Firefox beta for RISC OS.. What about Amiga?

[NyQuil]

Hi! I just noticed that the first beta of Firefox for RISC OS was released today, I don't know if RISC OS has a bigger following than Amiga, but it made me remember my plas on getting an A1 as soon as a decent browser came out..

I was just wondering how the port of Firefox for OS4 is coming along, or if somebody knows if it(or any other decent browser) is being ported at all?

Thanks.

[Mr_Capehill]

I don't the status of possible AmigaOS port but one day the author of RISC OS port walked in and asked the same thing:

http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=12922&forum=4&start=0&viewmode=flat&order=0

[NyQuil]

@Mr_Capehill

Interesting reading, thanks!

[Cymric]

I must say I am quite impressed with that achievement. On the other hand, RiscOS is presenting itself as a sort-of-vague-Unix to that program, and that makes porting things a helluvalot easier. All the nasty bits are handled by RiscOS's UnixLib linker library---that's the infamous ixemul.library to Amigans. Nevertheless, keep in mind it has taken years of committed efforts of a small group of people, and that is just to get glibc and X11 going! That is completely comparable to creating AmigaOS4 or AROS.

Amizilla is trying to make it all native, but progress is exceedingly slow (people on the mailing list often excuse themselves for not having worked on stuff a great deal), and some of the problems they were facing just made me cringe with their complexity. There was one topic suggesting that a sort-of source scanner be built to transform every gtk/glib-call into a matching MUI/Intuition-one: the libraries just handle things so differently. You have my sympathies.

In any case, you can watch progress yourself on the mailing list: it lives on Yahoo! Groups. Don't be all excited, however: message traffic is thin, on average slightly more than one message a day, sometimes a little more when diffs to the NSPR are posted.

[Acill]

Sure RiscOS has an X11 like waper to say, but its far from UNIX. Even less so then AmigaOS. Reading his threads at AW.net he is wondering why its taken us so long.

[ACEFNQ]

Hi Nquil
Please don't let the lack of software "this or that" influence your decision not to buy an A1.  I have an A1XE and I love it, so much so I have also picked up and Imac and Emac (seems a strange arguement doesn't it).

I love AOS as do I believe everyone does on this and other Amiga sites.  The PPC platform intigues me hence the buying of our longtime cousins the Mac (I got them very cheap).

All I can say is that I love my XE and there is not much I cannot do on it that I can do on my high ends PCs, so please just get on board, get one, the more on board the less likely to fail.  Sure it's a new platform and may have some minor bugs but the way I see it is the first few who bought XE etc (like me) took the big chances, we are the ones who have some niggling problems but the new A1s are fine (ours can be fixed by several means).

The RISC community is pretty resiliant and they also watch Amiga progress, success for both may also be achieved by some joint development.

At least both communities have a degree of influence on the way forward of their platform of choice.

cheers
ace

[Cymric]

Well, I gave the answer: a) making the computer appear Unixy; b) dedicating years of effort to it. I can think of others: c) the schisms between MorphOS and AmigaOS4 have taken up lots of energy and caused many people to abandon the platform; d) the build environment on OS3- (which the Amizilla bounty calls for) is spartanic and masochistic at the very least for a project of this magnitude; e) AmigaOS4 was in development by the time Amizilla was started; f) Mozilla/Firefox are moving targets themselves; g) Fleecy stating from time to time that Amiga, Inc. were pursuining their own browser/email client matrix (I think he put it like this, in any case); h) grumpy old men like myself who point out the sheer size of the project and openly wonder about the sanity of such an undertaking, pointing out the incredibly nasty programming problems dead ahead; i) split development efforts with high 'lets do this now' feeling, but little stamina and project management skills for the long haul (AmiDelf with his 'Next Amiga Project' anyone?); j) fanboys nagging about progress, how long to wait, status and what-not.

[NyQuil]

@ACEFNQ

Sure I really want to buy an A1, when I used an Amiga I actually had fun just fiddling around with the OS and trying different apps, I miss that.
But an OS without a modern browser is sadly totally useless to me, and dual booting into linux for browsing would take the fun out of it all. :-(