Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Software Issues and Discussion => Topic started by: Malakie on June 19, 2008, 05:01:19 AM
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Hi all,
Is there an internet web browser for Amiga that is up to date and works in most environments and most websites?
Malakie
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For classic Amiga's you could try IBrowse (http://www.ibrowse-dev.net/).
The main problem with Amiga browsers seem to be a lack of support for CSS and Flash.
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True. Some of us use iBrowse extensively anyway (like right now).
Aweb is worth a look, too. Isn't it open source now?
Voyager was the 3rd option, but I think it is no longer in development.
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If you've got a quick Amiga and you don't mind beta software, you could try OWB (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=35932).
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Aweb and Ibrowse are definately lacking.. I will try that beta out and see how it does.. Would love to get a nice current browser for Amiga since I hate using a PC.
Malakie
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For OWB to be useful you 'll need at least a PPC equipped Amiga with OS4 - and even with a configuration like this sometimes is sloooooooooow. IMHO OWB is meant to be used with AmigaOne...
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Malakie wrote:
Is there an internet web browser for Amiga that is up to date and works in most environments and most websites?
Not a chance. All Amiga web browsers are severely lacking in features and are, in combination with a classic Amiga, a sure way to utter frustration. You can access some older websites, but anything more up to date (like: using CSS) is completely unusable.
The web is useless, even on the most expanded of Amigas. I prefer an extended visit to a dentist... FTP, mail, chat, and Usenet work pretty ok on the Miggy, though.
Browsing on the Amiga is nice to have done just to be able to say it can be done. Once. Not more.
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Jiffy wrote:
The web is useless, even on the most expanded of Amigas.
Thats not entirely true. I quite happily use IBrowse to visit amiga.org, amigaworld.net, amigans.net, pouet.net, groups.yahoo.com, a couple of bugzilla databases, news.bbc.co.uk, etc. etc.
Also, OWB works reasonably well on my A4000/CSPPC/OS4, but its obviously better on my AmigaOne. I sometimes use OWB to visit thedailywtf.com, facebook.com and other websites that are unusable without CSS.
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xeron wrote:
Jiffy wrote:
The web is useless, even on the most expanded of Amigas.
Thats not entirely true. I quite happily use IBrowse to visit amiga.org, amigaworld.net, amigans.net, pouet.net, groups.yahoo.com, a couple of bugzilla databases, news.bbc.co.uk, etc. etc.
Sorry, but surfing the web with an Amiga is complete torture. I have a Pentium 133(!) with 64 MB, running Windows NT4 and IE6. This combination is lightyears ahead of any Amiga when it comes to surfing the web. And I don't even _like_ IE6!
The Amiga can do many things very well, but surfing the web isn't one of them. Even if the few Amiga browsers we have are able to display a site more or less correctly, it remains hideously slow (on highly expanded classic Amigas, that is).
Ofcourse, I do surf the web with my Amiga every now and then, but more out of nostalgia than for anything else. :-)
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Jiffy wrote:
Sorry, but surfing the web with an Amiga is complete torture. I have a Pentium 133(!) with 64 MB, running Windows NT4 and IE6. This combination is lightyears ahead of any Amiga when it comes to surfing the web. And I don't even _like_ IE6!
Like i said, that depends. I use my Amiga to browse the web all the time, because a lot of the sites i happen to visit work great in IBrowse, and even some that don't work fine in OWB.
I'm not saying its as good as it is on the PC, but to say its totally useless, or torture, isn't necessarily true.
BTW, what system were you trying to browse the web on? 020/AGA?
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Like everyone I am normally forced to use a PC for internet work. However I have a laptop that is configured solely with AmiKit and works like an Amiga laptop from bootup on. Thus would like to get better Internet capabilities.
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For MorphOS there's Sputnik, which performs not too shabby. It's even able to annoy you with slow moving dynamic html ads where you always have to carefully spot for the close gadget...
Of course Opera is still lightyears ahead, but Marcik did a great job with Sputnik so far and he hasn't abandoned yet, so there's more to expect. There's also a bounty for Sputnik on OS4, about a port to AROS or 68k I don't know the plans.
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xeron wrote:
I'm not saying its as good as it is on the PC, but to say its totally useless, or torture, isn't necessarily true.
BTW, what system were you trying to browse the web on? 020/AGA?
I have an A1200 with Blizzard 1260, 64 MB fastram and an 18 GB SCSI harddrive, an A2000 with a Blizzard 2040/40, 64 MB fastram, 9 GB SCSI harddrive and a Cybervision 64/3D, and finally an A3000 with A3640/33, 16 MB fastram, 18 GB SCSI harddrive and a Cybervision 64. All of them have a range of extra (but in this case not relevant) hardware. The big boxes use a XSurf card, the A1200 uses a 3Com PCMCIA-card.
Not entirely the fastest Amigas you can find, but no slouches either and most likely better equiped than the average classic Amiga here on Amiga.org...
If I compare one of my (much beloved) Miggies to even a very old pc (the P133 I mentioned, is still in use every now and then) running something ancient like Win 95 or NT4, I hate to admit the pc gives a far better webbrowsing experience.
As my A1200, 2000 and 3000 in their current configuration are at least comparable to something like a late 486 or an early (<100 MHz) Pentium preformancewise, with a much lighter OS requiring less resources, I would expect nothing less than being able to surf the web in a way more or less comparable to an old pc running an old Windows version. And that's not possible. Not even close. Both IBrowse and Aweb are absolutely nót on par with even an old and not to great browser like, say, IE 5, 5.5 or 6.
Pages load extremely slow and very often do not display anywhere near correctly. I don't expect any of my (classic!) Amigas to be able to display Youtube-movies or any of that stuff, I just want them to be able to display ordinary (CSS-)sites in an acceptable way.
That's not to say I don't appreciate the effort of the programmers of both AWeb and IBrowse! I find it highly admirable people are still working to improve those programs and I sincerely hope they will be able to come up with a version of their respective programs which both support more up-to-date webstandards and will be able to display the average website in an acceptable amount of time on any of mu nicely upgraded classic Amigas.
Sorry, but I can't agree with you on the quality of browsing the web on the Amiga. Imo, it's absolute torture. Unfortunately, it is (again imo) the one area the Amiga is severely lacking. Games, video, music, dtp, databases, wordprocessing, programming, mail, chat, ftp: it all works great. But browsing the web? Nah...
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Well, here is what browsing the web is like on my Amigas:
Browsing the web on the amiga (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YfYrSj5zuY)
Sorry for the quality, i filmed it on my phone.
I would put the original 150Mb file online, but i don't want to pay for the bandwidth, so if someone else wants to host the original .mp4 file, let me know.
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Sorry, but I can't agree with you on the quality of browsing the web on the Amiga. Imo, it's absolute torture.
It depends on your system - use a graphics card and it is not torture by any means. My system is a fast as my 1.5ghz laptop on basic pages.
But, CSS & Flash support is lacking, as is JAVA. Javascript pages ARE slow.
However, for the few sites I browse, IB2.4 is more than adequate.
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At home I only use IBrowse for browsing. Mainly on Pegasos (==real fast amiga) and sometimes on A1200, 060/60, Voodoo3, 128M, 10/100 etc.
All sites I use daily work ok.. Amiga sites, tv guides, online tabloids, scene pages, bank accounts, torrent sites, etc. Of course there's lots of pages which don't show up correctly, but even then most are usable. Some sites need enabling or disabling javascript or other plugins, but they can be configured per site for permanent use.
But the thing I love surfing with IBrowse is the speed and usability of it. I just can't do things as fast on PC browsers. And you can't see the speed if you have only Zorro2 gfx card.. not to talk about AGA. And one BIG advantage is that you can surf safely with Amiga, no need to think about spyware and trojans with every click. Just go wildly :)
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pVC wrote:
At home I only use IBrowse for browsing. Mainly on Pegasos (==real fast amiga) and sometimes on A1200, 060/60, Voodoo3, 128M, 10/100 etc.
Both of which are not quite easily obtainable. The Pegasos can't be compared to any classic Amiga performancewise, it's in a different league and alleviates much of the performancetroubles the classic Amigas have. It would certainly give you the power to not suffer the horrendous slowness of loading webpages on a classic Amiga, albeit expanded.
All sites I use daily work ok.. Amiga sites, tv guides, online tabloids, scene pages, bank accounts, torrent sites, etc. Of course there's lots of pages which don't show up correctly, but even then most are usable. Some sites need enabling or disabling javascript or other plugins, but they can be configured per site for permanent use.
Most sites I use do not work ok. They might load eventually (more or less), but as they quite often do not show up correctly, it gets near unusable. And I find configuring my browser per site(!!) totally unacceptable.
But the thing I love surfing with IBrowse is the speed and usability of it. I just can't do things as fast on PC browsers. And you can't see the speed if you have only Zorro2 gfx card.. not to talk about AGA.
Come on... The speed and usability? You can't do things as fast on PC browsers? A graphics card does indeed improve performance compared to just AGA, but comparing out of date software, severely lacking in standard(!) features such as CSS which many sites use, running on out of date hardware to modern and highly configurable browsers (Firefox 2/3, Opera 9.something or IE7 running on modern hardware is not realistic. It is not acceptable for me to have to wait, say, 30 to 60 seconds to check if a webpage loads to an acceptable/usable level or not at all. If it's not on my screen in about 5 seconds: tough luck, other site. "Ooooh! This site isn't displaying correctly! I should reconfigure my browser to be able to see it!"
I can understand there are certain niche-programs for the Amiga which are bot well designed and well programmed and do not have a real equivalent on a modern pc, but browsing the web on the Amiga can nót be compared to browsing the web on any pc.
Again, if I run IE6(!) on an old P1/133 with NT4, I can use almost any website without problems, with decent speed and without the need to reconfigure my browser per site. Adding something to display or hear some kind of multimediastream, ok, but that's about as far as I will go for a certain website.
And one BIG advantage is that you can surf safely with Amiga, no need to think about spyware and trojans with every click. Just go wildly :)
True, true... ;-)
Although I have to say, I don't really get annoyed about viruses and spyware with my Ubuntu 8.04 box...
All in all, browsing the web on a classic Amiga (no, the Pegasos is nót a classic Amiga) is torture. Graphics cards do improve on the severe lack of speed a lot, compared to AGA, but it still remains slow and cumbersome. Many pages do not display correctly, if at all.
I understand I do not have the fastest Amigas around, but come on: an A1200 with AGA, 68060/50 and 64 MB fastram, an A2000 with 68040/40, 64 MB fastram and CV64/3D and an A3000 with 68040/33, 16 MB fastram and CV64 should be able to run a decent browser and display the average webpage in a decent quality at a decent speed. I don't ask for perfection, but I need a certain level of usability. Which browsing on classic Amigas unfortunately can't deliver. If IE6 would run on OS3.x, I would be pleased. If it would run on any of my Amigas at a speed comparable to the average 486 running Win9x or NT4, I would be happy.
I'm eagerly awaiting new versions of IBrowse and AWeb, in the hope it gets better. Until now, new versions of both have indeed been improvements, so all is not lost. :-)
Small addition: I expect the problem with browsing the web on the Amiga is 'just' software. The OS is great, hardware ditto and the combination should have more than enough power to browse the web. Which leaves the browsers...
If you can browse the web on a C64/128 (which I have), it should be heaven to do so on an extremely more powerfull Amiga. Or am I wrong?
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Would it make any sense to use open source browser like Mozilla and port it to Amiga? Although I would be guessing that it would be slow on classic Amigas.
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Would it make any sense to use open source browser like Mozilla and port it to Amiga?
Try a quick search of mozilla, firefox and amizilla. Considering nothing has ever come out of these projects I'd say "no". It's just too large project for the amount of active skillful developers left.
For example AmiZilla started somewhere in 2003 I believe, and now 5 years later it hasn't really progressed much. It wasn't exactly hard to predict (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=11450) however.
But something much simpler than Mozilla would be possible. It'd still be pretty darned slow, however.
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Come on... The speed and usability? You can't do things as fast on PC browsers? A graphics card does indeed improve performance compared to just AGA, but comparing out of date software, severely lacking in standard(!) features such as CSS which many sites use, running on out of date hardware to modern and highly configurable browsers (Firefox 2/3, Opera 9.something or IE7 running on modern hardware is not realistic. It is not acceptable for me to have to wait, say, 30 to 60 seconds to check if a webpage loads to an acceptable/usable level or not at all. If it's not on my screen in about 5 seconds: tough luck, other site. "Ooooh! This site isn't displaying correctly! I should reconfigure my browser to be able to see it!"
For me the speed comes from many small things from GUI, OS, browser, habits etc. All counted together makes browsing much more comfortable on Amiga than on PC browsers. Some of it might just be that I don't know how to get most of the PC browsers and haven't noticed all the features, but that's the current situation :)
Some examples which comes in mind quickly... clipboard handling, I can quickly copy current url to clipboard or from clipboard with single selection without selecting url field or painting url or clicking more than one click and without having to press enter after it. Copying text from pages to clipboard with single drag without selecting "copy" etc. Good scrolling options, you can scroll pages properly on all directions with mmb or scroll button on gui. It's done very well on Amiga unlike on PC browsers :) Switching between many programs/screens, it's instant even on very low end Amiga when even on 1.6GHz PC you can see things drawn on screen and if Windows is swapping you have to wait too much. That kind of little waits annoy you if you haven't used to them in daily use. I usually browse on Amiga without javascript, flash etc. They're easy enable or disable on the fly. On PC they're usually enabled and may even need some external noscript etc plugins to disable (which you can't do if it's not your own PC). It's faster to browse and load pages if there isn't all kinds of ads jumping on your face all the time.
Page loading is also faster on IBrowse if you think about cpu used. On Pegasos pages load faster than on PC:s I've used. On my Amiga it it bit slower, but max that 5 secs usually. Many times I don't have patience for that 5 secs either. Good thing on IBrowse is, that it shows content while loading. So you don't have to wait all pics etc loaded before you can judge if the page has valuable information for you. On some browsers they show page when it's completely loaded and THAT is annoying wait.
With your mentions about 30-60s page loads, I agree that would be totally unacceptable. Last time I surfed with anything less than 68060 it wasn't like that, but in last years the pages have become much heavier. People have forget good manners of having reasonable content on their pages... maybe it's like that on slower computers nowadays then.
Again, if I run IE6(!) on an old P1/133 with NT4, I can use almost any website without problems, with decent speed and without the need to reconfigure my browser per site. Adding something to display or hear some kind of multimediastream, ok, but that's about as far as I will go for a certain website.
You have to remember than no 68k Amiga is nowhere as powerful as P1/133 is. Overclocked 060 might come close, but even 040 is far from it.
Although I have to say, I don't really get annoyed about viruses and spyware with my Ubuntu 8.10 box...
True :) I might have something to say about GUI on Linux systems, but that's the other story ;)
I understand I do not have the fastest Amigas around, but come on: an A1200 with AGA, 68060/50 and 64 MB fastram, an A2000 with 68040/40, 64 MB fastram and CV64/3D and an A3000 with 68040/33, 16 MB fastram and CV64 should be able to run a decent browser and display the average webpage in a decent quality at a decent speed.
In my opinion, you overestimate your Amiga setups little in web surfing case. AGA is the real bottleneck no matter how fast CPU you have. CV64/3D might be somehow reasonable IF it would be in Zorro3 bus. In A2000 it's in Zorro2 bus and that's bottleneck too. Zorro2 throughput is about same as on AGA (<4MB/s!), you only get better modes and little acceleration. In my experience you can't use CV64/3D in Zorro2 any better than 800x600x16bit and it's still slowish even with 060. It was huge jump for me to move from that kind of setup to PCI bus with Voodoo3. If you would have more memory on your A3000, I'd say it would be much more pleasant to have gfx card in it instead even when cpu is little slower. Anyway, I guess that most active classic Amiga users have 060 and PCI setups nowadays and it's pretty much minimum if you're looking for comfortable surfing. Even the basic jpeg decoding isn't the lightest job for <040, so I don't know if it's possible to make any faster rendering on lower end Amigas :)
Edit: Oops, you had gfxcard in a3k too. I guess it's 040 and memory then.
If you can browse the web on a C64/128 (which I have), it should be heaven to do so on an extremely more powerfull Amiga. Or am I wrong?
Well.. I guess C64 browsing skips pretty much stuff and it can't be ever visually acceptable, but if you want Amiga to support everything in modern web.. it might not be enough. It's balance with speed and supported things. But of course we hope that we'd get more modern options. CSS has seem to become the most important feature missing, but would require writing current engines from scratch :(
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Just my humble 2 cents worth, I find IBrowse to be responsive on the sites I visit. I normally run with Javascript OFF, which greatly improves usability.
I even prefer my Amiga browsing experience on sites like A.org, eBay, Yahoo, Wikipedia, etc. to booting my new XP laptop and using it.
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LOL You can actually Browse on the C-64!! Never knew that.. so cool! It is STILL my favorite computer ever of all time. Wish I still had one to be honest. I also had an SX-64 and loved it.. Man how I wish I still had one.
Anyhow, it is to bad more high end developers are not still around and working on Amiga projects. Ultimately that will be the cause of the true end if that does not change. If no one writes code, the machine is useless.
I would prefer to browse the Internet on my Amiga but alas based on the comments, it appears that is just not to be.
Malakie
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Gee Wiz!
Don't take any one's comments as gospel (except maybe mine, grin). It's clear A.org members represent the entire spectrum of expectation. We have no shortage of negativity here. It's often shocking to me how people go on at great length about how limited, out-of-date, poorly concieved, under-powered, unusable, hobyist-only, games-only, collectable-only, unworthy of serious consideration, etc, the Amiga is. All this on a site founded to promote and celebrate what a unique and relevant experience operating an Amiga can be.
Experience it for yourself!
You will then be more useful and better informed.
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Tenacious wrote:
Gee Wiz!
Don't take any one's comments as gospel (except maybe mine, grin). It's clear A.org members represent the entire spectrum of expectation. We have no shortage of negativity here. It's often shocking to me how people go on at great length about how limited, out-of-date, poorly concieved, under-powered, unusable, hobyist-only, games-only, collectable-only, unworthy of serious consideration, etc, the Amiga is. All this on a site founded to promote and celebrate what a unique and relevant experience operating an Amiga can be.
Experience it for yourself!
You will then be more useful and better informed.
Heh... believe me I realize this. I also agree with you that it is ironic in the sense of what people say here and on other sites. As long as the two systems I do still own function, I will keep using them for many things I do in computing.
I have been absent for quite a while and am trying to catch back up on things. I must be coming across as a newbie.. other than being way behind on news, the latest software and so forth, I am a long way from being new to the Amiga in any fashion. There are some areas I have fallen behind on in terms of what is happening, the latest and greatest and what does and does not work. Simply trying to catch up.
In fact, I could probably safely say I have had more inside experience with Commodore and the Amiga than many around. I say that because I was part of the Commodore and Amiga team from the mid 80's to early 90's. Working for Commodore was pretty nice especially since it happened to be my favorite computer company starting when the vic-20 came out.
It worked out great in terms of my careers as well. I started in the US Navy, got hurt, was recruited by CBM, worked there, also started small Amiga dev company.. then Amiga and CBM died, went back to work for government in law enforcement, got hurt again to where I am pretty much out of the game and am now sitting here typing on my computer keyboard trying to catch up on all that I missed, all that has changed and where things stand.
Malakie
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It’s always funny to see threads discussing iBrowse as if it’s actually possible for a new user to obtain it.
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@ Terse
As far as I know, you still can't get new registrations. I would find this frustrating if I didn't already have one.
@ Malakie
Sorry.
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Tenacious wrote:
@ Malakie
Sorry.
What ya apologizing for? ;-) You didn't say anything wrong at all.. Just letting you know I am versed to save you some typing! :-D
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Piru wrote:
Would it make any sense to use open source browser like Mozilla and port it to Amiga?
Try a quick search of mozilla, firefox and amizilla. Considering nothing has ever come out of these projects I'd say "no". It's just too large project for the amount of active skillful developers left.
For example AmiZilla started somewhere in 2003 I believe, and now 5 years later it hasn't really progressed much. It wasn't exactly hard to predict (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=11450) however.
But something much simpler than Mozilla would be possible. It'd still be pretty darned slow, however.
Who the hell screwed up the Internet and made it so demanding to view it in the first place? (no need to answer rhetorical questions)
Wasn't there also an attempt to port Opera? I thought it was supposed to be a light weight browser when it first came out.
Maybe there would be more interest today than there was in 2003 since it is obvious that AInc. or any other company is NOT going to provide an Amiga browser, the community is going to have to do it. I guess I should just go join the Open AWeb team and see what way I can help.
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Malakie wrote:
LOL You can actually Browse on the C-64!! Never knew that.. so cool!
You can browse on the MSX too with graphics !!. But there's a cheat to do it.... Anyway, it's cool!!!
http://uzix.sourceforge.net/uzix2.0/index.php?page=scrsht&lang=us
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Wasn't there also an attempt to port Opera?
No, Opera is a propietary project.
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pVC wrote:
You have to remember than no 68k Amiga is nowhere as powerful as P1/133 is. Overclocked 060 might come close, but even 040 is far from it.
I know a P1/133 is more powerful compared to a 68k Amiga, but the P1 I mentioned is also running a múch heavier OS (NT4) combined with a múch larger browser (IE6) than any of my Miggies, leveling the playing field a little.
I would be delighted when an Amiga browser would exist with the capabilities IE6 has, which would run on any of my Amiga's as fast as it would do on a comparable 486.
I just booted an ancient 486DX2/66 with 32 MB and just ISA-cards inside, running Win95 and IE5.5, which has been sitting in a corner for years now. Not exactly a recent setup (IE5.5 has been around since about 2000), to say the least. It's not the greatest for browsing the web and stíll it is much better than any of my classic Amigas, both speedwise and in displaying pages correctly. I find that disturbing, to say the least... ;-)
In my opinion, you overestimate your Amiga setups little in web surfing case.
<>
Edit: Oops, you had gfxcard in a3k too. I guess it's 040 and memory then.
Nah, I don't think I really overestimate my Amiga setups. I know their limitations when it comes to AGA or ZII bandwidth. I think I'm not to far off, if I compare them to a similarly configured 486 with Win95, just equiped with ISA-cards. Many things work great with my Amigas and I like it when I can put them to good use, even when I have much more powerful and up to date computers sitting in the same room. And my Amigas are still very acceptable when it comes to e-mail, FTP, Usenet, irc and stuff.
Well.. I guess C64 browsing skips pretty much stuff and it can't be ever visually acceptable,
True. But you can browse the web using a 1 MHz 8 bit computer with 64 KB ram. It's lousy, slow, doesn't support a lot and it is indeed only acceptable from a viewpoint of nostalgia and the huge 'look at this!'-factor, but it cán be done. And if it is (more or less) possible on a C64 (or an MSX, for that matter), it should be (more or less) usable on a reasonably expanded classic (68k) Amiga.
but if you want Amiga to support everything in modern web.. it might not be enough. It's balance with speed and supported things. But of course we hope that we'd get more modern options. CSS has seem to become the most important feature missing, but would require writing current engines from scratch :(
I don't expect it to support everything in the modern web, but I would expect a decent 68k Amiga (68040 and up, with RTG-card and, say, 32 MB or more) to perform about on par with a 486 or even an early P1 (<100 MHz). Unfortunately, the 486 with ISA-graphics wins hands down... :-(
CSS-support would be a fantastic improvement, though.
And yes, if there is ever a new update to either AWeb or IBrowse, I will install them happily. :-)
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From a technical standpoint, the Amiga and its networking capabilities are easily up to par for Internet browsing. The problem has nothing to do with the Amiga hardware itself. In fact an A500 or A1000 (with appropriate ram and networking additions could handle net traffic with ease.
The problem does come down solely to software. And not just someone writing a browser. It comes down to someone writing a browser for the Amiga! There is a big difference in an app written using PC standards and Amiga standards. You code a browser based and actually USING Amiga hardware (custom chips etc) as it was intended and designed and you can blow away any PC browsing experience.
And therein lies the problem. How many top level, high and low level coders are left that truly know Amiga hardware well enough to write a browser for the Amiga and not just because of it?
For those that disagree.. think of it this way... The Amiga can ray trace and produce awesome sound and handle graphics like no tomorrow.. BUT ONLY with software written specifically for the hardware allowing it to do it with that great design and those custom chips. Yet it cannot be utilized and coded to handle awesome internet browsing?
Had I that level of coding experience I would do it... alas I am and was more of a hardware guy than a coder and never put myself down to really getting into the coding side of the Amiga.... wish I had now.... but then again I was busy enough working on the hardware! :crazy:
Malakie
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amigadave wrote:
Who the hell screwed up the Internet and made it so demanding to view it in the first place? (no need to answer rhetorical questions)
That's the biggest problem IMHO. There's not good enough control and everyone is trying to invent new things for their browsers etc. And the worst thing is that in most cases pages could easily be done to look exactly the same in standard html, but then users or page generators use the most bloatest things for simple tasks. Simple and common example is to use javascript for normal links.
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Malakie wrote:
From a technical standpoint, the Amiga and its networking capabilities are easily up to par for Internet browsing. The problem has nothing to do with the Amiga hardware itself. In fact an A500 or A1000 (with appropriate ram and networking additions could handle net traffic with ease.
The problem does come down solely to software. And not just someone writing a browser. It comes down to someone writing a browser for the Amiga! There is a big difference in an app written using PC standards and Amiga standards. You code a browser based and actually USING Amiga hardware (custom chips etc) as it was intended and designed and you can blow away any PC browsing experience.
I agree completely. The hardware of Amiga in general is more than capable to run decent software for displaying graphics and texts simultaneously. Heck, that's what the whole bloody machine was famous for! Especially the more expanded Amigas (I am again referring to my own Miggies) can be easily compared to perform like a fast 486 or an early P1.
Unfortunately, the Amiga world now only exists in the form of a few thousand hobbyists, which is not exactly in the same league as the tens of millions of pc-users. Although I expect (just a guess, but I don't expect to be very wrong on this one) the percentage of Amiga users who are capable programmers is far higher compared to the pc market, it is a matter of sheer size: there are not many Amiga programmers left, let alone ones who are capable of programming a capable browser. The current ones who are more or less usable (AWeb & IBrowse) lack important features, features which are so much important as to almost disqualify both programs as realistic alternatives to other (Windows/Linux/OSX) browsers.
I sincerely hope the remaining programmers working on the current versions of both Amiga browsers will be able to produce a decent upgrade for their programs. An upgrade which will be both usable on nicely upgraded classic Amigas when it comes to speed and be able to display the average website correctly.
And to be honest, although I realize the limitations of AGA (I really love my 1200) I fail to see why it would completely cripple any browsing experience. AGA is, although old, a very capable chipset which can display graphics nice and fast. You can use all kinds of graphics software with it and to this day be amazed at the quality and speed of it and then people are trying to tell me it's almost impossible to display a lousy webpage with some teenie-weenie pictures splattered across without grinding a pretty hefty 1200 to a halt because of AGA?
Again, if it is possible to (more or less) display a frakking webpage on a 1 MHz 8 bit computer with 64 KB ram, I expect the same page to be displayed immensely superior in terms of quality, speed and usability on a 50 MHz, 32 bit computer with 64 MB ram and tons of extra hardware. And although that webpage is indeed displayed in a better quality, the difference is not as big as I would expect it to be when comparing the hardware. The same webpage is displayed múch faster, in higher quality and with many, many more features with much less errors while viewing it on a lousy 486 running a piece of crap like IE6! I frakking hate that 486 just for being able to display a bloody website correctly and with an acceptable speed which my A1200/2000/3000 can't! ;-)
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You guys are hitting on the prime reason that I feel that technology is becoming less about improvement and more about fashion, trendiness, and marketing. Some aspects of using a computer have not improved in the last 15 or 20 years, it's just a lot more bloated.
The most exciting thing I've seen in a long time is the PS3. Video content is finally moving into the hands of the audience, the way music moved to Mp3 a few years ago. This will probably hurt movie theaters.
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Jiffy wrote:
And to be honest, although I realize the limitations of AGA (I really love my 1200) I fail to see why it would completely cripple any browsing experience. AGA is, although old, a very capable chipset which can display graphics nice and fast. You can use all kinds of graphics software with it and to this day be amazed at the quality and speed of it and then people are trying to tell me it's almost impossible to display a lousy webpage with some teenie-weenie pictures splattered across without grinding a pretty hefty 1200 to a halt because of AGA?
Again, if it is possible to (more or less) display a frakking webpage on a 1 MHz 8 bit computer with 64 KB ram, I expect the same page to be displayed immensely superior in terms of quality, speed and usability on a 50 MHz, 32 bit computer with 64 MB ram and tons of extra hardware. And although that webpage is indeed displayed in a better quality, the difference is not as big as I would expect it to be when comparing the hardware. The same webpage is displayed múch faster, in higher quality and with many, many more features with much less errors while viewing it on a lousy 486 running a piece of crap like IE6! I frakking hate that 486 just for being able to display a bloody website correctly and with an acceptable speed which my A1200/2000/3000 can't! ;-)
Again it comes down to simply coding for the hardware design.
Some have compared say an A4000/04 to a i486 pc. I disagree there again. Now if you run two identical programs coded exactly alike, one compiled on PC and one compiled on Amiga, then ok yea they are equal. But if you code the Amiga version specifically to take direct advantage of hardware, that Amiga will run comparable to any machine today in terms of processing power. Speed up the Amiga processor clock more and one could easily beat even top level PC's today IF the code is specifically written for the Amiga hardware design.
And I can prove it.. or I could proveit that is if the Battletech centers were still around and operating.. I doubt any of them are today.
For those that do not know, the Battletech centers were built in a number of cities including the first one in Chicago. They were basically 16 individual {bleep}pits networked together, each with its own Amiga 500 heart and soul inside, running a FULL 3D virtual {bleep}pit simulation of FASA's Mechs from their Battletech series of games.
You see I was part of the team that help get those running and on a personal note, man was it freaking cool!! :-D Sitting in your OWN actual Battlemech style {bleep}pit with controls on each arm rest, pedals, main screen and buttons and knobs... as if you were sitting inside an actual Battlemech, and knowing there were 15 other people sitting in their own {bleep}pits ready to battle it out with you in on of the first true 3D simulation systems back then.
Anyhow, there came a time when the designers were having some problems, especially with not only rendering speed but main game engine processing speed. My team (from the company I mentioned earlier I started) came in and it was kind of a nice coup on the programmers they had there. They had spent weeks tweaking, changing, rewriting, altering and anything you can think of to the code to get it to run at a speed that was workable.. The best they had managed was 4 or 5 {bleep}pits at once and that was really pushing it. Obviously not acceptable by any means.
I remember that day because it was a major breakthrough for the centers to become a true reality. First, they had tried numerous 3D accelerator cards on the A500 boards but none worked. Constant crashes, hardware faults etc. This was some really high level code remember for what they were trying to do. So the first thing I did was have them plug one of the hardware products we produced... which once I give the name here, I am sure some of you will have heard of.
We plugged Sapphire 020 cards into each and every {bleep}pits A500 board. I was absolutely sure our small little board would do what was needed even though the big names had failed completely to work in this situation. I do not know why I knew my card would work, but I just knew. It took about 5 minutes to plug one Sapphire into each {bleep}pit board and power all of them up.... and for the very first time we had 16 fully running {bleep}pits without them crashing.
BUT frame rates were still not anywhere acceptable. At first I was wondering what the heck was going on... then I realized two things. 1) the code was compiled with NO 68020/30/40 optimizations. BTW, the Sapphire 020 was a bare bones 68020 & 68881 processor board with NO RAM on board. Our design utilized the Amiga's own onboard ram instead of relying on its own. This made a HUGE difference in compatibility.... thus the reason our little card became known for being one of the most compatible accelerator cards.
But to get full benefit, you needed at least a 1meg Amiga and the code you were running needed to be compiled with the 020 optimizations turned on. Many Amiga users back then did know that nor realize how many software apps back then really did not reach full potential because of this one over-site by programmers. Had more software done and been compiled this way, well..let's just say many people are not aware of the real speed even an A500 could reach.
Once I pointed this out, the programmers recompiled a few main code libraries and programs for the Battletech code and we then ran another test. And wham, in just 30 minutes they went from a system that was starting to look as if it may never truly become viable to 16 full {bleep}pits up and running at the same time with nary a crash AND with very nice frames per second rendering.
However that was not the only issue. We also pointed out that much of the code was NOT even touching on or taking ANY advantage of the Amiga's main strength... MULTITASKING via the custom Amiga chipset! It took them some weeks of work, but they recoded to take true advantage of not just the Sapphire 020 board but the inherent Amiga custom chips and well the rest is history. From what I remember, there were 17 centers built around the world in many major cities. Now that I think about all this, I wonder if any of them are still actually running.. would that not be cool!
Suffice it to say, those programmers learned one small but hugely important thing about the Amiga. You cannot code it like a PC or any other computer in the world because it is just far superior - even by today's standards and yes, it is STILL today in my personal opinion, a system that if we had people coding for it the way it was designed, would be blowing away even the dual core 2.8GHz system I am typing on now.
Had Commodore not died, today we would have Amiga's running on 68220 (heh) chips (yet still at a clock speed of only around 500 mhz or so - remember, 7.16 mhz started this whole thing!), a custom Amiga chipset design that had grown at the same pace as the pc market's advances have and if this had happened, we would have an Amiga that would probably be closer to a multi-processing, hyper-threaded, Cray than anything the PC OR Mac world could even attempt to match.
In my opinion, Take an Amiga 4000 with a 68060 or 68080, a nice Video graphics card and appropriate ram etc etc and some properly written Amiga code coded for the custom chipset and it will blow away any system in the PC market today running an equivalent software package.
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I agree completely. The hardware of Amiga in general is more than capable to run decent software for displaying graphics and texts simultaneously. Heck, that's what the whole bloody machine was famous for! Especially the more expanded Amigas (I am again referring to my own Miggies) can be easily compared to perform like a fast 486 or an early P1.
I think you're nmissing something very fundamental. The CPU has to decode the graphics first, before they can be displayed. Jpgs especially, take a lOT of processor time and that's where the slowdown is. It's nothing to do with the actual displaying, it's the preparing of the data to display. And even thougb I have an 060 with 196mb RAM, displaying jpgs using WarpDT is still considerably slower than on a PC.
Having said that, as I said earlier on, my Amiga is easily as fast as my 1.5mhz laptop, on non-graphics pages, if not faster. So I would suggest that IB is very well written, but with a slow CPU, no amount of brillant coding will increase the Amiga's speed.
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wurzel wrote:
I think you're nmissing something very fundamental. The CPU has to decode the graphics first, before they can be displayed. Jpgs especially, take a lOT of processor time and that's where the slowdown is. It's nothing to do with the actual displaying, it's the preparing of the data to display. And even thougb I have an 060 with 196mb RAM, displaying jpgs using WarpDT is still considerably slower than on a PC.
I don't think I'm missing anything fundamental. Again, I am NOT comparing any of my Amigas to any recent pc, I am comparing it to both a P1/133 ánd a 486DX2/66, also in my possesion. I have had that particular 486 since 1993. The 486 is equiped with an ISA-videocard, an ISA-networkcard, 32 MB ram, two 540 MB PIO-0 hard drives and is running Win95 with IE5.5. Hardwarewise, my Amigas are superior to this particular 486 in almost any respect. OS3.9 runs circles (speedwise) around Win95. The 486 is definitely slower than the P1/133 with NT4, but still displays almost any webpage at a more or less decent speed and in an acceptable quality. My Amigas (1200, 2000, 3000) trump this particular 486 with almost any software I use on them, whether it be games, graphics, DTP, wordprocessing, spreadsheets, utilities and the like. The sole part in which they are _completely_ inferior is when it comes to webbrowsing.
Please notice, I am nót comparing my own Amigas to a dualcore AMD cpu running at 3.2 GHZ with 2 GB ram. I am comparing them to a 15 year old 486, equiped with an OS which arrived on the market in 1995, running a browser from the year 2000. I don't think that comparison is unfair. My Amigas have more memory, faster harddrives, equally fast or faster cpus and have an OS requiring less resources than the 486.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the JPGs you mentioned, which, ofcourse, have to be decoded by the cpu first before being displayed, also have to be decoded by the 486 before they can be displayed. Is a 486DX2/66 thát much faster than a 68060/50 when it comes to decoding JPGs?
Having said that, as I said earlier on, my Amiga is easily as fast as my 1.5mhz laptop, on non-graphics pages, if not faster.
I would certainly hope your Amiga (whether it is expanded to the brim or plain vanilla) is at least equally as fast, if not faster, than your 1.5 MHz laptop. What is it? An overclocked SX64? :-D
All in all, I come to the conclusion that you find the webbrowsers on a classic Amiga to be of an acceptable quality, both speedwise and in displaying pages correctly, while I do not.
The speed is, imo, extremely lousy and many pages will not display correctly, if at all. The current browsers lack speed and features and unfortunately can't even be compared to a 15(!) year old pc.
I can put any person behind that old 486, start IE5.5 and they're able to browse the web, every once in a while muttering that is much slower than their own pc at home but still getting things done. If I put them behind my A1200, 2000 or 3000 and boot either AWeb or IBrowse, they will not mutter anymore, they simply will stop trying after a few minutes as the lack of speed makes it unworkable, while many websites they visit are only functioning partially, if at all.
I am not including non-classic Amigas such as the Pegasos, as I do not have any experience with them, although I fully accept they are immensely superior (speedwise) compared to a classic Amiga, which will ofcourse improve the usability of browsers on the Amiga, although the lack of features of both IBrowse and AWeb isn't affected by the extra speed Pegasos offers.
The current browsers for the Amiga lack speed and features. The Amigahardware is more than capable to handle the amount of data the average webpage throws at it, the OS is small, speedy and effective, but the current browsers are not up to their task in their current versions.
As I mentioned before in one of my previous posts: I would be extremely happy with a webbrowser with about the same features as IE6 (or even IE5.5 for that matter), running about as fast as IE6 would do on a 486DX2/66.
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Your web browsing experience on your Amiga does depend on your hardware and your web browser. i used to use ibrowse 2.4 on an A4000 68060 cv64 1024x 768 16 bit screen with a high speed zorro serial port. I did not have a site i couldn't use that involved getting text, picture and gifs, filling in forms, passwords, even banking . in fact not having a flash plug-in made my experience faster and free from all the advertising drivel. And my bandwith use was about 30% of the PC viewing the same pages due to no flash and using web caching. email retrieval and sending is faster on Amiga than on PC. i think i would happy if amiga had css support, but i couldn't give a stuff about flash or real player video's, just a waste of bandwidth and a colossal waste of technology
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stefcep2 wrote:
Your web browsing experience on your Amiga does depend on your hardware and your web browser.
Ehrm... Is this serious? We're talking about computers here... Ofcóurse it is depending on your hardware and your web browser! What else would it depend on? The temperature of my cup of coffee?
i used to use ibrowse 2.4 on an A4000 68060 cv64 1024x 768 16 bit screen with a high speed zorro serial port. I did not have a site i couldn't use that involved getting text, picture and gifs, filling in forms, passwords, even banking .
I find that highly unlikely. No site you couldn't use? There are huge amounts of sites that require the support of CSS to be able to use them. No CSS-support is no functioning website on your screen, period. And a serial port, albeit fast? What year are we talking about? Five, ten years ago? Websites were different then. My Amigas have been connected to my router through either a PCMCIA-nic (3Com509) or a XSurf card for years now, so bandwidth is no issue. Most sites expect you to have a broadband connection and I can't blame them. Websites today are different compared to websites 10 years ago. They are larger and more complex.
I am not asking something extreme. I have several decent Amiga setups, capable of outperforming a comparable 486 and P133 on many tasks with relative ease, except(!) when it comes to webbrowsing. Amiga browsers suck when comparing them to IE6, both when it comes to speed and even more so when it comes to displaying sites without to many errors.
Browsing with an Amiga is not funny: it's always a question if a site I want to visit will function or not. On the 15 year old 486, I do not have that problem... It's not the hardware: the Amigas I have (much) more powerful compared to the 486. Ergo, it's the software holding my Amigas back.
email retrieval and sending is faster on Amiga than on PC.
That might be so, but I wasn't denying that either as it wasn't part of the discussion. Email works fine on the Miggy, although I hardly ever use it. I like YAM, but as it doesn't support IMAP-folders, I hardly ever use it. I'm eagerly awaiting the 2.6 release... Still Q4, 2008?
i think i would happy if amiga had css support, but i couldn't give a stuff about flash or real player video's, just a waste of bandwidth and a colossal waste of technology
Same here. CSS is vital. Any browser nót supporting CSS is completely out of date as there are literally millions of websites requiring it. Any type of videosupport or animation (flash, real player, whatever) is not required by me, although I have to say it should be included nonetheless, with the option of switching it off: switch it off when you have a classic Amiga and want to be able to have decent speed, switch it on when you use something like Pegasos, A1 or the like which are fast enough to not stumble and fall over the extra data which has to be transfered.
Still, I fail to see why AWeb and IBrowse would be as slow as they are compared to a 486. People have mentioned that it's the lack of RTG (forgetting I have RTG-cards in two of the mentioned machines) or it's the ZorroII bus (forgetting I compared it to a lousy 486 with ISA ánd my A3000 runs a CV64, which only operates in ZorroIII-mode), the lack of memory (the A1200 and 2000 have twice as much ram compared to the 486) or a slow cpu (a 68060/50 is slower than a 486DX2/66? Really?).
The Amigas I have (and use, as a hobbyist) have some pretty hefty expansions and are more than a match compared to a bloody ISA-based 486DX2/66 with 32 MB ram and two crappy PIO-0 drives. When standing side-by-side, the 486 tramples any of my Amigas when browsing the web. It is faster and displays more pages correctly. And therefor I hate its bl..dy guts! ;-)
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"No CSS-support is no functioning website on your screen"
wrong! bad displayed (of course) but perfectly useable.
Did you meant Flash/java based pages perhaps?
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Framiga wrote:
"No CSS-support is no functioning website on your screen"
wrong! bad displayed (of course) but perfectly useable.
Wrong. Without CSS-suppport, it is certainly badly displayed and _may_ be usable in certain areas sometimes, depending on how heavily deformed the layout is without a functioning CSS-system. But there's a very good chance you're missing areas of that particular website. This can be because the lay-out is so badly f*cked up, you just overlook certain areas, but it can also be because certain parts aren't displayed at all.
Did you meant Flash/java based pages perhaps?
No. If that was the case, I would have called it flash or java...
I find it a little peculiar people are relentlesly trying to convince me either I have a lousy Amiga setup or my demands concerning webbrowsers are to high as they work perfectly fine for them.
Sorry, but I stand by my claim: the current browsers which run on on a decently expanded 68k Amiga (AWeb & IBrowse) are not able to perform equal to a humble 15-year old 486 based pc when it comes to speed and the ability to display the average webpage. Classic Amigas are lousy for browsing the web.
There are literally millions of sites using CMSs for maintaining their content (even I use one), the majority of them using CSS for their layout. They are ranging from small personal websites to larger corporate ones. Amigabrowsers do not support that (and other, imo less important stuff) and therefor can not display those pages in a usable fashion. A completely {bleep}ed up layout is not usable. I immediately admit the level of usability relies on how much the layout is {bleep}ed up. Some sites might be usable to a certain extent, others are not usable at all.
Again, as I have now said many times over: I do not expect perfection, I do not expect blistering speed and I do not compare my Amigas with current computers. I want the average website to be displayed in about the same way with about the same speed as a 486 does while running IE5.5/IE6. My Amigas are at least equal in hardwareperformance to my 486/P133 and even surpass them on many levels. OS3.x is much more responsive and needs much less resources compared to Win95/NT4. And still, both the 486 and the P133 trample my Amigas when it comes to browsing the web. Yes, certain pages display correctly on the Amiga, but many others do not.
The Amiga hardware I have and use is good, both in design and in speed. So is the OS. It outperforms equally old pcs with ease and sometimes even much newer machines with many things. But not while browsing the web.
My conclusion: the current Amiga browsers are not up to their tasks. They maybe were good a decade ago, when many current webtechnologies didn't even exist and webpages were much lighter, but in 2008 they severely lack in performance and features and can't even be compared to a (not to good) Windowsbrowser which has been in existence for about 8 years now...
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Jiffy wrote:
stefcep2 wrote:
Your web browsing experience on your Amiga does depend on your hardware and your web browser.
Ehrm... Is this serious? We're talking about computers here... Ofcóurse it is depending on your hardware and your web browser! What else would it depend on? The temperature of my cup of coffee?
As opposed to running a 14 mhz 020 2 meg ram AGA-only internal serial port Amiga with Ibrowse 1, or any lesser hardware or software than my set up. my A4000 was good enough until about 18 months ago
i used to use ibrowse 2.4 on an A4000 68060 cv64 1024x 768 16 bit screen with a high speed zorro serial port. I did not have a site i couldn't use that involved getting text, picture and gifs, filling in forms, passwords, even banking .
I find that highly unlikely. No site you couldn't use? There are huge amounts of sites that require the support of CSS to be able to use them. No CSS-support is no functioning website on your screen, period. And a serial port, albeit fast? What year are we talking about? Five, ten years ago? Websites were different then.
18 months ago. The layout may have been wrong: usually i had very long web pages, but the info that i needed was was still there. Maybe i don't browse the sites you do, but i didn't have a problem.
My Amigas have been connected to my router through either a PCMCIA-nic (3Com509) or a XSurf card for years now, so bandwidth is no issue. Most sites expect you to have a broadband connection and I can't blame them. Websites today are different compared to websites 10 years ago. They are larger and more complex.
Dial up was not a limiting factor for me, but then again I don't care for youtube, I don't download porn movies, and I hate flash rubbish. Hell I only got broadband for my PC 2 months ago
I am not asking something extreme. I have several decent Amiga setups, capable of outperforming a comparable 486 and P133 on many tasks with relative ease, except(!) when it comes to webbrowsing. Amiga browsers suck when comparing them to IE6, both when it comes to speed and even more so when it comes to displaying sites without to many errors.
Browsing with an Amiga is not funny: it's always a question if a site I want to visit will function or not. On the 15 year old 486, I do not have that problem... It's not the hardware: the Amigas I have (much) more powerful compared to the 486. Ergo, it's the software holding my Amigas back.
why don't you try ibrowse 2.4 on winuae? sure its not running native 68x0 code but its about as fast in hardware as you're gonna get. this also removes the tcp stack issue (maybe the amiga stacks are slowing things down as well). this may help sort out the issue of whether its the hardware or ibrowse/aweb. javascript is now a big slow down for amiga
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Jiffy wrote:
Ofcóurse it is depending on your hardware and your web browser! What else would it depend on? The temperature of my cup of coffee?
Only if you're using Java in the browser. :)
(Sorry, couldn't resist)
Seriously, though, you've obviously not used OWB on an AmigaOS 4 machine like mine (604e @ 200Mhz A4000 Voodoo III etc.) I was reading BBC news on it just this morning, and it rendered pretty much exactly like a PC browser.
Yeah, IBrowse and AWeb are less featured, but I find them much more responsive than most PC browsers because they're built for low-resource machines. I use AWeb usually under OS3.9 and OS4 because it's faster, but as soon as a site needs CSS or something heavier I go to OWB.
Compared to a 486... well... I know which I'd rather use. Maybe I should fire up my DX2/66 and compare. It's got Netscape 3 on it, that should suffice. Actually, NS3 is a lot less compatible than AWeb, so I'd need to install Win95. Which is a dog on a 486, so maybe I shan't bother.
Really does sound like you have a problem somewhere with your Amiga though... because you seem to be the only person on here who is having trouble with it!
You did see that YouTube video of an A4000 running OWB didn't you?
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I actually took my advice and used IBrowse in Winuae. It is slower at rendering pages, mostly due to lengthy javascipt (which you can shorten), but also due to the way in which images(mainly gifs and jpegs) are downloaded and then decoded. However the cache is a real time saver when moving back and forth between pages. Amiga.org is rendered just the same as in firefox, ebay works, but pages are not dispalyed the same, banking works fine but again pages are not displayed the same, some commercial tv sites are not rendered right but work and i can do all the things on those sites, such as log into forums,buy things etc. I think your set up eg ssl must be preventing you from using many sites. But yes it is slower
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@Malakie
I hope you received some answers to your original question.
Anyways ... as you may have guessed by now, your choices depend on what Amiga environment you are running. For classic Amiga with no PPC, you are looking at AWeb, IBrowse and Voyager. Back in the day, I used AWeb on my Amiga 2000HD over a 19.2 Kbps dialup ppp connection to my ISP. Needless to say, it was very slow. I had my browser set to "don't load" images. Aweb would place a blue square (image link?) where the image would normally be and I could click on the square if I really wanted to see a particular image. My machine had a 68000 CPU (no accelerator card), so the images were quite grainy.
On my MicroA1 running OS4, I use AWebPPC, IBrowse and OWB. OWB has improved to the point where I use it most, but I still use IBrowse for certain sites and AWeb for certain sites.
Not sure for emulated amiga running on a pc. Three x86 pc's at home here, but no amiga emulator running on any of them. I would probably try IBrowse or AWeb (maybe both).
(Of course, for an emulated amiga running on a pc, there is always the alternative of using the browsers available for the "host" operating system ... it all depends on what you want to do. If you like firefox or IE better ... go for it. It is your machine and your fun that is at stake, and noone else has the right to say you are wrong.)
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redfox
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Redfox:
Yea I got the answers I was looking for. :-) Not what I was hoping for but not much I can do about that..
Malakie
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Hi all,
Just trying out a new version of OWB, Origyn Web Browser version 2.5 installed about 20 minutes ago. So far seems ok on my MicroA1. Posting with it now.
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redfox
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Do you have an URL for that by chance?
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Hi,
See this thread (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=35932) for comments on the 68K version, and here (http://strohmayer.org/) for the OS4 version.
Not tried either. I agree with the previous poster(s) that Amiga web browsing in general is one of those "because I can!" things, and not for day to day use unless visiting lightweight sites or PDA-enabled sites.
- Ali
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OWB can be downloaded from http://strohmayer.org/ which might be off the air at the moment.
The main support site seems to be www.amigans.net where the author converses with several users. There are also some threads on www.amigaworld.net
The latest version, OWB 2.5 is not a standalone product yet, so some files are required from an earlier version. The readme file gives details as to which files are required. They are called sobjects. OWB 2.5 will not run without them.
If I recall correctly, OWB 2.5 is PPC only. Not sure how well it operates on a classic Amiga with PPC but it seems to work fine here on my MicroA1.
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redfox
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@Malakie
Try Netsurf available at Aminet
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@TiredOfLife
OS4 only...
:-(
OWB doesn't help people on 68K, its too slow to be usable for almost anything... unless you like browsing to feel like waiting for a 3D model to render...
IBrowse, AWeb & even Voyager are still the only real options on classics -- and all 3 are pretty much the same standards wise.
Sputnik is a another choice if you have MorphOS... :-)
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Origyn Web Browser (OWB) is changing fast. This is OWB 2.6. Looking good so far.
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redfox
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InTheSand wrote:
Hi,
See this thread (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=35932) for comments on the 68K version, and here (http://strohmayer.org/) for the OS4 version.
Not tried either. I agree with the previous poster(s) that Amiga web browsing in general is one of those "because I can!" things, and not for day to day use unless visiting lightweight sites or PDA-enabled sites.
- Ali
Hi,
I downloaded the version at the url's you posted. But I am not able to find a link anywhere for v1.3. The only version I could find is 1.24. Do you or does anyone else have a link to the latest?
EDIT: Ok perhaps I am missing something in my reading... This browser is ONLY for OS4.0 and NOT available for OS3 users?
Malakie
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First post with OWB 2.7. :-D
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redfox
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>...I agree with the previous poster(s) that Amiga web browsing in general is one of those "because I can!" things, and not for day to day use unless visiting lightweight sites or PDA-enabled sites.
Actually, I used to use a Gateway PCI 90Mhz system to browse websites (using 56K modem), but can no longer which basically shows that websites themselves have become worse. People usually don't think about optimizing websites or even browsers thinking people will be using 1Ghz+ systems. I am sure if CPU/modem speeds hadn't increased, people would still be optimizing their websites and browsers and they would be running much faster on old PCs and Amigas. Some people still sit down and think of how to squeeze more features into a 4K Atari 2600 Cartridge whereas more and more PC gamers just try to get it working and recommend 128MB+ AGP graphics or something of that sort. I saw one of the 'optimized' Aegis demos of airplane flying at 30fps that runs from a floppy disk and if you try to port one of the 30fps animation from a PC to Amiga, it probably won't run due to lack of CPU power or lack of storage.