Internet web browser....

[Piru]

Wasn't there also an attempt to port Opera?

No, Opera is a propietary project.

[Jiffy]

pVC wrote:

You have to remember than no 68k Amiga is nowhere as powerful as P1/133 is. Overclocked 060 might come close, but even 040 is far from it.

I know a P1/133 is more powerful compared to a 68k Amiga, but the P1 I mentioned is also running a múch heavier OS (NT4) combined with a múch larger browser (IE6) than any of my Miggies, leveling the playing field a little.

I would be delighted when an Amiga browser would exist with the capabilities IE6 has, which would run on any of my Amiga's as fast as it would do on a comparable 486.

I just booted an ancient 486DX2/66 with 32 MB and just ISA-cards inside, running Win95 and IE5.5, which has been sitting in a corner for years now. Not exactly a recent setup (IE5.5 has been around since about 2000), to say the least. It's not the greatest for browsing the web and stíll it is much better than any of my classic Amigas, both speedwise and in displaying pages correctly. I find that disturbing, to say the least... ;-)

In my opinion, you overestimate your Amiga setups little in web surfing case.
<>
Edit: Oops, you had gfxcard in a3k too. I guess it's 040 and memory then.

Nah, I don't think I really overestimate my Amiga setups. I know their limitations when it comes to AGA or ZII bandwidth. I think I'm not to far off, if I compare them to a similarly configured 486 with Win95, just equiped with ISA-cards. Many things work great with my Amigas and I like it when I can put them to good use, even when I have much more powerful and up to date computers sitting in the same room. And my Amigas are still very acceptable when it comes to e-mail, FTP, Usenet, irc and stuff.

Well.. I guess C64 browsing skips pretty much stuff and it can't be ever visually acceptable,

True. But you can browse the web using a 1 MHz 8 bit computer with 64 KB ram. It's lousy, slow, doesn't support a lot and it is indeed only acceptable from a viewpoint of nostalgia and the huge 'look at this!'-factor, but it cán be done. And if it is (more or less) possible on a C64 (or an MSX, for that matter), it should be (more or less) usable on a reasonably expanded classic (68k) Amiga.

but if you want Amiga to support everything in modern web.. it might not be enough. It's balance with speed and supported things. But of course we hope that we'd get more modern options. CSS has seem to become the most important feature missing, but would require writing current engines from scratch

I don't expect it to support everything in the modern web, but I would expect a decent 68k Amiga (68040 and up, with RTG-card and, say, 32 MB or more) to perform about on par with a 486 or even an early P1 (<100 MHz). Unfortunately, the 486 with ISA-graphics wins hands down... :-(

CSS-support would be a fantastic improvement, though.

And yes, if there is ever a new update to either AWeb or IBrowse, I will install them happily. :-)

[Malakie]

From a technical standpoint, the Amiga and its networking capabilities are easily up to par for Internet browsing.  The problem has nothing to do with the Amiga hardware itself.  In fact an A500 or A1000 (with appropriate ram and networking additions could handle net traffic with ease.

The problem does come down solely to software.  And not just someone writing a browser.  It comes down to someone writing a browser for the Amiga!  There is a big difference in an app written using PC standards and Amiga standards.  You code a browser based and actually USING Amiga hardware (custom chips etc) as it was intended and designed and you can blow away any PC browsing experience.

And therein lies the problem.  How many top level, high and low level coders are left that truly know Amiga hardware well enough to write a browser for the Amiga and not just because of it?

For those that disagree.. think of it this way...  The Amiga can ray trace and produce awesome sound and handle graphics like no tomorrow.. BUT ONLY with software written specifically for the hardware allowing it to do it with that great design and those custom chips.  Yet it cannot be utilized and coded to handle awesome internet browsing?

Had I that level of coding experience I would do it... alas I am and was more of a hardware guy than a coder and never put myself down to really getting into the coding side of the Amiga.... wish I had now.... but then again I was busy enough working on the hardware!   :crazy:

Malakie

[pVC]

amigadave wrote:
Who the hell screwed up the Internet and made it so demanding to view it in the first place? (no need to answer rhetorical questions)

That's the biggest problem IMHO. There's not good enough control and everyone is trying to invent new things for their browsers etc. And the worst thing is that in most cases pages could easily be done to look exactly the same in standard html, but then users or page generators use the most bloatest things for simple tasks. Simple and common example is to use javascript for normal links.

[Jiffy]

Malakie wrote:
From a technical standpoint, the Amiga and its networking capabilities are easily up to par for Internet browsing.  The problem has nothing to do with the Amiga hardware itself.  In fact an A500 or A1000 (with appropriate ram and networking additions could handle net traffic with ease.

The problem does come down solely to software.  And not just someone writing a browser.  It comes down to someone writing a browser for the Amiga!  There is a big difference in an app written using PC standards and Amiga standards.  You code a browser based and actually USING Amiga hardware (custom chips etc) as it was intended and designed and you can blow away any PC browsing experience.

I agree completely. The hardware of Amiga in general is more than capable to run decent software for displaying graphics and texts simultaneously. Heck, that's what the whole bloody machine was famous for! Especially the more expanded Amigas (I am again referring to my own Miggies) can be easily compared to perform like a fast 486 or an early P1.

Unfortunately, the Amiga world now only exists in the form of a few thousand hobbyists, which is not exactly in the same league as the tens of millions of pc-users. Although I expect (just a guess, but I don't expect to be very wrong on this one) the percentage of Amiga users who are capable programmers is far higher compared to the pc market, it is a matter of sheer size: there are not many Amiga programmers left, let alone ones who are capable of programming a capable browser. The current ones who are more or less usable (AWeb & IBrowse) lack important features, features which are so much important as to almost disqualify both programs as realistic alternatives to other (Windows/Linux/OSX) browsers.

I sincerely hope the remaining programmers working on the current versions of both Amiga browsers will be able to produce a decent upgrade for their programs. An upgrade which will be both usable on nicely upgraded classic Amigas when it comes to speed and be able to display the average website correctly.

And to be honest, although I realize the limitations of AGA (I really love my 1200) I fail to see why it would completely cripple any browsing experience. AGA is, although old, a very capable chipset which can display graphics nice and fast. You can use all kinds of graphics software with it and to this day be amazed at the quality and speed of it and then people are trying to tell me it's almost impossible to display a lousy webpage with some teenie-weenie pictures splattered across without grinding a pretty hefty 1200 to a halt because of AGA?

Again, if it is possible to (more or less) display a frakking webpage on a 1 MHz 8 bit computer with 64 KB ram, I expect the same page to be displayed immensely superior in terms of quality, speed and usability on a 50 MHz, 32 bit computer with 64 MB ram and tons of extra hardware. And although that webpage is indeed displayed in a better quality, the difference is not as big as I would expect it to be when comparing the hardware. The same webpage is displayed múch faster, in higher quality and with many, many more features with much less errors while viewing it on a lousy 486 running a piece of crap like IE6! I frakking hate that 486 just for being able to display a bloody website correctly and with an acceptable speed which my A1200/2000/3000 can't! ;-)

[Tenacious]

You guys are hitting on the prime reason that I feel that technology is becoming less about improvement and more about fashion, trendiness, and marketing.  Some aspects of using a computer have not improved in the last 15 or 20 years, it's just a lot more bloated.

The most exciting thing I've seen in a long time is the PS3.  Video content is finally moving into the hands of the audience, the way music moved to Mp3 a few years ago. This will probably hurt movie theaters.

[Malakie]

Jiffy wrote:

And to be honest, although I realize the limitations of AGA (I really love my 1200) I fail to see why it would completely cripple any browsing experience. AGA is, although old, a very capable chipset which can display graphics nice and fast. You can use all kinds of graphics software with it and to this day be amazed at the quality and speed of it and then people are trying to tell me it's almost impossible to display a lousy webpage with some teenie-weenie pictures splattered across without grinding a pretty hefty 1200 to a halt because of AGA?

Again, if it is possible to (more or less) display a frakking webpage on a 1 MHz 8 bit computer with 64 KB ram, I expect the same page to be displayed immensely superior in terms of quality, speed and usability on a 50 MHz, 32 bit computer with 64 MB ram and tons of extra hardware. And although that webpage is indeed displayed in a better quality, the difference is not as big as I would expect it to be when comparing the hardware. The same webpage is displayed múch faster, in higher quality and with many, many more features with much less errors while viewing it on a lousy 486 running a piece of crap like IE6! I frakking hate that 486 just for being able to display a bloody website correctly and with an acceptable speed which my A1200/2000/3000 can't! ;-)

Again it comes down to simply coding for the hardware design.

Some have compared say an A4000/04 to a i486 pc.    I disagree there again.  Now if you run two identical programs coded exactly alike, one compiled on PC and one compiled on Amiga, then ok yea they are equal.  But if you code the Amiga version specifically to take direct advantage of hardware, that Amiga will run comparable to any machine today in terms of processing power.  Speed up the Amiga processor clock more and one could easily beat even top level PC's today IF the code is specifically written for the Amiga hardware design.

And I can prove it.. or I could proveit that is if the Battletech centers were still around and operating.. I doubt any of them are today.

For those that do not know, the Battletech centers were built in a number of cities including the first one in Chicago.  They were basically 16 individual {bleep}pits networked together, each with its own Amiga 500 heart and soul inside, running a FULL 3D virtual {bleep}pit simulation of FASA's Mechs from their Battletech series of games.

You see I was part of the team that help get those running and on a personal note, man was it freaking cool!!   :-D  Sitting in your OWN actual Battlemech style {bleep}pit with controls on each arm rest, pedals, main screen and buttons and knobs... as if you were sitting inside an actual Battlemech, and knowing there were 15 other people sitting in their own {bleep}pits ready to battle it out with you in on of the first true 3D simulation systems back then.

Anyhow, there came a time when the designers were having some problems, especially with not only rendering speed but main game engine processing speed.  My team (from the company I mentioned earlier I started) came in and it was kind of a nice coup on the programmers they had there.  They had spent weeks tweaking, changing, rewriting, altering and anything you can think of to the code to get it to run at a speed that was workable.. The best they had managed was 4 or 5 {bleep}pits at once and that was really pushing it.   Obviously not acceptable by any means.

I remember that day because it was a major breakthrough for the centers to become a true reality.  First, they had tried numerous 3D accelerator cards on the A500 boards but none worked.  Constant crashes, hardware faults etc.  This was some really high level code remember for what they were trying to do.  So the first thing I did was have them plug one of the hardware products we produced... which once I give the name here, I am sure some of you will have heard of.

We plugged Sapphire 020 cards into each and every {bleep}pits A500 board.  I was absolutely sure our small little board would do what was needed even though the big names had failed completely to work in this situation.  I do not know why I knew my card would work, but I just knew.  It took about 5 minutes to plug one Sapphire into each {bleep}pit board and power all of them up.... and for the very first time we had 16 fully running {bleep}pits without them crashing.

BUT frame rates were still not anywhere acceptable.  At first I was wondering what the heck was going on... then I realized two things.  1) the code was compiled with NO 68020/30/40 optimizations.  BTW, the Sapphire 020 was a bare bones 68020 & 68881 processor board with NO RAM on board.  Our design utilized the Amiga's own onboard ram instead of relying on its own.  This made a HUGE difference in compatibility.... thus the reason our little card became known for being one of the most compatible accelerator cards.  

But to get full benefit, you needed at least a 1meg Amiga and the code you were running needed to be compiled with the 020 optimizations turned on.   Many Amiga users back then did know that nor realize how many software apps back then really did not reach full potential because of this one over-site by programmers.  Had more software done and been compiled this way, well..let's just say many people are not aware of the real speed even an A500 could reach.
Once I pointed this out, the programmers recompiled a few main code libraries and programs for the Battletech code and we then ran another test.  And wham, in just 30 minutes they went from a system that was starting to look as if it may never truly become viable to 16 full {bleep}pits up and running at the same time with nary a crash AND with very nice frames per second rendering.

However that was not the only issue.  We also pointed out that much of the code was NOT even touching on or taking ANY advantage of the Amiga's main strength...  MULTITASKING via the custom Amiga chipset!  It took them some weeks of work, but they recoded to take true advantage of not just the Sapphire 020 board but the inherent Amiga custom chips and well the rest is history.  From what I remember, there were 17 centers built around the world in many major cities.  Now that I think about all this, I wonder if any of them are still actually running.. would that not be cool!

Suffice it to say, those programmers learned one small but hugely important thing about the Amiga.   You cannot code it like a PC or any other computer in the world because it is just far superior - even by today's standards and yes, it is STILL today in my personal opinion, a system that if we had people coding for it the way it was designed, would be blowing away even the dual core 2.8GHz system I am typing on now.

Had Commodore not died, today we would have Amiga's running on 68220 (heh) chips (yet still at a clock speed of only around 500 mhz or so - remember, 7.16 mhz started this whole thing!), a custom Amiga chipset design that had grown at the same pace as the pc market's advances have and if this had happened, we would have an Amiga that would probably be closer to a multi-processing, hyper-threaded, Cray than anything the PC OR Mac world could even attempt to match.

In my opinion, Take an Amiga 4000 with a 68060 or 68080, a nice Video graphics card and appropriate ram etc etc and some properly written Amiga code coded for the custom chipset and it will blow away any system in the PC market today running an equivalent software package.

[wurzel]

I agree completely. The hardware of Amiga in general is more than capable to run decent software for displaying graphics and texts simultaneously. Heck, that's what the whole bloody machine was famous for! Especially the more expanded Amigas (I am again referring to my own Miggies) can be easily compared to perform like a fast 486 or an early P1.

I think you're nmissing something very fundamental. The CPU has to decode the graphics first, before they can be displayed. Jpgs especially, take a lOT of processor time and that's where the slowdown is. It's nothing to do with the actual displaying, it's the preparing of the data to display. And even thougb I have an 060 with 196mb RAM, displaying jpgs using WarpDT is still considerably slower than on a PC.

Having said that, as I said earlier on, my Amiga is easily as fast as my 1.5mhz laptop, on non-graphics pages, if not faster. So I would suggest that IB is very well written, but with a slow CPU, no amount of brillant coding will increase the Amiga's speed.

[Jiffy]

wurzel wrote:
I think you're nmissing something very fundamental. The CPU has to decode the graphics first, before they can be displayed. Jpgs especially, take a lOT of processor time and that's where the slowdown is. It's nothing to do with the actual displaying, it's the preparing of the data to display. And even thougb I have an 060 with 196mb RAM, displaying jpgs using WarpDT is still considerably slower than on a PC.

I don't think I'm missing anything fundamental. Again, I am NOT comparing any of my Amigas to any recent pc, I am comparing it to both a P1/133 ánd a 486DX2/66, also in my possesion. I have had that particular 486 since 1993. The 486 is equiped with an ISA-videocard, an ISA-networkcard, 32 MB ram, two 540 MB PIO-0 hard drives and is running Win95 with IE5.5. Hardwarewise, my Amigas are superior to this particular 486 in almost any respect. OS3.9 runs circles (speedwise) around Win95. The 486 is definitely slower than the P1/133 with NT4, but still displays almost any webpage at a more or less decent speed and in an acceptable quality. My Amigas (1200, 2000, 3000) trump this particular 486 with almost any software I use on them, whether it be games, graphics, DTP, wordprocessing, spreadsheets, utilities and the like. The sole part in which they are _completely_ inferior is when it comes to webbrowsing.

Please notice, I am nót comparing my own Amigas to a dualcore AMD cpu running at 3.2 GHZ with 2 GB ram. I am comparing them to a 15 year old 486, equiped with an OS which arrived on the market in 1995, running a browser from the year 2000. I don't think that comparison is unfair. My Amigas have more memory, faster harddrives, equally fast or faster cpus and have an OS requiring less resources than the 486.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the JPGs you mentioned, which, ofcourse, have to be decoded by the cpu first before being displayed, also have to be decoded by the 486 before they can be displayed. Is a 486DX2/66 thát much faster than a 68060/50 when it comes to decoding JPGs?

Having said that, as I said earlier on, my Amiga is easily as fast as my 1.5mhz laptop, on non-graphics pages, if not faster.

I would certainly hope your Amiga (whether it is expanded to the brim or plain vanilla) is at least equally as fast, if not faster, than your 1.5 MHz laptop. What is it? An overclocked SX64? :-D

All in all, I come to the conclusion that you find the webbrowsers on a classic Amiga to be of an acceptable quality, both speedwise and in displaying pages correctly, while I do not.

The speed is, imo, extremely lousy and many pages will not display correctly, if at all. The current browsers lack speed and features and unfortunately can't even be compared to a 15(!) year old pc.

I can put any person behind that old 486, start IE5.5 and they're able to browse the web, every once in a while muttering that is much slower than their own pc at home but still getting things done. If I put them behind my A1200, 2000 or 3000 and boot either AWeb or IBrowse, they will not mutter anymore, they simply will stop trying after a few minutes as the lack of speed makes it unworkable, while many websites they visit are only functioning partially, if at all.

I am not including non-classic Amigas such as the Pegasos, as I do not have any experience with them, although I fully accept they are immensely superior (speedwise) compared to a classic Amiga, which will ofcourse improve the usability of browsers on the Amiga, although the lack of features of both IBrowse and AWeb isn't affected by the extra speed Pegasos offers.

The current browsers for the Amiga lack speed and features. The Amigahardware is more than capable to handle the amount of data the average webpage throws at it, the OS is small, speedy and effective, but the current browsers are not up to their task in their current versions.

As I mentioned before in one of my previous posts: I would be extremely happy with a webbrowser with about the same features as IE6 (or even IE5.5 for that matter), running about as fast as IE6 would do on a 486DX2/66.

[stefcep2]

Your web browsing experience on your Amiga does depend on your hardware and your web browser.  i used to use ibrowse 2.4 on an A4000 68060 cv64 1024x 768 16 bit screen with a high speed zorro serial port.  I did not have a site i couldn't use that involved getting text, picture and gifs, filling in forms, passwords, even banking .  in fact not having a flash plug-in made my experience faster and free from all the advertising drivel.  And my bandwith use was about 30% of the PC viewing the same pages due to no flash and using web caching. email retrieval and sending is faster on Amiga than on PC.  i think i would happy if amiga had css support, but i couldn't give a stuff about flash or real player video's, just a waste of bandwidth and a colossal waste of technology

[Jiffy]

stefcep2 wrote:
Your web browsing experience on your Amiga does depend on your hardware and your web browser.  

Ehrm... Is this serious? We're talking about computers here... Ofcóurse it is depending on your hardware and your web browser! What else would it depend on? The temperature of my cup of coffee?

i used to use ibrowse 2.4 on an A4000 68060 cv64 1024x 768 16 bit screen with a high speed zorro serial port.  I did not have a site i couldn't use that involved getting text, picture and gifs, filling in forms, passwords, even banking .

I find that highly unlikely. No site you couldn't use? There are huge amounts of sites that require the support of CSS to be able to use them. No CSS-support is no functioning website on your screen, period. And a serial port, albeit fast? What year are we talking about? Five, ten years ago? Websites were different then. My Amigas have been connected to my router through either a PCMCIA-nic (3Com509) or a XSurf card for years now, so bandwidth is no issue. Most sites expect you to have a broadband connection and I can't blame them. Websites today are different compared to websites 10 years ago. They are larger and more complex.

I am not asking something extreme. I have several decent Amiga setups, capable of outperforming a comparable 486 and P133 on many tasks with relative ease, except(!) when it comes to webbrowsing. Amiga browsers suck when comparing them to IE6, both when it comes to speed and even more so when it comes to displaying sites without to many errors.

Browsing with an Amiga is not funny: it's always a question if a site I want to visit will function or not. On the 15 year old 486, I do not have that problem... It's not the hardware: the Amigas I have (much) more powerful compared to the 486. Ergo, it's the software holding my Amigas back.

email retrieval and sending is faster on Amiga than on PC.

That might be so, but I wasn't denying that either as it wasn't part of the discussion. Email works fine on the Miggy, although I hardly ever use it. I like YAM, but as it doesn't support IMAP-folders, I hardly ever use it. I'm eagerly awaiting the 2.6 release... Still Q4, 2008?

i think i would happy if amiga had css support, but i couldn't give a stuff about flash or real player video's, just a waste of bandwidth and a colossal waste of technology

Same here. CSS is vital. Any browser nót supporting CSS is completely out of date as there are literally millions of websites requiring it. Any type of videosupport or animation (flash, real player, whatever) is not required by me, although I have to say it should be included nonetheless, with the option of switching it off: switch it off when you have a classic Amiga and want to be able to have decent speed, switch it on when you use something like Pegasos, A1 or the like which are fast enough to not stumble and fall over the extra data which has to be transfered.

Still, I fail to see why AWeb and IBrowse would be as slow as they are compared to a 486. People have mentioned that it's the lack of RTG (forgetting I have RTG-cards in two of the mentioned machines) or it's the ZorroII bus (forgetting I compared it to a lousy 486 with ISA ánd my A3000 runs a CV64, which only operates in ZorroIII-mode), the lack of memory (the A1200 and 2000 have twice as much ram compared to the 486) or a slow cpu (a 68060/50 is slower than a 486DX2/66? Really?).

The Amigas I have (and use, as a hobbyist) have some pretty hefty expansions and are more than a match compared to a bloody ISA-based 486DX2/66 with 32 MB ram and two crappy PIO-0 drives. When standing side-by-side, the 486 tramples any of my Amigas when browsing the web. It is faster and displays more pages correctly. And therefor I hate its bl..dy guts! ;-)

[Framiga]

"No CSS-support is no functioning website on your screen"

wrong! bad displayed (of course) but perfectly useable.

Did you meant Flash/java based pages perhaps?

[Jiffy]

Framiga wrote:
"No CSS-support is no functioning website on your screen"
wrong! bad displayed (of course) but perfectly useable.

Wrong. Without CSS-suppport, it is certainly badly displayed and _may_ be usable in certain areas sometimes, depending on how heavily deformed the layout is without a functioning CSS-system. But there's a very good chance you're missing areas of that particular website. This can be because the lay-out is so badly f*cked up, you just overlook certain areas, but it can also be because certain parts aren't displayed at all.
 

Did you meant Flash/java based pages perhaps?

No. If that was the case, I would have called it flash or java...

I find it a little peculiar people are relentlesly trying to convince me either I have a lousy Amiga setup or my demands concerning webbrowsers are to high as they work perfectly fine for them.

Sorry, but I stand by my claim: the current browsers which run on on a decently expanded 68k Amiga  (AWeb & IBrowse) are not able to perform equal to a humble 15-year old 486 based pc when it comes to speed and the ability to display the average webpage. Classic Amigas are lousy for browsing the web.

There are literally millions of sites using CMSs for maintaining their content (even I use one), the majority of them using CSS for their layout. They are ranging from small personal websites to larger corporate ones. Amigabrowsers do not support that (and other, imo less important stuff) and therefor  can not display those pages in a usable fashion. A completely {bleep}ed up layout is not usable. I immediately admit the level of usability relies on how much the layout is {bleep}ed up. Some sites might be usable to a certain extent, others are not usable at all.

Again, as I have now said many times over: I do not expect perfection, I do not expect blistering speed and I do not compare my Amigas with current computers. I want the average website to be displayed in about the same way with about the same speed as a 486 does while running IE5.5/IE6. My Amigas are at least equal in hardwareperformance to my 486/P133 and even surpass them on many levels. OS3.x is much more responsive and needs much less resources compared to Win95/NT4. And still, both the 486 and the P133 trample my Amigas when it comes to browsing the web. Yes, certain pages display correctly on the Amiga, but many others do not.

The Amiga hardware I have and use is good, both in design and in speed. So is the OS. It outperforms equally old pcs with ease and sometimes even much newer machines with many things. But not while browsing the web.

My conclusion: the current Amiga browsers are not up to their tasks. They maybe were good a decade ago, when many current webtechnologies didn't even exist and webpages were much lighter, but in 2008 they severely lack in performance and features and can't even be compared to a (not to good) Windowsbrowser which has been in existence for about 8 years now...

[stefcep2]

Jiffy wrote:

stefcep2 wrote:
Your web browsing experience on your Amiga does depend on your hardware and your web browser.  

Ehrm... Is this serious? We're talking about computers here... Ofcóurse it is depending on your hardware and your web browser! What else would it depend on? The temperature of my cup of coffee?

As opposed to running a 14 mhz 020 2 meg ram AGA-only internal serial port Amiga with Ibrowse 1, or any lesser hardware or software than my set up.  my A4000 was good enough until about 18 months ago

i used to use ibrowse 2.4 on an A4000 68060 cv64 1024x 768 16 bit screen with a high speed zorro serial port.  I did not have a site i couldn't use that involved getting text, picture and gifs, filling in forms, passwords, even banking .
I find that highly unlikely. No site you couldn't use? There are huge amounts of sites that require the support of CSS to be able to use them. No CSS-support is no functioning website on your screen, period. And a serial port, albeit fast? What year are we talking about? Five, ten years ago? Websites were different then.

18 months ago.  The layout may have been wrong: usually i had very long web pages, but the info that i needed was was still there. Maybe i don't browse the sites you do, but i didn't have a problem.

My Amigas have been connected to my router through either a PCMCIA-nic (3Com509) or a XSurf card for years now, so bandwidth is no issue. Most sites expect you to have a broadband connection and I can't blame them. Websites today are different compared to websites 10 years ago. They are larger and more complex.

Dial up was not a limiting factor for me, but then again I don't care for youtube, I don't download porn movies, and I hate flash rubbish.  Hell I only got broadband for my PC 2 months ago

I am not asking something extreme. I have several decent Amiga setups, capable of outperforming a comparable 486 and P133 on many tasks with relative ease, except(!) when it comes to webbrowsing. Amiga browsers suck when comparing them to IE6, both when it comes to speed and even more so when it comes to displaying sites without to many errors.

Browsing with an Amiga is not funny: it's always a question if a site I want to visit will function or not. On the 15 year old 486, I do not have that problem... It's not the hardware: the Amigas I have (much) more powerful compared to the 486. Ergo, it's the software holding my Amigas back.

why don't you try ibrowse 2.4 on winuae?  sure its not running native 68x0 code but its about as fast in hardware as you're gonna get.  this also removes the tcp stack issue (maybe the amiga stacks are slowing things down as well).  this may help sort out the issue of whether its the hardware or ibrowse/aweb.  javascript is now a big slow down for amiga

[spirantho]

Jiffy wrote:
Ofcóurse it is depending on your hardware and your web browser! What else would it depend on? The temperature of my cup of coffee?

Only if you're using Java in the browser.

(Sorry, couldn't resist)

Seriously, though, you've obviously not used OWB on an AmigaOS 4 machine like mine (604e @ 200Mhz A4000 Voodoo III etc.) I was reading BBC news on it just this morning, and it rendered pretty much exactly like a PC browser.

Yeah, IBrowse and AWeb are less featured, but I find them much more responsive than most PC browsers because they're built for low-resource machines. I use AWeb usually under OS3.9 and OS4 because it's faster, but as soon as a site needs CSS or something heavier I go to OWB.

Compared to a 486... well... I know which I'd rather use. Maybe I should fire up my DX2/66 and compare. It's got Netscape 3 on it, that should suffice. Actually, NS3 is a lot less compatible than AWeb, so I'd need to install Win95. Which is a dog on a 486, so maybe I shan't bother.

Really does sound like you have a problem somewhere with your Amiga though... because you seem to be the only person on here who is having trouble with it!

You did see that YouTube video of an A4000 running OWB didn't you?

[stefcep2]

I actually took my advice and used IBrowse in Winuae.  It is slower at rendering pages, mostly due to lengthy javascipt (which you can shorten), but also due to the way in which images(mainly gifs and jpegs) are downloaded and then decoded.  However the cache is a real time saver when moving back and forth between pages.  Amiga.org is rendered just the same as in firefox, ebay works, but pages are not dispalyed the same, banking works fine but again pages are not displayed the same, some commercial tv sites are not rendered right but work and i can do all the things on those sites, such as log into forums,buy things etc.  I think your set up eg ssl must be preventing you from using many sites. But yes it is slower