Project Timberwolf - Firefox for AmigaOS4.1

[persia]

The only advantage to Firefox are the plug ins, will they work?

[persia]

Absolutely, Mozilla browsers just aren't as robust as webkit ones.  Firefox's main draw are the plugins, they do remarkable things, without them it's sort of antiquated.  You have to have two browsers nowadays.  

To be honest, the whole idea of Firefox on OS4 excited the heck out of me when it was first suggested many years ago.

Today not so much, I don't even use Firefox on my PC or Mac anymore, its all about Webkit these days, and lets not forget we already have a brilliant Webkit browser in the form of OWB (and netsurf, but that's never worked on my machine for some reason).  Firefox is slow, bloated, and uses up a ton of resources.  Safari and Chrome and other webkit browsers out perform it by a huge margin.

For a while we were getting weekly updates to OWB, but now there haven't been any for 4 months or so, I'm praying he hasn't given up work on it.  It still lacks a few things, a download manager being the most obvious.

I think we're better off putting our efforts into OWB and making it more usable, its almost thee.  If Joerg (I believe his name is, excuse me if I got it wrong) hasn't got the time to work on OWB now, maybe he could open the source so others can expand on it.

Firefox would have been great 4/5 years ago, but these days I say Webkit is a much better option.

[persia]

Maybe the Amizilla bounty could be changed to allow for the port of any modern browser to all Amiga related platforms?  Wen the bounty was set it was very much a two browser world, well three, but Safari was Mac only.  Now we have Chrome, Safari for both Mac and PC, Opera and Firefox, with IE still PC only.  Having any of these available on all Amiga platforms would be great.

I think the key is multi-platform availability, we don't want to leave the Classic users behind if at all possible.

Also browsers are moving targets, any port should be able to incorporate improvements to the browser made in the future.

The webkit v gecko wars could easily fill several libraries.  Each has it's strengths and weaknesses.  There have been suggestions that Mozilla abandon gecko for webkit but I don't see that happening.  The next few years are going to be real interesting browser war wise....

Well it's all well and good, but it's not 2006 anymore. A port of Chromium (Google Chrome, which is Webkit based) would be more desirable these days, in my opinion.

[persia]

Ah, the answer is out of Tuvalu, Lunascape!

http://www.lunascape.tv/

[persia]

Simple the money was donated for one purpose, it would be at the very least immoral if not illegal to give it to someone who has not completed the task that the money was given for.  It's not a question of what the brothers hyperion do, they are free to do whatever they want, just without the Amizilla bounty.  They aren't open source folks, they probably will want to keep the code to themselves and not take outside money anyway.

Ho boy, I really stirred up a hornet's nest with this one. Let's see...

I feel like the new bounty makes the AmiZilla bounty redundant, which means all that money remains in permanant limbo status, useless. If they're asking the community to contribute funding to the project, then it would have been nice if they had respected the community's existing funding mechanism by allowing everyone who contributed to AmiZilla to get some kind of tangible return on their investment.

That's not to say the developers can't, or even shouldn't set things up the way that's most advantageous to them (the Firefox card in OS4's deck would do much good attracting users/sales from outside the community). Starting their own bounty ( With blackjack, and hookers! ) just struck me as... impolite.

But I can already imagine scores of others from outside the community laughing derisively at the Amiga's collective failure to collect an easy paycheck, and at keeping the project closed and static rather than trying to integrate it into the regular Firefox build tree as has been done with NetSurf.

And why does compatibility across Amiga platforms matter? How about being able to share user/developer resources and testing platforms to iron out bugs and improve the overall product? Even if a 68K version is too slow for real hardware, it'd be a great asset for WinUAE or bootable x86 Amiga emulation environments.

Anyway, that's my opinion. Let the celebrating resume.

[persia]

Like moves on, Gecko is bloatware, for MS Windows users it was better than trident and that was enough then.  Today Firefox is sort of your grandfather's browser, nice and slow and unforgiving of small web page variations.

Firefox is a handy application. Sure it is slow and clunky these days, especially compared to webkit based browsers, but then why not have both if both are available?

A few years ago, I bet most of the people now slating firefox were praising it