Author Topic: Web Browser (Read 9304 times)

slaapliedje · « **on:** March 17, 2014, 02:34:30 AM »

AWeb, if I recall, comes with OS3.9, but it's an older version, and I think one of the official boing bags had an update for it (official boing bags meaning 1&2).

There is a rather broken version of OWB for m68k I've tried at one point, and it was horribly unstable. Netsurf really is the best 'modern' browser for the Amiga 68k. I've noticed that it seems a lot slower than it is, because it waits to show anything before it's rendered. The trick most browsers do to make them seem faster is to start showing things as they're loaded, but netsurf doesn't do that, it waits the 5-15 seconds (for me) to then show the page is loaded, but it loads the whole thing.

It actually is fairly fast, though I'm running it on a 060/50, with tons of ram (well, in Amiga terms, I have 380mb~ of fast ram.)

For most day to day use though, I use IBrowse, 'cause it actually works while doing other things.

slaapliedje

slaapliedje · « **Reply #1 on:** March 17, 2014, 03:25:41 AM »

I could be wrong about this, but doesn't IBrowse also basically do what Chrome was so praised for, in that each tab basically runs under it's own process? It certainly feels that way, especially, as you say, that one heavy website doesn't cause the rest of it to slow down.

I wouldn't know about IE, I only ever use it to download Firefox

slaapliedje

slaapliedje · « **Reply #2 on:** March 17, 2014, 03:10:18 PM »

So here's the question... does anyone know if IBrowse has a separate library for it's rendering engine? And if so, could we try to reverse engineer it and then update it to support newer HTML standards? Or would it be easier to just start writing a new browser from scratch?

I know AWEB is open sourced, but from reading up on that, the code is such a frightful mess, that most of the people who have looked at it gave up on trying to improve it.

Realistically, I think having an MUI based one would be the best approach, and that's exactly what IBrowse is. But since development has ceased on it so long ago, and you can no longer legitimately buy the key, it'd be nice if they just opened the source on that (though I think it's been tried before).

slaapliedje

slaapliedje · « **Reply #3 on:** March 24, 2014, 06:48:46 PM »

Ha ha, I saw the article about that (or maybe just something similar) on OSNews. Only thought I had about it was "great, isn't this like the Dash on Ubuntu where you would search for local things and it would send your searches to Ubuntu's servers to then send onto amazon?

Guess it'd work okay for just stupid sites you're browsing, but I wouldn't use any that you log into.

slaapliedje