Why porting Mozilla to Amiga??

[HeUnique]

I've been doing some reading about this "bounty" to port Mozilla, and quite frankly, I find this suggestion not a very good one - and I'll explain:

Porting Mozilla to other OS's (and platform, for that matter) is not easy - SPECIALLY when it comes to Mozilla. Go ask Apple why they chose KDE's KHTML engine rather Mozilla (and Gecko based Firebird - for that matter).

I have at home a sub-notebook - a Pentium 300Mhz with 96 MB RAM, with 6GB hard drive. (It's not a powerful machine but should be enough to browse the web, don't you agree?), and unfortunately Mozilla Firebird (the "lite" version of Mozilla) running on Windows 98 (without anything else running, all tasks are killed) is DOG slow. I tried at the same machine using Redhat 7.2 + WindowMaker + Mozilla firebird - same result, although a bit faster, but still very slow.

Why do I mention this? because what people here wants is a browser that works in their 200+ Mhz PPC machines, and in the 600-1Ghz machines. While Mozilla should run very nice in the 600+Mhz machines, it will run dog-slow on the old machines..

What I would suggest (if someone out there cares) is another route:

How about porting Trolltech's QT library? why? simple:

1. QT itself can be run on frame-buffer without any problem.
2. The library itself is very well documented.
3. Porting QT will open the door for quite few more applications (based on KDE or QT) which can be used on AOS.

After you have QT ported - you can take something like KDENOX (available inside KDE CVS) and just recompile it against QT - and you have a working browser! KDENOX "gets" all the KHTML modifications from the KDE library which KDE & Apple Computer are working on..

Thoughts? comments? flames?  :-o

Thanks,
Hetz (HeUnique)

[HeUnique]

QT is Free AND Open source - it's under GPL license - what else do you want? you cannot use it with closed source development unless you pay for Trolltech (thats the QPL license) which I think it's pretty fair when a company invests heavily on their product. Please DON'T SPREAD FUD!

As for Mozilla is fast as Explorer - I'm sorry, but I have 4 machines here near me - 3 of them are Pentium II 300 and one of them is Pentium 233Mhz - all of them equipped with 64-96MB RAM, and Mozilla is WAY slower then Explorer - I could give you lots of examples. FUD again..!

[HeUnique]

Crap in what sense? I use it right now to type this message, and Apple uses it's engine for their Safari browser (with all engine modifications going back to the KDE community). Is Apple wrong about their decision do adopt KHTML instead of Mozilla/Gecko? I don't think so.

It's getting better - you don't need the QT library at all to make KHTML work, just like Apple don't use QT in their Safari browser, but you need some GUI library to display the pages

I have shown the KDENOX (which is essentially KHTML + QT library) running on a Linux embedded with Motorola Coldfire processor - it runs pretty impressive.

And here's one point - by porting mozilla - you're porting a browser, and not much more (I can't really call the XUL think a good GUI, sorry), but with QT you can port the KDENOX and have a library which can be used to port other based apps to Amiga. Go do some checking how many apps are based on QT and how many apps are based on Mozilla's XUL engine, then come back

ronybeck wrote:
Why Port it?  Because it ####s on any browser the amiga has.  It is fully featured and not just some cut down crap like what comes with KDE.

It is time to move out of the 90's guys.  you can't expect Amiga developers to write software for 200Mhz machines for ever.   Mozilla isn't that bad.  It runs well on my girlfriends 700Mhz. althlon.  So on a G3 it will be brilliant.  700mhz is considered ancient history now.   You can't be serious with your 200Mhz machines.

For those asking, QT is a muliplatform GUI api.  It is Kind of the OpenGL of GUI's :-).  It would just mean that people could port stuff from other OS's easily.  Linux uses it quiet a bit.

I hope no body takes this guy seriously and ports the half hearted Konquerer browser from KDE.  It is a waiste of time and rates as poorly as the likes of iBrowse and Voyager.