I think a lot of people in this thread underestimate what it is they're asking for here.
In my day job, I'm a software developer specializing in real time graphics and visualization using OpenGL under Windows. I've also developed for Linux and back in the day I wrote some BASIC programs on my old Amiga 500. I've taken a renewed interest in the Amiga and now have a 1200 that I'm teaching myself to program (screens, windows, sprites, etc).
There are several obstacles to getting a "good" web browser on the Amiga.
The first issue that I'm noticing is everyone wants something different. Some people want small and fast, some want full-featured. So depending on which way you go, half of the users won't like the browser.
Next, there's a huge variety in Amiga hardware. Do you want a browser that runs on a 512k Amiga 500 or a 256 MB PPC accelerated A4000 with a true color video card? It's very difficult to write something with that huge range of hardware targets. Unlike the PC, there is much less abstraction in place to help you scale things. Heck, I'm even noticing some of the C examples I've found for OCS chipsets aren't working right on my AGA Amiga, and they're using OS function calls to do their drawing! This means that any development that is going to work across multiple different Amigas would have to have a different back-end for each one. It's many projects wrapped into one.
People seem to think that the $10k for porting Firefox to the Amiga should be a big incentive. It's not, it's a joke. The project would probably take a developer who is experienced on multiple platforms and with all the different web technologies over a year of full time work to do, and he has to make the investment up front - no one is paying him while he develops, only if he gets it to work. Someone with that type of experience could be making $10k per month at his normal job. Web browser development isn't fun and sexy like games are, so people aren't likely to tackle such a difficult job in their spare time.
Lastly, I don't think a Firefox port is the right way to go anyway. I have 5 tabs open on my Firefox right now and it's using 90 Mb of RAM and probably assumes virtual memory will be available if needed. Please raise your hand if your Amiga has 1/10th of this memory available. Think of all the external tech libraries that it probably depends on that would also have to be ported. Is there a png library for Amiga? XML parser? Javascript interpreter? Java virtual machine? Flash player?
Despite all this negativity, I do think there could be a market for a lite, fast browser that works on 68k Amigas. It should be doable to make something that just does basic html (I'm thinking just tables, frames, text, and images) and works smoother than iBrowse (why can't iBrowse even scroll smoothly?), but it would be more like Lynx with a mouse than Firefox.
If I were to make something like that, would people buy it? Does anyone here have an idea how many total sales iBrowse had?
