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Timberwolf (a.k.a. Firefox) Alpha 1 For AmigaOS
An anonymous reader writes "We're happy to announce the availability of the first alpha release of Timberwolf, the AmigaOS port of the popular Firefox browser. Timberwolf needs AmigaOS 4.1 Update 2 installed. Please read the documentation for information about usage and limitations. This is an alpha release, meaning it will have a lot of problems still, and be slower than it should be. We are releasing it as a small 'Thank you' to all those that have donated in the past to show that development is still going on. Timberwolf is available on os4depot.net. For further information and feedback, check the Timberwolf support forum on amigans.net."
I think you answered your own question...
If it ain't broke, DON'T fix it.
| Guru Meditation Error |
Waiting for an amusing sig.
People use new PowerPC Amigas because they can. Classic Amigas are at least collectible because they were 10 years ahead of their time when they came out. They have held their value well.
PCs depreciate very quickly by comparison. The fact that every new version of the OS needs more hardware each time drives the value of used PCs through the floor.
I can understand why people think the next-generation Amigas with the PowerPC chips are not so great though. They use commodity hardware internally instead of doing original stuff like Commodore did.
So does anyone know the exact string the browser identifies as?
I am thinking I should set my browser to match this.
...and Commodore64 application development continues unfalteringly.
I can understand it perfectly. It's the novelty, the nostalgia, and the challenge. If people think they'll enjoy the results, why not?
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It's not AS obsolete as one might think, amiga OS 4.1 update 2 was released in 2010. Amiga OS 4 was released in 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_OS_4
Anything starring Rob Schneider or Ben Stiller? The first 15 seconds of the movie is usually the limit of what any normal person could stand of them.
I'm not sure what you mean by "official Amiga". OS 4.x is strictly PPC, and specifically "AmigaOne, SAM440EP and Pegasos II" (from the "AmigaOS 4.1 Update 2" link). By my definition, there were no native PPC Amigas (i.e., from Commodore); those were all 680x0 machines like God intended.
I guess that just goes to show you the unsettled state of what's considered "Amiga".
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
OS4.1 is a decent enough OS, and the current Amiga OS machines have fast modern CPUs.
Some people simply like Amiga OS. The way the Amiga does screens (every application on its own desktop at its own resolution) and the fast boot time and the datatypes system are all pretty nice innovations that you don't get with other platforms.
Sure. This is the computing power of an Amiga:
.
See it? Now this is the computing power of an iPad:
o
And that's about as exact an approximation as we need... computing power is not a complete metric for comparing computing systems. More important is the computing ecosystem -- the applications available, the restrictions on use of the system, etc. I'm sure that there are some people out there for whom an Amiga is better suited to their computing needs than an iPad, since it is largely an open ecosystem.
Actually, almost everything I do is of very little benefit to the world. Yet my job is not a hobby, my family is not a hobby, breathing is not a hobby... and yet, one of my hobbies is maintaining hiking trails. Probably this is the one thing with the most positive impact on the world that I do, and it's a hobby.
My main point here is that someone spending time on Amiga development may be pursuing a hobby... but whether their hobby benefits the rest of the world in a measurable manner is beside the point. The only concern is whether or not it fulfills them without harming others. And you'd be hard pressed to demonstrate harm to others without introducing societal opportunity cost, which is a tough selling point when it comes to individual fulfillment.
All that said... congrats to the developers on a (somewhat) stable release. They should take pride in their accomplishment, regardless of how important that accomplishment is to society as a whole.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
It's quite simple:
The most used software of todays computers for most people is the web browser.
So having a decent web-browser make AmigaOS much more usable. And for most else it already have good software. Sure it may not be the state of the art for video editing or something such but for everyday use everything is there and people enjoy their old apps I assume.
Origyn Web Browser is a Webkit based browser for MorphOS and AmigaOS4:
http://fabportnawak.free.fr/owb/
http://os4depot.net/share/network/browser/owb.lha
Someone has obviously made it possible to play Youtube videos from within iBrowse, which atleast back in the day was an Amiga browser not based on any other engine which I know of:
http://os4depot.net/share/network/browser/ib_youtube.lha
iBrowse web page:
http://www.ibrowse-dev.net/
Looks like it got a flash plugin for MorphOS:
http://www.ibrowse-dev.net/news.php?id=1169229504
And there exist a PPC-version of AWEB:
http://os4depot.net/share/network/browser/aweb.lha
Enough people use it that they have donated more than 5000 euro to get it ported to that page. I don't know if it handles the donation from the old project which was about the same think, getting a modern browser (gecko) on AmigaOS.
New as in april 30th, 2010 even...
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
If you have to ask, then you're not a nerd. Go away. Shooo!
Camping on quad since 1996.
I don't do any development for old systems - I was just saying I can understand the appeal of it. I have actually gone skydiving...and paragliding...and bungee jumping (but I can't drive). And that's only in 20 years on the planet. That's fun for a change, but TBH, I prefer spending more time tinkering with machines and instruments. A general interest in the Universe is a wonderful thing to have.
And it gets you laid pretty often if you can also engage in conversation ;-)
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They probably can. The PowerPC instruction set was designed to make it easy to emulate x86 and m68k. The AIM (Apple, IBM, Motorola) group wanted to run Windows and MacOS on them, emulating the legacy architectures for old code. Given that most m68k Amigas had an CPU running at under 8MHz, and even the upgrades only went to about 40MHz, it's not much of a stretch to expect a 533MHz PowerPC to be able to emulate the m68k chip much faster than the real thing ran. Unless, of course, you bought one of the 300MHz m68k expansions that came out a couple of years ago, and even then the PPC is probably faster.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
>>>an obsolete OS - I think my question has some merit.
Your question makes an invalid assumption, which is why it was labeled "flamebait" or "troll" by moderators. AmigaOS 4.1 is just over 1 year old. You can that "obsolete"? Hardly. It's younger than the Vista, XP or OS X 10.5 operating systems many of us are still using. - And "I didn't know" isn't a defense when you're only a mouseclick away from google: http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=amigaos+4.1
The Amiga hardware is a bit slow (~800 megahertz), but then again it's always been a lightweight OS, so it doesn't need much speed. The original Amiga did true multitasking with just 0.25 megabytes of RAM and the modern Amiga OS is just as efficient.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Even more practical than that, a tenant literally just handed me some cash, I'm popping into my Amiga software (I created with CanDo years ago) as we speak to record the transaction, with records going back almost two decades. All my banking/financial stuff I do w/Amiga software.
Okay technically my daily use "Amiga" is currently WinUAE running on my laptop, but I always wanted a laptop Amiga (and I have an A4000 and A500 still kicking, actually bought the A4000, my second, just a couple years ago for ridiculously little money from an Amiga dealer).
So the answer is you can still do some things easier on an Amiga, but web surfing via AWeb was annoying (and no Flash), that's what took me to a Linux box and ultimately to Windows. However I miss ARexx integration, standard through all software, to this day--AutoHotKey in Windows is a poor substitute.
I have MP3s that were brought over from my Amiga, as well as digital photos from way before digital cameras were mainstream, heck the background screenshot on my cellphone is carried over (was digitized with DCTV and composited/converted to JPEG with ADPro).
Just because it's not currently being promoted doesn't mean it doesn't work! Heck, it was easier/cheaper to connect my PDA to my Amiga than it was to connect it to my laptop.
No memory protection is one reason why Amiga OS is fast. Unfortunately, it's also a big reason why it's obsolete, regardless of the chronology of its latest updates.
Well, you might call it obsolete. But it still(!) runs circles around so-called modern systems when it comes to interface responsiveness, and elegance of OS design.
Whenever I have to struggle with Pain(t)ShopPro or, even worse, GIMP, I wish for DPaint, and MaxxonCAD might not be a contender for AutoCAD, but it was way easier (and more affordable) for casual use.
And the development environment around SAS C with its blazing fast compiler that could produce ass-tight code (Try making a "Hello World!" program in less than one K of executable on a "modern" system) is still on my mind. Especially with its support back then - far superior over what I get today with the different commercial development systems I use.
Yes, it might be obsolete, because it had no memory protection, but a MMU is not the solution for for all the problems out there. No memory protection also made interprocess communication way easier, and if you consider how well Amiga programs interact with each other via a system-wide AREXX scripting engine, the lack of an MMU is neglectable.
At least editor-wise I finally found something at least comparable to the decade-old super-duper-editor CygnusEd: Notepad++. The sad part is that NP++ does not run on Linux...
Does AmigaOS have a big base of hackers actively writing viruses, worms and various malware exploits for it? No? Then, it's obsolete.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
"Official Amiga" is, I guess, the system running "Amiga OS" from whoever has the rights to call it that. The name has been shifted around a lot, but the PPC systems run an operating system directly descended from the m68k Amigas.
Macs run on x86 instead of PPC or m68k these days too.
The right to use the Amiga-related names lie at Amiga Inc. and Hyperion Entertainment CVBA (some usages exclusive to Hyperion - some on license). Hyperion works with third parties to deliver machines. The AmigaOne X1000 from A-Eon will be the first fully Amiga-branded machine (branded case, mouse, keyboard) to release since Amiga 4000T.
Against the grain
Yeah, you never get any interest or stories about proprietary OSs round here, certainly not... And no one ever liked PowerPC, right.
AmigaOS 3.x and 4.x both have memory protection, same as a modern Mac OS X or Windows 5.x/6.x have memory protection.
3.x was released in 1992
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall