Why porting Mozilla to Amiga??

[mikeymike]

Q: Why port Mozilla to Amiga?

A: Because we want it!

You may not want it.  That's entirely up to you.  If you don't want to buy a product, you don't buy it, that's also entirely up to you.  However, we DO want it.  Assume that the reasons we do want it are reasonably sane.  I wouldn't go slating people who put up a bounty for Opera on Amiga just because I don't like Opera.

It's not going to alter the balance of the universe having Mozilla ported to the Amiga, nor is it going to upset anything else, so what the heck are you complaining about?

[mikeymike]

@ KennyR

Mozilla is slow, guys. Admit it.

Looks pretty fast from where I'm sitting.

It takes ages to load,

Takes longer than I'd like, which is why I have it installed on recoverable ramdisk.

it takes ages to surf,

No it doesn't.  Quicker than any other browser I've used.  The exception is Firebird, which is based on Mozilla.

and it takes ages to install.

Now I'm wondering if you've even tried it.  Takes ages to install?  What planet are you from?

Everything about it is an exercise in patience.

If you're in the habit of counting nanoseconds with increasing tedium, I suppose so, but then life must be very slow and dreary to you.

It even comes with a launcher so it loads quicker,

I've never felt the need to use the launcher.

and the expense of eating about 30MB of your memory

Mozilla doesn't have a small memory footprint, it's true.  But while I've got half a gig of RAM because Win2k doesn't exactly have a small memory footprint either, I'm not complaining.

Now what is the point in the constant Mozilla bashing?  Does it achieve anything whatsoever?

[mikeymike]

Try it on an 030/50.

Are all applications supposed to run full speed on an 030/50?

Takes longer than I'd like, which is why I have it installed on recoverable ramdisk.

Which slows Windows by using up all its memory and forcing paging VM

Again, not from where I'm sitting.  399MB physical memory available.

Now I'm wondering if you've even tried it. Takes ages to install? What planet are you from?

A planet where things should install in under two minutes.

Mozilla takes less than a minute to install (and I'm not talking about installing it on my recoverable ramdisk (incidentally, that takes less than 30 seconds), but on hard disk).  Unless we're going to talk about an 030/50 with PIO0 hard disks again...

I've never felt the need to use the launcher.

No, you prefer to have your VM page the HD all the time using a ramdisk instead. What's the difference?

9MB swap in use.  399MB physical RAM available.  Hmmm.  And that's with a number of other apps/services running.

Mozilla could run easily on a machine with 128MB RAM, even if it's running Windows.  It's running with that config on my parents machine, and while it loads more slowly than it does on mine, it's not unacceptable slow to load.  Once loaded, it's as responsive as it is on my system, pretty much.

From what I've read on the amigaone mailing list, virtually every A1 buyer is equipping their system with half a gig, a gig or more RAM "because it's so cheap".

Does bloated code acheive anything whatsoever? Apart from being annoying and selling new PCs?

If it achieved nothing, people wouldn't buy it, so don't be so naive.

I'm not advocating bloated code, and Mozilla, while it is hardly featherweight, it doesn't come close to the worst offenders.  However, IMO, it is a kickarse web browser, the mailnews component is reasonable, and I like the optional Calendar component, even though that is still quite buggy, it fits my needs.

Mozilla isn't the fastest web browser to load, true.  Once it's loaded, it reloads quickly (without the launcher).  Once it's loaded, it is both responsive and fast, IMO.  It's quite a safe browser to use, plus I help out in testing/bug reporting, and see decent results in the form of a better application in return.

Look - if the people who like Mozilla thought as you do, it's obvious that they wouldn't put up money to get it ported.  However, as they're putting up money for it, it's obvious they disagree with you.  So stop trolling.  And get your facts right.

And anyway, what the hell are you going to compare Mozilla against?  Can any Amiga web browsers boast the same functionality, and standards compliancy?  No.  The only comparable contender I see to Mozilla is Opera.  If you think you can produce a web browser that can do everything Mozilla can do, just faster and better, and can run on an 030/50, I think there's quite a few people that would like to know about it.  Including me.

[mikeymike]

@ AxE

I generally agree with you, although you should try Opera 7x, I'd say it's pretty much on par with Mozilla for compatibility.

[mikeymike]

And the other thing about this thread that really gets me is this - as soon as someone does something bold and original to get some decent software ported to AmigaOS, they get slated because they (in so obviously enlightened peoples' opinions) "picked the wrong software".

Have you thought that maybe once we get something like Mozilla ported, that it might encourage A: new users to come over to OS4 or later, and B: developers to port other applications to AmigaOS, and C: possibly encourage those developers to get involved in writing apps natively for AmigaOS?

I don't like Opera, but I still think it would be cool if the bounty had been put up for it to be ported, and at least I could be sure I could have a reasonable, up-to-date web browser which is ready for when I get myself an A1 with OS4.

Amiga development, both hardware and software, will go at a snail's pace if the Amiga community doesn't get new blood.  That comes largely through ported software to provide the sure stepping stone between platforms.  And no, I'm not advocating ported software over native software either.

This Mozilla bounty is the only truly interesting news I've heard on the Amiga front for a long time.

[mikeymike]

@ bbrv

As much as you have to for IBrowse, but anyway...

[mikeymike]

No, of course not. I am exaggerating wildly. A 060/50 would be a more representational CPU speed for the average Amiga user today.

How about the average application today?  Applications and uses of computers have increased a huge amount since the 68060, why on earth should anything new be designed to run for such an old processor?

I'm not saying that's an excuse for sloppy coding, but to take an extreme example, if all applications still had to run on an A500, in particular its half a meg of RAM, how much would we be holding back the evolution of computers?  The same goes for processing power and general architecture.

Most UNIXs will run better on older hardware than their predecessors, but if you want to do high-end stuff with them, you've got to supply with high-end hardware.  A web browser on its own may not be a formidably complex piece of software, but what about all the supporting software underneath it?  Face it.  a 68060 is ancient.  It may have been a nice processor in its time, and people may still be making do with it now, but they're not doing anything high-end (today's standards) with their systems.  What am I doing with my PC right now?  Watching a DVD (or playing an mp3 list), mail window open, net connection running, writing out a post about things that I'm surprised I have to explain to persons who claim to know anything about computers, and also running SMTP, WWW and an FTP server on my machine.  How much of that could I do with an 060-based Amiga with say 64MB RAM with ease?  Ok, surprisingly more than most PC users would think, but no, they don't even compare.

I'm sorry, but the m86k Amiga users shouldn't expect a port of any up-to-date software from other platforms.  It's about time they upgraded.  However, I seriously don't think it's them putting up bounty money for Mozilla.  Why on earth would they be putting up such serious amounts of bounty money when they can't be arsed to upgrade?  Not that many people are so stupid that they expect their hardware to be able to run everything forever.

[mikeymike]

@ Hammer

Mozilla 1.3 is only ~25Mb. Ideally, with a 55Mb/s hard drive the system should be able to load Mozilla about ~0.5 of a second.

Very flawed assumption.  IDE disks may be able to get a maximum throughput of say 55MB/sec, but for loading lots of little files you'll find the throughput drops to maybe a meg a second.  The entirety of Mozilla's app install doesn't need to be loaded into memory however.

People complain about large libaries or executables, but it is far worse to have lots of tiny libraries that all have to be loaded in rather than one big one.

Apps like Firebird (formerly 'Phoenix) and Thunderbird are currently getting their libraries compacted into one for this reason primarily.

The only time you'll ever see your hard disk perform at anywhere near its maximum throughput is when copying internally between platters, and a disk benchmarking at 55MB/sec will probably manage a maximum of 40MB/sec when everything is taken into consideration, and that's when butterflies aren't flapping their wings around Mount Fuji, and when the very large files (over 200MB say) aren't at all fragmented, and neither is space allocated as their destination.

The most important statistic for a hard disk to have quoted would be latency on requests, which doesn't get officially stated, only in independent benchmarking.  That's the statistic you want to pay attention to, if you want app and data files to be loaded in quickly.