Should we really crack IBrowse 2.4???

[whabang]

Didn't we have a :beatingdeadhorse: emoticon?

The issue is the same as it always were - commercial companies are abandoning the Amiga platform.

From a purely theoretical point of view, cracking the software is useless - spreading a key would be more efficient. Besides, any coding effort would be better aimed at an open-source alternative.

When it comes to spending money, a bounty for a small and fast open-source browser would be better spent. This community needs to realise that open source is the way to go if there's to be any hope of decent up-to-date software at a somewhat reasonable price.

[whabang]

Writing a browser from scratch (to support all these modern features and standards), open source or not, isn't going to happen. Not on Amiga at least. The resources this will take would be enormous, even for a large company. Proposing an Amiga-bounty(!) to produce a browser for 68k from scratch is a little naive, it simply won't happen. So it would have to be based on either Firefox (bloated, slow and bulky) or Webkit (like Google Chrome, Apple's Safari and MorphOS's Odyssey), and *neither of these* (especially Firefox) running on a 68k processor wouldn't be very fun, even if you *could* make it running.

Indeed, a port of Dillo would be much more useful.

[whabang]

Sounds about as useful as IBrowse 2.4 is today?

Pretty much - with the major exception being that Dillo is an active project and that porting it would be legal and benificial for the entire community.

[whabang]

I'm sorry but how does MorphOS fix the abandoned software issue?   I have Amiga hardware that runs Amiga software, not Apple hardware that emulates Amiga hardware to run SOME Amiga software. IBrowse 2.4 runs well, yeah it is out of date, but it runs on old hardware.  As a 68K program (with JavaScript.library blacklisted) it runs fast and tight on OS 4.1

At the moment there is no solution for the 'abandoned software issue'. Unless you can convince the author to keep selling keys, give them away for free, or give away the rights for IBrowse, then there isn't anything we can do about it. At least not legally

This is why we're discussing alternatives.