agree with this 100%. The core technology is sorely needed - the rest of it is application-orientated. Dropping Gecko into an existing browser framework should not be that difficult.