Amizilla: donating, discussion, etc...

[MarkTime]

 I've decided to volunteer my time, and this is the type of thing that I consider..how fast will it be...we don't have to guess how fast it will be, because Mozilla has already been ported to NetBSD/m68k (including the 1.4 release, unstable) and earlier versions of Moz to linux/m68k.

and yes, they are dog slow, but I will test it out, see exactly how slow, and whether or not 060 is enough horsepower..or whether it will only run acceptably on PowerPC or Amithlon.  Actually, some people suggest, that earlier versions of mozilla were fast enough on an 040....after the .8 release but before the 1.4 release....that timeframe.

I still think 68k has to be the target, even if it won't run on any real 68k...for the reasons you mentioned, I am not going to buy an AmigaOne just to help with this project,a nd I don't think a lot of people own AmigaOne's...(yet)

so...I don't speak for the team of course, but just to let you know, one member of the team is considering these types of things.  I expect that Mozilla will run on an 060 at bearable speeds, and since I expect more people will soon be using their amiga's via WinUAE, AF, Amithlon, OS 4, or MorphOS, than on an actual classic amiga, it probably won't be such a big issue....

someday, at least, it won't be such a big issue....as for how long it will take...I personally think the traditional porting route would take a very long time...I am looking into something along the lines of Tenon's mach ten 68k...again, this is just me..independently looking at it.

but I think that if not one thing, than another solution will present itself.

btw, I actually used aweb and browsed the internet with an amiga for 15 minutes earlier today....hadn't done that in 5 years...I am safely back using IE now...WOW..it was fun and nostalgic, and terrible all at the same time.

[MarkTime]

mdma wrote:

X-Windows and its widgets is not the GUI for amiga, nor for other platforms

This is a common misconception about unix software.  Just because GTK uses X on unix, doesn't mean that it has to use it on other platforms.

that's true, GTK has a native port on Windows and BeOS, and one of the things we have talked about is GTK port to native Amiga.  Though, that may not necessarily be required, I do know one thing....no one is talking about targetting the final version to x windows...(even though an x windows port was done by Holger Kruse..its just wouldn't feel like an amiga under x windows)

[MarkTime]

@cass

yes I didn't read your first post.  I think I agree with a lot of what you say.

a lot of what makes a modern browser so neat, as you said, are those features it has....features like multithreading where the browser is doing a jillion things at once, and it doesn't block anything else, so that the user gets the
feeling of things being fast.

now we talk about Amiga OS being efficient,a nd it is....for what it does, but you get to writing a modern browser,and trying to launch everything that would be a lite thread in unix as a task under exec, and you quickly see, that its not so efficient for some things.

Then you are left with porting a lot, a whole architecture,...in some manner or another....the amizilla team and I may differ on some points...but in some way  you can give yourself modern features...partially because those improvements in os design really were improvements and not just 'bloat' and partially because it makes the job of porting somewhat reasonable...i.e. its still a port and not a complete re-write.

I again have to caution everyone I don't speak for the team who may have somewhat different goals, but my goal would be to only get it as fast as it is under NetBSD/68k.  And if that is dog slow, then it will be dog slow on a real amiga too.  Now if someone wants to go beyond that and figure out how to make it real fast...well great but its a monumental undertaking to just get it far enough to run stably.

But if it runs acceptably on a fast pc using UAE, or Amithlon, or OS 4 or MorphOS, then that is a good thing...and if someone using an 060 gets a functional, yet slow, browser, then I think we have done a good thing and hit the target.  The future is with future hardware.