Peter Naulls has released the fifth Firefox beta for RISC OS. The new version feels more like a conventional RISC OS application thanks to the icon bar icon and pop up menus. The browser also responds to URI requests from other applications.
Peter Naulls has released the fifth Firefox beta for RISC OS. The new version feels more like a conventional RISC OS application thanks to the icon bar icon and pop up menus. The browser also responds to URI requests from other applications.
As many have said, the first way to make any OS useful, despite age, is to have a modern web browser. Firefox for RiscOS is a good thing™, I’m supprised that it has not already been ported to Amiga despite a $9000 bounty :/
9000 dollars!? And no port!?
Heeey… I know FOSS is about freedom, but come on… there must be some Amiga users longing for Firefox… or longing for $9000
Regarding why there isn’t an Amiga port yet, there was a perfectly sensible explanation posted by someone in an Amiga forumthread a while back, but I can’t find it any more.
It has to do mainly with A) the state of the Amiga developper community: fractured and frictional, and overloaded with work pressure (so much things to do for different platforms, so few programmers) and B) RISC OS had a number of advantages regarding porting of unix code. For example, someone did the time to port X anda couple of UNIX libraries to RISC OS, making a port of firefox a lot easier.
3 people rejoice
3 people rejoice
You’d be amazed at how many people actualy use RISC OS. Especially in England. Basically an entire generation’s first computer experience there was on RISC computers.
Indeed! I was one of them myself.. We really didn’t have any Windows Machines at my school until 1998 when they turfed all the “Acorn” computers.
3 people rejoice
Have you been reading “The RISC OS Browser issue”?
http://www.ietf.org.uk/browser.html
Plus the other 200 odd who downloaded it in the last 20 or so hours. But we wouldn’t want informed comment on OSNews now, would we? This is essentially a test version. I expect a lot more for a full version.
The spelling is “RISC OS”, by the way. I’ve lent my comments and ideas to the Amiga people, and it’s a bit worrying that AmigaOS, with rather more developers (but still quite a small number) is unable to put together a port.
As for $9000, that probably doesn’t come to very much per person compared to the hours spent when it’s split over a team. If Amiga users are really serious about this, they need to put up a lot more, and perhaps split it over specific goals.
Well, that “someone” was me. However, from a standing start, AmigaOS is in a much better position for Unix development. It’s much closer to POSIX, already has a long history of ports, and unix compatibility, etc. and X stuff.
I posted a much longer explanation on amigaworld.net which you may care to dig up. But as I said there, what really makes this possible at all is cross compiling. Native building such programs under RISC OS is near impossible, and much slower. The Amiga developers seem to be sadly slogging it out with native builds.