We need an iBrowse replacement for 68k!!!

[Heiroglyph]

Where is the source with your changes?

I'd like to take a look, but no commitments.

I'm waiting on parts for my system, so I'm not set up to do anything but read over it ATM.

[Heiroglyph]

Oh, I assumed that you were working on your own without committing changes back yet.

Are you cross compiling or building on the Amiga?

[Heiroglyph]

I still find iBrowse to be my goto browser on Amiga, but I'm not sure it's worth putting money into just to get it opened. I'd rather pay an active developer for new work on another project.

OWB on MorphOS is pretty awesome. I wish we had a good version of that.

I'm seriously looking into Netsurf at the moment though. It looks like it has potential and some active developers, just not enough.

[Heiroglyph]

Ibrowse works fine on slower Amigas. How slow an Amiga will Netsurf be a joy to use?

That's a really good question.

iBrowse to me has the best speed to usability ratio on real 68k Amigas at the moment.

[Heiroglyph]

Do you really belive that OWB would be usefull with real amigas? Good version for it for 68k Amigas, I can't imaginet what that would be.

OWB takes 89mb ram just to start.
Netsurf takes 20mb ram just to start.

A good version would be one that runs on existing machines and gives similarly compatible results.

Morphos is very usable on the modern internet.

If I need 128MB of RAM to do that, well then I guess I need 128MB like high end Amigas had 20 years ago. It's not a high cost.

Another thing, I don't understand what you are looked into Netsurf? OR has you looked current 68k version of it??? It is light weight web browser, memory footprint is much smaller than OWB has. It is a multiplatform browser, so it doesn't have just some active developers, it has quite many developers for several operating systems. It displays prety much  every web page correctly. Has a CSS, SSL and Java support, what else you would require?

Like I said, I'm looking into it.

Last time I tried to install it, it wouldn't run properly so I blew it off. This discussion sparked an interest.

[Heiroglyph]

Haha, wait, what?  I wish!  :angry:

Seriously, most accelerators can hold 128MB or you can get a Zoram for 3000/4000 for under a hundred bucks and you're not going to get far on the modern web without at least an accelerator card.

If RAM was the problem preventing a decent web browser, it's available and won't break the bank. That's all I'm saying.

IMHO, it's the CPU speed, but I don't think the amount of RAM used is a deal breaker.

[Heiroglyph]

Will Netsurf work on a plain A1200 with 4 MB fast RAM?

(Not picking on you, Yasu)

I understand that not everyone has a big system, but come on, this is why we can't have nice things.

The "it's gotta work on an A500" mentality didn't help us in the 90's and it's not helping now.

At some point, you need to get some upgrades if you want to run software that wasn't made in the 90's, for 80's systems.

[Heiroglyph]

Which is why I use MorphOS

lol, hey, at least you paid for something.

I just think a lot of people expect there to be some way for stock 90's systems to browse the web with a total memory capacity smaller than the size of the images on the site. It's frustrating.

There are CPU cards and RAM upgrades available at reasonable prices, so I don't think having an expectation of reasonable upgrades is too much to ask for.

[Heiroglyph]

If nothing else, this browser builds FAST.

I haven't tried cross compiling yet, just made sure that I could build and run the Linux version.

Hopefully I'll get the Amiga build working tonight and I'll test in UAE until my hardware comes in.

I've got to get a source level debugger set up somehow though. Working on something as big as a browser with only assembly debugging and printf's is like building a ship in a bottle when you just want a ship.

[Heiroglyph]

BDebug is not a true source level debugger but it can display the current source line as you step through the 68k assembler executable. You do have to get to the main() function before it will work and it does have to be able to find your source code. BDebug is in the Barfly package.

http://aminet.net/dev/asm/BarflyDisk2_00.lha

The docs say that it supports STABS as well as the SAS/C (SAS D1) debug info. GCC can output STABS with a switch which Chris has selected in the makefile of the NetSurf /amiga directory. Vbcc with a 68k target outputs SAS/C debug by default (with -g in vbcc 0.9d).

Thanks, I'll have to check that out as an option.

I'm spoiled to the Visual Studio and even the SAS/C debuggers. Normally I'd use vbcc and the SAS/C debugger.

I sure wish this would build with vbcc. At some point I'm going to see how gcc specific this codebase is.

[Heiroglyph]

this archive must be somehow os4 specific.. i couldnt decompress it properly neither under win or amiga..

It opened for me on Windows, but I used 7zip.

It is Lzh compressed.

[Heiroglyph]

I've been following along daily but had no time to actually look at it myself.

This can't seriously be how you intend to debug the whole application. It's just not viable.

This needs to be built with source level debugging one way or another.

Never in my professional life have I had these kinds of problems finding and fixing a bug with such obvious, repeatable symptoms. Those are the types of bugs I like to see assigned because they are so easily fixed. I faceplam at my carelessness, fix it, then move on.

My suggestion is still to get it building with VBCC so that you can use a source level debugger such as the one in SAS/C.

It couldn't take longer than debugging like this and the final result will be more reliable.

[Heiroglyph]

ive got a feeling too, there must be some simple method to find and fix those problems rather than going round in circles.

And this is in no way a criticism of Chris. He's done a great service to the community at much personal expense.

I just think that the process needs to be fixed for the new platform.