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 A graphics card does indeed improve performance compared to just AGA, but comparing out of date software, severely lacking in standard(!)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
