Project Timberwolf - Firefox for AmigaOS4.1

[xeron]

it wasn't particularly harder, and it's quite more amiga-like too (the irony).

What irony? Who cares? OS4 offers developers more choice. I fail to see why that is a bad thing.

[kolla]

Dunno what they smiley's for. They still have their uses. They save hard disk space, bug fixes in shared objects don't require all apps that use them to be recompiled, and combined with dlopen/dlsym are a very handy way of making C++ based plugins.

I had no idea smileys are that versatile.:confused:

[kolla]

What irony? Who cares? OS4 offers developers more choice. I fail to see why that is a bad thing.

The irony is AmigaOS4.x developers failing to develop software the way Amiga software is meant to. As for who cares? How many are left to care? Giving developers choice is not always the right thing to do, unless ofcourse "a big mess" is the goal.

As for Firefox, I keep it around for the same reasons someone might keep IE6 around. I always found Firefox way too much of a resource hungry slowmess and moved over to Konqueror back in KDE3.2 days or so. Firefox can be fast at rendering pages, but it's way too sluggish to use. Another annoying thing is that plugins bring down the entire browser; on Konqueror I can kill off the flashplayer without it having any effect on the browser.

[Fab]

Does any port of OWB to Amigoid systems support this?

I'll implement in the MorphOS port, at least.

The OS4 OWB port has a reasonable address bar history, but the Firefox 3.x one is better. Is the OWB MorphOS one as good?

Hard to say. At the moment, the OWB MorphOS one shows a sorted by date/name list with favicon/url/title, popping up for autocompletion if needed. But it can always be improved for sure.

Who says the Friedens couldn't? The GUI is not the hardest part of a browser, but if you get a GUI that hundreds of people already work on, thats a bonus.

It's not really about difficulty but time and motivation. In MorphOS, porting the basic OWB layers such as thread/IO/memory/network and so on took about one week (these layers being more or less the same as the ones needed for Firefox), but the GUI itself is still always in development after more than 7 months (and there's still much to do). So I perfectly see the point in getting for free an already fully functional GUI.

[itix]

Have you tried writing code that provides properly extensible C++ classes (complete with virtual functions) in an amigaos shared library?

True. You cant do that.

It is up to the compiler/linker implementation to decide how virtual function tables work, not the operating system.

And this is exactly the problem. It is compiler specific and you can not always mix C++ libraries compiled with different GCC versions.

[Karlos]

Firefox is a handy application. Sure it is slow and clunky these days, especially compared to webkit based browsers, but then why not have both if both are available?

A few years ago, I bet most of the people now slating firefox were praising it

[Karlos]

True. You cant do that.

I wasted many hours trying to work around it too. In the end, it just isn't possible.

And this is exactly the problem. It is compiler specific and you can not always mix C++ libraries compiled with different GCC versions.

It is compiler specific yes, and no you can't always mix versions, but the .so format has been pretty much standardised these days. There was quite an effort to tidy it up. Since amigaos 4 only has .so files from gcc 4.x, there aren't likely to be quite the problems you got when glibc got upgraded in linux.

If you assume for a moment that .so files on OS4 are primarily for C++ code (they don't have to be, of course, but I wouldn't write a C .so for amigaos when I could write a shared library instead) and that the only C++ compiler on OS4.0/1 is gcc 4, most of the above objections don't really apply.

Of course, if a new version of gcc decides to change .so files dramatically again, then yes, there will be a problem. However, the revamp  in the last major glibc, though necessary to properly make .so files useful for C++ was something nobody is keen to repeat, not even for C++0x. The current .so format should be future compatible for the latter anyway and hence could be around for some time.

[xeron]

The irony is AmigaOS4.x developers failing to develop software the way Amiga software is meant to.

What the hell? Since when is there a giant rule book of what you must do. "Thou shalt not do anything that AmigaOS3.1 didn't offer!". Please.

unless ofcourse "a big mess" is the goal.

What big mess?

[Karlos]

What the hell? Since when is there a giant rule book of what you must do. "Thou shalt not do anything that AmigaOS3.1 didn't offer!". Please.

People going down that road when criticising support for .so files should consider that ELF is not an amiga 3.x standard either, yet I don't see any complaints about the fact it is used in both MOS and OS4. And why not? It's a sensible standard. Likewise .so is a sensible choice, particularly for C++ since quite frankly, there is no other widely accepted, open alternative.

What big mess?

I suppose having 3.x libraries, 4.x interfaces and .so files could be construed as somewhat excessive. However, I rather like .so file support, simply because neither of the others lend themselves to enabling runtime linked C++ code.

[persia]

Like moves on, Gecko is bloatware, for MS Windows users it was better than trident and that was enough then.  Today Firefox is sort of your grandfather's browser, nice and slow and unforgiving of small web page variations.

Firefox is a handy application. Sure it is slow and clunky these days, especially compared to webkit based browsers, but then why not have both if both are available?

A few years ago, I bet most of the people now slating firefox were praising it

[itix]

People going down that road when criticising support for .so files should consider that ELF is not an amiga 3.x standard either

It is not and there were massive flame wars in the Amiga community ten years ago. "ELF is a monster !!!" being the most famous quote from that era.

Likewise .so is a sensible choice, particularly for C++ since quite frankly, there is no other widely accepted, open alternative.

C++ sucks anyway ;-)

[Karlos]

It is not and there were massive flame wars in the Amiga community ten years ago. "ELF is a monster !!!" being the most famous quote from that era.

ELF is a sensible format. It was just very alien to people accustom to the usual hunk format.

C++ sucks anyway ;-)

Yo mamma... (etc)

[Pyromania]

It would be nice if this finally came out.