Web Browsers

[hancock]

anyone notice  " eyeOS " Web application  by eyeOS Team

[arnljot]

@Phantom

Either list a wanted ad under classified here, or at amibay or amigaworld. Or keep an eye on eBay.

Or, wait and see and hope for the best. The IBrowse team hasn't said that they quit. But they haven't said that they're continuing either.

Those are the only legal ways to get IBrowse I'm afraid. I was lucky, and had a CD backup of my 1999-working amiga system.

But for new users of IBrowse... I'm afraid it's a though world... Most succomb to ask google for help...

[Tenacious]

I'm not trying to pick a fight here.  

If the iBrowse team gives up, it could be that they feel under-appreciated.  Some one seems to be always posting "..when are we going to get a descent browser?".  In truth, they produced the best browser the Amiga has seen so far (I've been happily using it for years.).  It fits the Amigas strengths and it's aging CPU horsepower very well.  With it, I can use yahoo, google, wikipedia, aminet, eBay, etc with no fuss at all.  I can stream audio, get maps and satelite images, and download anything.  In fact, it allmost never chokes on me (I can't say the same for any other aging OSes I use!).  On the other hand, I don't frequent those sites that seem to aim at cutting the fashionable edge of surfing.

I have often wondered how usable a browser ported from another platform (that clocks 20 to 200 times faster and is  used to a Gig of memory) would be on our now modest computers.

I'm grateful to have a browser as good as iBrowse, especially considering my Amigas were made years before there was a world wide web.  I can't imagine the frustration of trying to get Amiga software for lower spec machines without having one machine on the net.

[beakster2]

It is very depressing that Firefox still hasn't been ported to AmigaOS/MorphOS/AROS.  I mean look at this:



If someone has ported it to RiscOS then why not Amiga? Especially when there is a $10,000 waiting for the first person who does!  I mean who uses RiscOS anyway!?!? I used it once at school and it was superbad!

I remember when the Quake source code was leaked and it was a matter of days before an Amiga port appeared.  When ID released the Doom and Descent source all of a sudden there were loads of ports!

The fact that no progress has been made in porting Firefox must surely be a symptom of the fact that most of the hardcore devs have left the Amiga scene. :-(

[Colani1200]

beakster2 wrote:
If someone has ported it to RiscOS then why not Amiga?

The RiscOS version is intended for Risc PCs, surely not for the old Archimedes type of machines. So expecting Firefox or similar browsers for 68k is pure nonsens. From the RiscOS wiki: "most users will find performance unacceptably slow on sub-300MHz machines".

There is promising development for PPC Amigas though. Origyn is progressing quickly and maybe Sputnik should be mentioned aswell.

[Merax]

I think a lot of people in this thread underestimate what it is they're asking for here.

In my day job, I'm a software developer specializing in real time graphics and visualization using OpenGL under Windows.  I've also developed for Linux and back in the day I wrote some BASIC programs on my old Amiga 500.  I've taken a renewed interest in the Amiga and now have a 1200 that I'm teaching myself to program (screens, windows, sprites, etc).

There are several obstacles to getting a "good" web browser on the Amiga.

The first issue that I'm noticing is everyone wants something different.  Some people want small and fast, some want full-featured.  So depending on which way you go, half of the users won't like the browser.

Next, there's a huge variety in Amiga hardware.  Do you want a browser that runs on a 512k Amiga 500 or a 256 MB PPC accelerated A4000 with a true color video card?  It's very difficult to write something with that huge range of hardware targets.   Unlike the PC, there is much less abstraction in place to help you scale things.  Heck, I'm even noticing some of the C examples I've found for OCS chipsets aren't working right on my AGA Amiga, and they're using OS function calls to do their drawing!  This means that any development that is going to work across multiple different Amigas would have to have a different back-end for each one.  It's many projects wrapped into one.

People seem to think that the $10k for porting Firefox to the Amiga should be a big incentive.  It's not, it's a joke.  The project would probably take a developer who is experienced on multiple platforms and with all the different web technologies over a year of full time work to do, and he has to make the investment up front - no one is paying him while he develops, only if he gets it to work.   Someone with that type of experience could be making $10k per month at his normal job.  Web browser development isn't fun and sexy like games are, so people aren't likely to tackle such a difficult job in their spare time.

Lastly, I don't think a Firefox port is the right way to go anyway.  I have 5 tabs open on my Firefox right now and it's using 90 Mb of RAM and probably assumes virtual memory will be available if needed.  Please raise your hand if your Amiga has 1/10th of this memory available.  Think of all the external tech libraries that it probably depends on that would also have to be ported.  Is there a png library for Amiga?  XML parser?  Javascript interpreter?  Java virtual machine?  Flash player?  

Despite all this negativity, I do think there could be a market for a lite, fast browser that works on 68k Amigas.  It should be doable to make something that just does basic html (I'm thinking just tables, frames, text, and images) and works smoother than iBrowse (why can't iBrowse even scroll smoothly?), but it would be more like Lynx with a mouse than Firefox.  

If I were to make something like that, would people buy it?  Does anyone here have an idea how many total sales iBrowse had?

[melott]

@Merax ...

Just look at the number of users here at A.org ......

For a reasonable price I think most would buy a reasonably
performing Browser. You are correct in saying you can't
satisfy everyone but somthing that runs on say an A500
will satisfy enough ppl to make it worth while.

I would buy ... (I run an acellerated A3k)

Mel

[Trev]

I wouldn't buy a browser, for what it's worth. Web browsers have always been free (or bundled) on modern systems, and as has been noted, the browsing experience on a 680x0 Amiga will never come close to Firefox/Mozilla, Internet Explorer, or Safari/WebKit on a modern system.

[rkauer]

 For "raising hands": I have 130Mb on my A1200... :afro:

[matthey]

I want a fast lightweight Amiga browser that reliably supports all standard html, the latest javascript, and has a flash plugin. This would be very useful even without style sheets, JAVA or similar as already mentioned. ClassAct would be nice to use as the GUI as it is supported in AmigaOS 4 as well as classic. There is already a very good start to this with AWeb...

http://aweb.sunsite.dk/

The source is freely available so if your a programmer then download it from the site above and have a look. I'm more of an old Amiga assembler programmer who has come back to the Amiga but I hope to at least get it compiling on my Amiga and help with some debugging and minor changes after I get my Amiga situated. Thanks to anyone helping on this project.

P.S. There is a recent 68000 version of AWeb on the link above. It's probably slow but I bet still useful to someone.

[arnljot]

Trev wrote:
I wouldn't buy a browser, for what it's worth. Web browsers have always been free (or bundled) on modern systems

To an extent true. But Opera for one was at a premium to begin with, true there was a free version, but it was limited, and had ads.

For the Amiga back in 98-99 I bought IBrowse1, upgrade to IBrowse2, Voyager3 and Aweb-II.

No matter how you look at it, mozilla.org has made a business of it's free FireFox. Opera has a business with their Opera Browser. And Microsoft and Apple must have their IE and Safari for their OS'.

Amiga Inc and Hyperion should have made a browser for OS4, and Amiga Inc should have made a browser for OS3.5 and OS3.9. But they didn't, because they didn't and still don't have the resources.

So this leaves enthusiasts, and third party developers.First ones will work for free, but it requires a certain level of dedication, motivation and free time. MorphOS and AROS seems to bring that to the table, so one day we might have Traveller and Sputnik. Certainly OS4 with OWB also has provided the needed spiff to a developer.

Now for third parties, money is needed. And for it to be money in it. There needs to be users willing to pay. And the majority of Amiga OS 3.x users are voicing that they are not. IOSpirit probaby felt this when they were selling IBrowse, and this is probably the reason to why they aren't anymore.

The only scenarios that hold any hope for OS3.x users are:
- A port of Traveller
- A port of OWB
- A rejuvenated IBrowse with a release 4(3 is already stated not to be a "perfect modern browser", and noone knows if or when that will be).

Traveller is the one hope I think that has most substance. Because it's being made for AROS which to some extent is OS3.1 compatible. But it's the one which is least complete atm.

So if you want to do it all, and an Amiga is your only computer, you need to learn how to code then... And you need to learn to do it well.

PS: I'm not asking for trouble, just calling it like I see it.

[AMC258]

Opera is free now... ?  I remember way back when I got the free version with ads and paid for it to support it and get rid of the ads.  But, the peecee with that install went away a long time ago.  I have installed Opera (for free) on several peecies and Sparcs with no ads, no limits, nothing.  I can only assume it is just free for everyone now.

[zyphoid]

And there lies the problem.  How does one become a compitent programmer? Do it yourself, or continue to wait.
no new updates to aweb apl though slow, it was promising and stable!

[Trev]

@arnljot

I've been a casual programmer for the last 10 years or so, and I'm not at all interested in making money off the things I do. (I'm also not a GPL advocate, so I guess that makes me a computational moderate.) There are more than a few capable programmers here and elsewhere, but porting a project like Mozilla takes time. Most folks like to get outside a bit, spend time with family and friends, sleep, and live their lives.

Programmers are also notorious for getting bored or disenchanted and moving onto other projects. What amazes me is not the programming itself--anyone of average intelligence can learn to do that--it's the steadfastness (and often temerity) with which it's done.

Regarding legacy Amigas, they're certainly capable of running a modern browser, but users would have to be realistic about performance expectations.

[Damion]

I agree that a browser 100% up to modern standards would likely be ridiculously slow, especially on 68k machines. (Personally, I'd much rather browse on a modern computer anyway. The ability to boot up IBrowse and handle online banking might be cool novelty fun, but torturing myself and my Amigas with something like Firefox sounds terrible.) From my perspective, IBrowse strikes a nice balance between being reasonably capable of handling the "basics", while retaining (very) good performance.
 
There's a somewhat up-to-date 68k version of ICab, and while I admittedly know exactly _nothing_ about programming (outside of some pretty wicked BASIC skillz, LOL), perhaps an amiga port of that would be easier than shooting for the stars with something like Firefox.

[Trev]

iCab appears to be closed-source. I didn't see anything mentioning source code on the iCab site.