RISC OS users have crowed for years about the intuitiveness of their operating system’s GUI. But that vaunted usability is of little utility in this modern world without a modern web browser to go with it. So you’ll understand the importance of the RISC OS Firefox port released today.
firefox on risc. all i can say is yes!
bet it sticks out like a sore thumb on riscos
“bet it sticks out like a sore thumb on riscos”
The initial port does, yes. But apparently, further development will improve integration with the RISC OS ‘way of doing things’.
The Firefox port on RISC OS is part of a porting project – http://www.riscos.info/unix
The version released today is a 1st public beta and still some significant work is required to properly integrate it in the RISC OS desktop. This version is comparable to a Linux vanilla version. Nonetheless, it is quite useable and seems to work with most sites thrown at it. It requires at least about 30MB of RAM and a StrongARM RiscPC to acceptably work with it.
This release has been very important to RISC OS users and is a sign of dedication to improve their standards, which were once an inspiration to many others.
how does this run with firefox+flash on such a low-spec machine?
How much RAM is required?
flash in an arm processor ?!?
Theres no Flash for RISCOS… well, there might be a port of gplflash to the native browser plugin interface, but theres none for Firefox.
Well, considering there is a Flash player for PalmOS and PocketPC/WindowsCE/Windows Mobile/Whatever it’s called this week, and all such devices run on SOME ARM derivative, then yes, there is Flash for ARM processors.
–JM
Flash is available under RISC OS, but not the latest version. The most recent I know of is the player included with Oregano 2, which supports Flash 3 and 4: http://www.genesys.org.uk/features.html
There may be others that I don’t know of.
As MYOB points out, Flash for Firefox under RISC OS is a different matter entirely, though.
Pretty good work! Well done to the developers on this! RiscOS is not dead!
This is good to hear. Glad things are starting to look up a little for RISC OS.
AAARRGHHH!!!
Were is the Amiga version of Firefox. The last time I checked I think the donations to that project were over $7000 USD.
I’m happy for the RiscOS users out there. Good to see you guys now have a modern browser.
no, It was me who made the comment, but didn’t go nuts on reporting abuse…i dont actually SEE any abuse here heh. so i am curious.
Damn, I thought I had it figured out. Here’s the new theory…
Some dude was playing Knights of the Old Republic 2, got killed by Master Vrook like 5 times in a row because he decided to help the mercenaries against Khoonda (not realizing that Vrook frowns upon such behavior) despite the fact that he had nowhere near enough experience and he didn’t get around to building a lightsaber yet, then wandered in here and decided to hit all the abuse buttons he could in a fit of dispair while he waits for someone to tell him at the Obsidian forums how to beat that bald bastard…
The original FireFox for BeOS was a real kludge to use, each version since feels more and more like a BeOS program. Still there are some real diffirences between how FireFox handles under BeOS due to limitations and diffirences in basic operation/UI to other BeOS programs.
What I am asking is how close to Unix/Linux is RISC OS? Was the porting a major undertaking, or was it relatively easy to do so that the developers can spend more time on the UI vs getting the latest version running?
I have just returned from tonight’s meeting of the RISC OS User Group of London where Peter Naulls gave a talk & demonstrated Firefox in action on RISC OS. It’s very impressive & can already outdo any other RISC OS browser, although it also rivals any for speed – it’s usable, even on an 11yr old RISC PC, bit it’s slow by Acorn standards.
I was interested by the comments of some of the crowd. There was an audible gasp when he revealed that it used ~30M of RAM – an awesome amount on RISC OS, a platform with no VM.
Some of the questions also seemed to reveal widespread ignorance of the significance of this – bringing the huge wealth of GPL xNix S/W to RISC OS. RISC OS is a tiny platform – I think sales of the new Iyonix & Omega hardware plus the latest OS for older machines only amount to a few thousand in total. (There are also PCs sold as semi-dedicated Acorn emulators, which might add significantl more – I’ve not seen figres.) So the app portfolio is small, tho’ of high quality. This potentially expands it by many orders of magnitude; it’s a really big deal. But Acorn users neither know nor care what Linux is, what open source means or any of that.
If the Unix Porting Project gets to the stage where it can bring a complete free app bundle to RISC OS, that would make it a more attractive platform for usors… But a less attractive one for developers. And that’s fatal, long term.
Perhaps, though, it might foster a market for smaller faster native RISC OS apps as an alternative?
Either way, it inspires me to get my old Acorn out of the attic & ressurect it!
“AAARRGHHH!!!
Were is the Amiga version of Firefox. The last time I checked I think the donations to that project were over $7000 USD.
I’m happy for the RiscOS users out there. Good to see you guys now have a modern browser.”
Now the donation for the Amizilla project is $9464 USD.
Don’t worry, the project is going to slow but procede 🙂
It occurs to me that maybe someone has already done it, but is just holding out for the pot ‘o money to get bigger. Of course, this seems foolish since someone else could always swoop in and grab the pot at any time, but you never know.
“So you’ll understand the importance of the RISC OS Firefox port released today.”
You mean “not very”?
What’d be more important is if the platform had other vaguely useful software, and ran it at a respectable speed.
Having a web browser isn’t going to save the platform, guys.
I agree with you, a web browser can’t save a OS.
Regarding AmigaOS, without a decent browser it’s useless, and with one it could be my main and only OS, so there is one person it could be saved for at least.
“What’d be more important is if the platform had other vaguely useful software, and ran it at a respectable speed.”
The RISC OS platform has quite a lot of useful software, take a look sometime, for example here – http://www.filebase.org.uk/
Most software runs at a fine pace, so Firefox is noticably slower in operation than the majority, but bear in mind it is still in beta stage and will be enhanced by a few major and many minor speed improvements.
“Having a web browser isn’t going to save the platform, guys.”
Yes, it is. Indeed, every little and big effort is saving the platform as we speak and quite a lot of effort is made in all kinds of area’s – one hint: remember this is the ARM processor OS and there are a huge amount of those around, aren’t there? They were practically made for eachother and if one has success, the other is bound to benefit as well.
I would actually argue that a modern browser is probably the most useful software an OS can possess.
The IT world is increasingly moving towards networked computing, with big players like Microsoft already developing web service based applications. It is increasingly likely that browsers (such as Firefox) will provide increased support for web services. Given that web services are intended to be platform independent, then this can only be benefical for RISC OS.
In a lot of cases, a browser -can- be what saves an OS.
RISCOS and BeOS both quite a lot of production-quality software, and quite a lot of it is very old – for a lot of things, this doesn’t matter, but for some things, its extremely important – like a browser or a media player keeping up with current standards. Mozilla and Videolan being those two apps for BeOS.
Having a good browser and no other apps is completely useless however, but there ARE other decent apps for RISCOS.
From what I’ve seen UnixLib and ChoX11 are extremely interesting concepts, and seem to do OK speed wise – some of the systems they’re running Firefox on are unusably slow with it under Linux.
“Remember this is the ARM processor OS and there are a huge amount of those around, aren’t there? They were practically made for eachother and if one has success, the other is bound to benefit as well.”
The ARM processor *was* made for RISC OS. ARM used to stand for Acorn RISC Machine, and it was Acorn that designed the very first ARM1 to power their Archimedes computer running Arthur (later RISC OS).
Of course, Acorn then classically shot themselves in the foot by not realising quite what they had in their ARM processor designs, so they spun off the processor design department into a new company named ARM Ltd, whilst themselves declining and eventually being broken up to release the capital in their ARM shares.
“What’d be more important is if the platform had other vaguely useful software, and ran it at a respectable speed.
Having a web browser isn’t going to save the platform, guys.”
No, but it will mean RISC OS doesn’t have to hide in shame any longer whenever someone mentions web browsing. As for other software, there is very much software which is more than “vaguely useful”. The *only* things I need to turn to other platforms for are a JVM (Kaffe port in progress) and Skype – everything else is more than catered for on my Iyonix, and with much nicer usability and interaction between programs than all the other OSs I’ve tried.