Why porting Mozilla to Amiga??

[HeUnique]

I've been doing some reading about this "bounty" to port Mozilla, and quite frankly, I find this suggestion not a very good one - and I'll explain:

Porting Mozilla to other OS's (and platform, for that matter) is not easy - SPECIALLY when it comes to Mozilla. Go ask Apple why they chose KDE's KHTML engine rather Mozilla (and Gecko based Firebird - for that matter).

I have at home a sub-notebook - a Pentium 300Mhz with 96 MB RAM, with 6GB hard drive. (It's not a powerful machine but should be enough to browse the web, don't you agree?), and unfortunately Mozilla Firebird (the "lite" version of Mozilla) running on Windows 98 (without anything else running, all tasks are killed) is DOG slow. I tried at the same machine using Redhat 7.2 + WindowMaker + Mozilla firebird - same result, although a bit faster, but still very slow.

Why do I mention this? because what people here wants is a browser that works in their 200+ Mhz PPC machines, and in the 600-1Ghz machines. While Mozilla should run very nice in the 600+Mhz machines, it will run dog-slow on the old machines..

What I would suggest (if someone out there cares) is another route:

How about porting Trolltech's QT library? why? simple:

1. QT itself can be run on frame-buffer without any problem.
2. The library itself is very well documented.
3. Porting QT will open the door for quite few more applications (based on KDE or QT) which can be used on AOS.

After you have QT ported - you can take something like KDENOX (available inside KDE CVS) and just recompile it against QT - and you have a working browser! KDENOX "gets" all the KHTML modifications from the KDE library which KDE & Apple Computer are working on..

Thoughts? comments? flames?  :-o

Thanks,
Hetz (HeUnique)

[DaveP]

I think you are right, but I don't want to offend the people behind the bounty because their heart is in the right place.

[Staticman]

Mozilla would be a brilliant application to have running on my Amiga.

All the Amiga browsers out there at the moment still dont really cut it (even the mighty iBrowse 2.3)

[trgse]

well first... Qt isn't free or open source (that's why Apple doesn't use Qt and went to the truble of implementing a Qt abstraction layer in their browser) so you can't port Qt without lotsa money or that the Qt developers do it themselves (highly unlikely).

well, I've used mozilla (latest 1.4) on a 200 MHz pentium-II and it ran just as fast as Internet Explorer (it just had 64 MB RAM too) so all talk of mozilla being slow is bullshit, if you can't install it and setup windows to minimize use of virtual memory anything will be slow even on a 16 GHz Pentium-IX.

[HeUnique]

QT is Free AND Open source - it's under GPL license - what else do you want? you cannot use it with closed source development unless you pay for Trolltech (thats the QPL license) which I think it's pretty fair when a company invests heavily on their product. Please DON'T SPREAD FUD!

As for Mozilla is fast as Explorer - I'm sorry, but I have 4 machines here near me - 3 of them are Pentium II 300 and one of them is Pentium 233Mhz - all of them equipped with 64-96MB RAM, and Mozilla is WAY slower then Explorer - I could give you lots of examples. FUD again..!

[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?

[odin]

I think HeUnique is talking about something else than QuickTime. What that QT you mean exactly?

[T_Bone]

HeUnique wrote:
QT is Free AND Open source - it's under GPL license - what else do you want? you cannot use it with closed source development unless you pay for Trolltech (thats the QPL license) which I think it's pretty fair when a company invests heavily on their product. Please DON'T SPREAD FUD!

As for Mozilla is fast as Explorer - I'm sorry, but I have 4 machines here near me - 3 of them are Pentium II 300 and one of them is Pentium 233Mhz - all of them equipped with 64-96MB RAM, and Mozilla is WAY slower then Explorer - I could give you lots of examples. FUD again..!

bla foot in mouth n/m...

You can use it with closed source developement so long as you don't distribute it.
 

[Brian]

Dunno if this sais anything... I run netscape on my P166 noMMX/64Mb EDO and it works like a charm. Speed vs IE is not notisable slower to me.

I don't see the problem with a port of it to the Amiga, I'm sure it can handle it, after all, it has super efficient AmigaOS and as I understand it it's not a 100% port which meens inefficient code can be scrapped. :-D

[Hooligan_DCS]

@HeUnique
Said the exact same thing hefre a few hours after the Amizillaproject was started. No use to port it to classic ppc, let alone 68k. What I got was counterarguments of Mozilla running "just fine" on "crappy aged mac's" .. so just leave it there, it's no use. They know better than you and me ;-)

[Damion]

Well, I agree with HeUnique...I never liked
netscape (slow and bloated after 4) or mozilla.
Seems kind of contrary to the idea of fast/
lean amiga apps.

But I do agree that it would be better to have
it than not; it can't really do any harm.
Although my guess is it will be pretty slow
on the "classic" setups.

[ronybeck]

Why Port it?  Because it ####s on any browser the amiga has.  It is fully featured and not just some cut down crap like what comes with KDE.

It is time to move out of the 90's guys.  you can't expect Amiga developers to write software for 200Mhz machines for ever.   Mozilla isn't that bad.  It runs well on my girlfriends 700Mhz. althlon.  So on a G3 it will be brilliant.  700mhz is considered ancient history now.   You can't be serious with your 200Mhz machines.

For those asking, QT is a muliplatform GUI api.  It is Kind of the OpenGL of GUI's :-).  It would just mean that people could port stuff from other OS's easily.  Linux uses it quiet a bit.

I hope no body takes this guy seriously and ports the half hearted Konquerer browser from KDE.  It is a waiste of time and rates as poorly as the likes of iBrowse and Voyager.

[bbrv]

The day we had the OSNews and Slashdot news a couple of weeks ago coverage we had 425,000 page views in a matter of hours.  Mozilla browsers accounted for nearly 45% of those accessing www.pegasosppc.com.  All Microsoft browsers accounted for just a bit less.  Contrast this with Google's stats for April: 93% Microsoft something, 3% Mac, and 1% Linux (its not just Apples and oranges  ;-)  ).  Anyway, even last week with this coverage, Safari (KHTML) ranked second!  There is a shift afoot and when people see things they are familiar with the have a tendency to be less hesitant to change (for example Linux to MorphOS).  Hence, there is some credence to the Mozilla port (if anyone can really do it!).  To quote a famous friend of ours named Ralph, "it's a *pig*" (Mozilla that is).  Anyway, we agree with HeUnique, go ask Apple.  KHTML made sense for them, why not us?  Plus, with the latest episode of Microsoft vs. AOL where will Mozilla be headed anyway?  As Damien said, "So much code, so little time!"

:-)

R&B

P.S. Internally, we are sticking with Voyager.  BTW, iBrowse had 3% of the views on the last OSNews-day, Opera 5%.

[HeUnique]

Crap in what sense? I use it right now to type this message, and Apple uses it's engine for their Safari browser (with all engine modifications going back to the KDE community). Is Apple wrong about their decision do adopt KHTML instead of Mozilla/Gecko? I don't think so.

It's getting better - you don't need the QT library at all to make KHTML work, just like Apple don't use QT in their Safari browser, but you need some GUI library to display the pages

I have shown the KDENOX (which is essentially KHTML + QT library) running on a Linux embedded with Motorola Coldfire processor - it runs pretty impressive.

And here's one point - by porting mozilla - you're porting a browser, and not much more (I can't really call the XUL think a good GUI, sorry), but with QT you can port the KDENOX and have a library which can be used to port other based apps to Amiga. Go do some checking how many apps are based on QT and how many apps are based on Mozilla's XUL engine, then come back

ronybeck wrote:
Why Port it?  Because it ####s on any browser the amiga has.  It is fully featured and not just some cut down crap like what comes with KDE.

It is time to move out of the 90's guys.  you can't expect Amiga developers to write software for 200Mhz machines for ever.   Mozilla isn't that bad.  It runs well on my girlfriends 700Mhz. althlon.  So on a G3 it will be brilliant.  700mhz is considered ancient history now.   You can't be serious with your 200Mhz machines.

For those asking, QT is a muliplatform GUI api.  It is Kind of the OpenGL of GUI's :-).  It would just mean that people could port stuff from other OS's easily.  Linux uses it quiet a bit.

I hope no body takes this guy seriously and ports the half hearted Konquerer browser from KDE.  It is a waiste of time and rates as poorly as the likes of iBrowse and Voyager.

[KennyR]

Mozilla is slow, guys. Admit it. It takes ages to load, it takes ages to surf, and it takes ages to install. Everything about it is an exercise in patience. It even comes with a launcher so it loads quicker, and the expense of eating about 30MB of your memory on every boot, which slows your system down even more....arghhh!

And no doubt the 68k guys want Mozilla too, which will take the slowness of this app into extremes. They're bound to be disappointed if they ever get it.