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.

Comments

Does the Amiga OS

[geekoid]

have any inherent advantage over other modern OS?

I get people like to do this stuff for fun and nostalgia. That's fine. It's just been so long since I have used an Amiga I can't think of anything today that it does better then Win7/OSX/Linux

Re:Does the Amiga OS

[realmolo]

No, no advantage.

It's still a very *efficient* OS, but it lacks about a zillion features that any modern OS has. Protected memory, for one.

But for day-to-day use? It's pointless and stupid. You can't do anything with AmigaOS that you can't do faster and better (anc cheaper- modern Amiga hardware is ridiculously expensive) on Linux, MacOS, or Windows.

Still, AmigaOS has a lot of neat features. It's still very well-designed, and it's interesting to think about what it would be like if it had sold well enough to become a viable alternative.

Re:Does the Amiga OS

[Johann Lau]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6nRHNDY2Kw

Re:Does the Amiga OS

[Sloppy]

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.

Re:Does the Amiga OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I checked you couldn't get a PC virus to run on an Amiga.

Re:Does the Amiga OS

[toejam13]

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.

Re:Does the Amiga OS

[unixisc]

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.

Re:Does the Amiga OS

[LordLimecat]

Last time I checked, you cant get a PC virus to run on a potato either.

Re:So?

[philip.paradis]

I care. Other /. members apparently care. Since you don't care, why did you waste your time posting a comment?

Re:Aren't they all betas?

[unixisc]

So does that mean Amiga users will be getting latest & greatest updates every 8 weeks? Is Timberwolf on v11 already?

Re:leave us be

[styrotech]

No way! I haven't used an Amiga for 15-20 yrs and probably never will again, but I still have a soft spot for it and like to occasionally hear about what's happening with its latest incarnations.

After all it is very nerdy news, and that's what we're here for right?

What about AROS?

[csirac]

AROS is AmigaOS 3.1+, with extra bits, re-implemented as a portable OS (not just x86, but ARM, 68k, PPC). AROS is/was for users, by users, without (scant!) profits getting in the way of rational decision-making.

The reason the various zombie shells of Amiga, Inc. and its contractors/IP licensees never did an x86 port is because by the time the AROS guys were actually doing it, the Amiga market was so small that monetizing such an effort would have been impossible without proprietary hardware in the first place.

I'm glossing over the fact that PPC was technically also a much easier challenge than going x86, but I think that's the reality: there always seemed to be more money in what was left of the retail/reseller network for hardware, than software.

I'd also like to point out that AmigaOS had virtual memory, even in the classic 3.x OS with add-ons, and many popular software packages were written to be "VM friendly". Also, AmigaOS 4.x has protected memory, but the implementation has some interesting twist which I forget the details of (but seemed a good compromise to transition AmigaOS 3.x apps into the new protected-memory world).

Even with protected memory enabled, it sure as hell boots faster and starts apps quicker than the shiny new Asus laptop I bought last year...