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Timberwolf (Firefox) Beta For AmigaOS
An anonymous reader writes "News from the world of AmigaOS that the Beta version of Timberwolf (a.k.a. Firefox) was made available last month."
Timberwolf is a port of Firefox to the AmigaOS (the name change is for similar reasons to Debian's use of Iceweasel name) and has been under development for quite some time. The AmigaBounty project page has screenshots and even more info for those interested. There's a video of the browser in action, but beware of the cheesy soundtrack.
Great, now I'll have that Timberwolf tune stuck in my head for the next couple of days.
For all who don't know what I'm talking about:
http://frededison.free.fr/
or Thomas Timberwolf on youtube...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6nRHNDY2Kw
Speed. AmigaOS is bloody fucking fast and ought to be able to run rings around most OSes.
That's assuming you have equivalent hardware to your Linux system, which happens to never be the case.
And it's assuming you don't care that any of hundred tasks can write to any particular piece of memory, an assumption which usually isn't the case, though somehow in the 1990s I managed to get by with that, telling myself "run bugfree software, run bugfree software." Whether or not there's actually such a thing as bugfree software, or if Firefox could possibly be an example of it, I'll leave to Firefox hackers to advocate. (Good luck, guys, you're going to need it.)
And it's assuming that by "fast" you're not talking about the filesystems. The Amiga had some third-party filesystems that were pretty speedy for the time but somewhere around 2.4 Linux got into a league of its own.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Last time I checked you couldn't get a PC virus to run on an Amiga.
it's interesting to think about what it would be like if it had sold well enough to become a viable alternative.
There is a good chance that it would look nothing like the OS we used on legacy Amiga hardware.
The reason the OS was so bloody fast was because it used a flat non-protected memory space. IPC was often done by passing pointers via registers. You could eavesdrop into any other task's memory space, even if its memory was not flagged with MEMF_PUBLIC. The majority of the kernel ran outside of 68K supervisor mode with function calls being made via a jump table as opposed to a software interrupt.
One of the largest complaints about desktop multitasking operating systems of the 80s and 90s was that they crashed too much. That was a huge complaint with Windows 95 and was also a common complaint with AmigaOS. To continue being a viable OS, AmigaOS would have needed memory protection bolted on at some point.
Using a fully virtualized protected memory model like UNIX and NT would have been incompatible with the foundation of AmigaOS since it would break IPC. You'd need stick with a flat address space, simply marking some memory sections as R/O. Program code sections could be R/O for everything except the kernel (that'd prohibit self-modifying code, but SMC was already incompatible with the data cache in 68020+ processors). Tasks could then allocate private memory, public memory or even semi-private memory by granting limited R/O or R/W access to other tasks.
Main problem I see with that route is that you'd bump into the 4GB barrier much faster than fully virtualized memory models, especially since a large chunk of that 4GB would also be allocated to memory mapped hardware and other PCI peripherals. You'd need a processor with a 48-bit or 64-bit memory address space sooner than later.
Since 64-bit CPUs are now common (except ARM), I'd think they could leapfrog 32-bit, and go directly from 16-bit to 64 bit and be there on PPC or MIPS. Do something like using the top (or bottom) half of the address space as reserved for the R/O, and leave the other half there for the memory to grow. That would still give the user up to 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 bytes to address. In fact, they could even toss in some compatibility features w/ the old 16-bit Amiga DOS.
But I only see the point if some computer manufacturer bundles it w/ a new computer that can't run Windows, such as a MIPS or PPC based computer. No point in having this to port it to PCs - there are already too many alternatives for PCs, and as others have noted above, there is no reason to prefer it to Windows7/OS-X or any of the Unixes.