New AmiZilla Website

[paolone]

There are lots of misassumptions in the amizilla webpage, first of all the one about being not considered serious if we haven't our own port of Firefox. Firefox is just another web browser and I personally can think that we would be taken more seriously if we had OpenOffice instead. Someone else can think this about Mono and so on. Firefox has proven to be heavy, difficult, too much tied to features that only "modern" operating system have. On the contrary, some effort on WebKit has already been made and gave us at least some first-stage modern browsers.

Just look at what the only Robert Norris brought to AROS with his "Traveller Preview" or what Andrea Palmatè did with OWB. Webkit is no technically inferior to Firefox and is more viable for an Amiga port, so why insisting on the huge beast? Porting Firefox for the simple pleasure of "having it" is practically meaningless, if the average Amiga machine still working can't run it at all, or with terrible compromises. All those money could be spent in a better way to bring us a modern, portable, light amiga browser that could work on every amiga platform, form 3.1 to 4.1, MorphOS and AROS. More than 5 years without any concrete result should suggest that money are not the issue, here.

AmigaOS 4.1 has Cairo, which is a underlying graphic library well suited for Webkit. Robert Norris ported it to AROS too and, starting from this effort, it shouldn't be so dramatic to port it to MorphOS and other amiga dialects: maybe spending all those money for a more realistic project, as like as continuing and completing Robert's work, might be a better idea.

[paolone]

@Trev:

The problem with modern browsers are not in the applications itself, but in the contents they have to handle. Once you succeeded in placing a "beast" like Firefox in 2 megs of RAM (dreams sometimes never come true...), you need to allocate twice of them, minimum, to open a single and light page.

So you need either a) a *huge* amount of RAM (128 megs or above), or b) virtual memory. You can have "a" only on modern hardware running AROS, MorphOS or AmigaOS 4.0, or either under UAE emulation. You can have "b", and for now only theoretically, with AmigaOS 4.1.

Then there is another little problem for AmigaOS: threads. You need them in order to open different kind of contents (music, animations, images, text, javascript, and so) at the same time and, in the end, I haven't either talked about Java.

In the end, there is the graphic API of 3.1 which needs heavy improvements to meet the bare minimum standard to handle a browser properly, and it's the motivation why Robert had to port Cairo to AROS and Andrea had to use SDL to render pages.

@ Codenetfx

AROS compatibility with AmigaOS 3.1 APIs is not perfect but far better than what most people think. In the last months it has improved slightly, and if it's true that there are still many things to do, it's also trye they are far less than they were months ago. Just look at the status page to have a better idea:
http://aros.sourceforge.net/introduction/status/everything.php

There are also some guidelines for coders willing to write their application taking care of compatibility between different Amiga platforms:
http://shinkuro.altervista.org/amiga/guida/english/index.htm

All in all, main compatibility poroblems are between Zune and MUI3.8, but they can be worked around.