After much, much development, the developers behind AmigaOS 4 have released the first alpha of Timberwolf, the AmigaOS 4 port of the Firefox web browser. I tried it out on my Amiga, and indeed confirmed that this is very much alpha material.
Thomas and Hans-Joerg Frieden have been working on this one for a while now, and relatively regular screenshot updates have been posted to keep the Amiga community up to speed on development. The time has finally come for every Amigan to try out Firefox.
“We’re finally able to make the first binary release of Timberwolf,” the Friedens detail, “This is going to be an Alpha version, meaning it will be prone to crashing and misbehavior, it will be slow, and not all functionality is implemented yet.”
“Future plans include an update to the latest baseline source code of Firefox (3.7 beta), an Amiga-specific theme, as well as a major rewrite of the rendering code,” they add, “The current version of the rendering code (did we mention it’s an alpha release?) has some conceptual problems that will lead to misrenderings, and massive overdraw (some webpages might be rendered 2 to 8 times, you may notice the window will turn black several times during page buildup).”
I hooked up “my” sam440ep machine (it’s actually ACube’s) running AmigaOS 4.1 Update 2, and downloaded the alpha to try it out. Installation took its sweet time, and especially launching it for the first time took forever. It loaded OSAlert just fine, but it crashed all the time. There are graphical remnants too, as you can see in the screenshot.
As you can see, Firefox doesn’t look like an Amiga application at all, but the proposed theme will hopefully improve the integration. Still, I’m not entirely sure why the Frieden brother invested in porting Firefox to the AmigaOS. While I was trying to use the browser, I had painful flashbacks to the days of yore when you were forced to use the terrible Firefox BeOS port. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to invest all this time and effort into improving OWB?
Still, it’s an impressive effort, and everybody is free to do whatever they want, of course. Firefox on Amiga is actually a bounty, so it would appear not every Amigan shares my view.
….you already have a WebKit browser. Dump the money into bringing it up to speed wit Safari and Chrome. I don’t get it. I wouldn’t touch Mozilla for the last 18 months on my Mac because WebKit has gotten so much better, why would anyone want this? On a platform that needs a solid web browser, why would they make the same mistake the Be people made?
Choice is good?
Even though I use Chrome on my Windows box, I still keep an updated Firefox around for those occasions where it runs a website better (and there are definitely situations where that’s the case).
It certainly doesn’t hurt to have two of the major browsers available on any platform (and I hope Haiku will eventually get a fresh Firefox port to complement it’s native Webkit browser).
Both of you have some good points. Personally I’m quite satisfied with OWB on AROS, and personally don’t want FF around. For the few websites, where WebKit-based browsers have issues (a handful of those I need, incl. some government-sites with digital signatures, java and remnants of IE-specific code) I have Windows Server 2008+Firefox/IE (or LFS+Wine+blahblahblah) and what not. OTOH, that’s not really an option for PPC-based platforms.
How is webkit “so much better” ? It’s a little faster, yes, but Firefox 3.6 is reasonably fast even on older hardware (contrary to, say, IE7). It sounds way easier to port. But as a user, does Webkit really have some serious benefit over Gecko ?
Edited 2010-06-10 07:56 UTC
If it’s used in a multiprocess setup like Chrome do, yes as this allow the user to find easily which tab use too much memory|CPU and close it (and this can be used also to improve security), otherwise no..
Firefox devs are working on a multiprocess version of FF, but I don’t expect it anytime soon: this kind of big change must be quite difficult to do..
I agree with the multiprocess thing, myself because I hate seeing a plugin crash leading to loss of data, but as you said it’s not part of Webkit itself (making it so is the goal of the Webkit2 project), it’s only part of Chrome/Chromium’s implementation.
Firefox as a Gecko frontend could just do the same thing and open one new Gecko process per tab without in-depth work on the underlying engine. It’d be a performance nightmare, however, because Gecko has not been optimized for such use at all, hence we’d get 100 MB/tab memory usage and such.
Maybe there would be some incompatibilities with legacy code as well, but usually rendering threads of several tabs should not interfere with each other.
Edited 2010-06-10 09:37 UTC
If they manage to pull it off and make it look Amiga-native I am sure it will have its place. It’s not too surprising that it runs slowly on your Sam440, but on a higher-end machine (like the X1000) it would probably be plenty fast. And of course it’s just an alpha.
How slow is it on a Sam440, on my peg2 it’s fast, not err.. 100% stable
, but speeds not a problem.
not me, but this’ll give you some idea-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvUc7hXUAX8
I’d rather run OWB than FireFox on Windows/Linux/OSX these days, lighter and with the features I need,.
Although I am talking more of the MorphOS than the rather different AmigaOS version.
Also I know it’s early days, but presssing Alt or ctrl + the key for shortcuts feels wrong on an Amiga..
@ALL
Read well the article he doesn’t say it’s slow, he says it takes time to install and that the first start up is slow (subsequent ones are faster, and the installation problem is connected to some font recompiling that happens at installation run time).
Actually this browser on Sam is as fast and in many cases WAY faster than OWB. Heavy sites that are a total chore to browse in OWB have been very fast on SamFlex (like http://www.IGN.com something i never experienced before) and many stuff I never seen working on Amiga finally do (such as Amazon’s recent hystory feature that stalls on the spinning circle going on forever and now finally works, or Wikipedia embedded videos that now finally play just to name a few).
But the most important part is that is that it’s a VERY early Alpha which the authors are saying is much slower than what the final version will be.
I hear people saying that they prefer Chrome because it is more light weight, and yet here we have an Amiga Native FF implementation that goes as fast (at the very least least) as webkit based OWB and it’s still in Alpha state! Final version might be the only browser on earth to deliver lightning speed (if this is any indication) and features all rolled into one, quite an achievement IMHO…
So does that mean the final version will also include a JavaScript JIT targeting PowerPC?
For those remembering the “good old times” with their Amiga workbench 1.3, this news item is pure science fiction haha. I belive they would get a shock trying out AmigaOS 4.1… it’s NOT that old 4 colour workbench you once were used to
I Hope the Amiga X1000 and OS4.1 kicks off into space…the Amiga platform truely deserves some raw power and modern apps.
Can’t wait till i find the money for the X1000…darn maybe I have to wait till they actually release the beast….dohh
Edited 2010-06-10 06:09 UTC
Any new browser such as OWB or Firefox has two benefits:
1. More choice
– there are pros/cons to each browser
2. Improves the underlying operating system
– OS4 has already been updated to support some of
the requirements for Firefox. Undoubtedly some
bugs have been found and squashilated as well.
In general, there browsers are helping the OS4 platform evolve, become more robust and move towards the goal of being suitable for your primary desktop OS.
More than likely porting Firefox has in some way benefitted OWB as well.
not by the browser itself but by the looks of the desktop in the screen capture. Didn’t know AmigaOS was so advanced. Or has there been updates lately? I must confess I know strictly nothing about AmigaOS, where and when it stopped and whether there are developments still going on.
Porting any browser on any platform is a feat per se.
AmigaOS is much alive today (just check aminet.net) because people want to support it. People which uses it, love it so much, hehehe
If there was such love for Windows or MacOS then I am sure that world in 2010 would have looked way different. AmigaOS is the underground OS of all OS’es. It shows how a product can survive without any commercial interruptions. It shows that this is a product many have forgotten because of Commodore’s misstakes.
Now today you have 4 Amiga communities which can live with each other or not
Classic AmigaOS upto 3.9, MorphOS 2.5, AmigaOS4 and AROS. The main difference between all of these AmigaOS’es and Windows/MacOSX/linux OS’es is that AmigaOS is driven by the heart I think. You have some unique software, which you don’t find anywhere else. Like Aminetradio, Titler, Showgirls, fxpaint, SabreMSN, PolyOrga+++ but you also have other programs on other platforms that have been taken to the Amiga platform and made them even better. MPlayer, OWB, Timberwolf (will get AmigaOS UI), MAME and snes9x just to name a few.
Lots of sites care for the community:
http://www.amigaworld.net
http://www.amigans.net
http://www.aminet.net
http://www.amiga.org
http://www.morphzone.org
http://www.morphos-files.net
Well, didn’t know Amiga was so alive. But it still does not answer my question so I’ll rephrase it: when was the last official AmigaOS released ? I’m wondering because the screen capture looks modern.
What hardware do these Amiga OSes run on?
Have a look here: http://www.osnews.com/story/23230/Update_2_of_AmigaOS_4_1_Released
Supported hardware is AmigaOne, Sam440 and Pegasos 2.
And AmigaOS 4.1 has shown demoing running on the High End AmigaONE X-1000 64bit dual core PPC 1.8 GHz (at the moment still running at 32 bit, 1 core), and also AmigaOS has been announced it will be available almost for next September for Low End SAM460EX sporting AMCC 460EX 32bit single core 1.0/1.2(?) GHZ PPC processor.
If they would also somehow get a working copy for those of us who don’t want / can’t be extorted for PPC prices…
I have an Amiga 4000 with the stock processor, a Mediator, 100mb PCI card and 64mb radeon. The one thing it’s missing is a browser that is… well not crap.
OWB is out for it, but it’s a much older version, and I don’t think I had much luck using it.
The Amiga computers and OS were just plain awesome.
You can use ongoing NETSURF browser born in RiscOS scene and then ported to Amiga also!
http://aminet.net/package/comm/www/Netsurf-m68k
But remember that you need lots of RAM!
These are the system requirements:
Also if you have the latest version of the Mediator PCI BUS extension card, it can tricky the Amiga hardware and use SVGRAM from 256MB ATI Radeon PCI graphic card as it was Amiga System FAST RAM!
http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=5465
http://eu-shop.elbox.com/cgibin/shop?info=203M4DIR
Else, if you need more RAM for your A4000 and you don’t have latest MEDIATOR and/or you do not want to afford one of the MEDIATOR latest models, which can trick the Video RAM as 32bit Amiga System Fast RAM, then you can purchase also newly made Zorro III RAM Expansion cards from Amikit online shop:
http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=5464
I hope I was of some help for you and for your incoming navigation with A4000 and Netsurf browser, and hope I helped also for infos on about hardware solutions if you need RAM for your A4000 machine to surf the Internet.
Edited 2010-06-11 14:52 UTC
I think the most shocking thing about that screenshot (for a long time Amiga user like me) is seeing a menu in the browser window. That is so un-Amiga. On Amiga, every application has its menu in hidden in the screen titlebar, accessed by right-mouse-button (a nice feature, wasting no screen space). A menu in a window just seems totally wrong on Amiga.
It’s probably way too much work to rewrite Firefox to be more Amiga-like. It’s nice to have Firefox on Amiga, but it’ll never be a “native program”.
Edited 2010-06-10 13:45 UTC
Unless one keeps the web engine and re-does the GUI, like they did on Windows, that is. It’s possible actually : Firefox no longer looks and behaves exactly the same on Windows and OSX…
Edited 2010-06-10 14:16 UTC
Make Amiga Menus is on to do list.Be patiente is an early Alpha and even on a subGH machine it feels faster than FF on my Dual core Windows machine
Edited 2010-06-10 14:30 UTC
…which is quite an acccomplishment, since windows firefox gets by far the most love out of all of them.
Sounds like those Amiga guys are up to their ole
‘Can’t be done’ tricks again. Good for them.