The South Wales Amiga User Group has reviewed the latest version of IBrowse, one of the three main Amiga webbrowsers and the default browser for the soon to be released version 4.0 of the Amiga Desktop Operating System. I have uploaded some additional screenshots here, but note that the browser can be configured to look prettier. Also IBrowse is compact and will function on 14 Mhz (or better) classic Amiga systems. Regarding the new PPC Amiga platform, Soft3 recently posted some pictures of the AmigaOne-XE motherboard in combination with a Dual 7410 cpu module.
Is there a way someone to try osnews with this browser and see how it renders? Thanks.
You can download a demonstration version of IBrowse 2.3 from the IOSPIRIT website:
http://www.iospirit.de/index.php?mode=download
Fully installed the browser takes less than 3MBs of harddrive space and already functions with 14 MHz classic Amigas!
Also note that IBrowse uses MUI and so you can almost fully customize the user interface in addition to replacing buttons, surf button animations, the allignment of buttons to any side, etc. You can find many nice things on Aminet.
http://www.aminet.net
@ Eugenia
Is there a way someone to try osnews with this browser and see how it renders? Thanks.
I have uploaded a screenshot here:
http://www.stormloader.com/amiga/ibrowse.htm
@ Everyone who want to try this for themselves:
If you only own a PC, you can emulate AmigaOS and test the three main Amiga webbrowers AWeb, Voyager and IBrowse on your PC. More info:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1561
This makes me want to dust of my old Amiga 500…
This makes me want to dust of my old Amiga 500…
You won’t be able to use IBrowse on a standard A500 without some upgrading. On lowly powered Amigas a more satisfying alternative would probably be usage of the freeware and test-only webbrowser ALynx.
Regarding this review
On Amiga websites there have been various people who replied that they haven’t experienced problems by using their wheel-mouse with IBrowse and some had better experiences with regard to printing. So, some of these issues seem to be configuration dependent.
Eugenia, may I ask what browser you use on your new TiBook ?
—
http://homepage.mac.com/softkid
The fastest browser on the Mac is Safari, but because it has a bug that does not allow you to login to unregistered secure pages, I can’t login to an https:// I really need to. So these days I mostly use Mozilla, until Safari adds tabs and fixes the issues I have come up with (I ‘ve filed bug reports to Apple btw).
Looks don’t count for everything, but still that is probably the ugliest browser since IE 3.0! It really does look about 5 years out of date. Isn’t anti-aliased font rendering really an essential these days?
One wonders why they didn’t use the mozilla or khtml cores.. they’d likely provide much better site compatibility?
Still, I guess beggars can’t be chosers, and certainly the Amiga market has to take any new software they can get.
@ Trenton Weir
Luckily the general looks of the browser itself can be customized. Also, this has only been the first update of IBrowse in years, version 3.0 is planned to be a major overhaul.
The prospect of AmigaOS4 being under development has sparked much regained life into various software projects. To name a few applications, this months new versions of Audio Evolution, Pagestream and FXPaint have been finished.
Make no mistake, most people within the Amiga community know that it will take a long time before Amiga solutions would become superior again for general consumers like they were in the past, if ever again.
Mike, you might want to consider using the WebFonts package based on M$’s fonts, or just install the truetype fonts straight off. It really looks hideous with the standard bitmapped Topaz.
@Trenton Weir
For all the talk about antialiasing on OSNews recently, I haven’t seen AA in action on any Windows PC since 1997-ish. I visit lots of internet cafe’s and surf using Internet Explorer from school and none of these installations use antialiased fonts. It doesn’t really contribute much to legibility, though RISCOS fans will probably tell me otherwise.
The ugliness you’re referring to stems from the font rendering, I suppose. Mike and the reviewers both use the standard bitmap fonts supplied with the OS. They’re not much cop, but can thankfully be exchanged. I run the above mentioned M$ web font pack for a prettier experience. The rest of the interface is just a collection of Windows and navigation buttons, which can be rearranged, replaced and heavily extended.
As for KHTML and Mozilla, they weren’t there when Ibrowse started development, and they weren’t in any usable state when IBrowse 2 was written.
Add to that the fact that they’re bloated (especially Mozilla) and unportable. Mozilla is a headache and runs slowly on my mate’s SGI, which is a monster. It takes days to compile and won’t even run on many NetBSD ports. And NetBSD is a UNIX, which the Amiga certainly isn’t.
Yes, KHTML and Mozilla would provide better compatibility, but they’re really not options, both due to size and UNIX techniques. Porting such an engine would probably take about as much time as getting IBrowse’s own engine up to date.
I still run IBrowse as my only browser, and despite its shortcomings in modern standards compliance, it’s got the best GUI, bar none. IB users love the IB GUI as much as OmniWeb users love theirs. In the recent interview with the OmniWeb developer/boss, he mentioned an upcoming feature which allowed you to edit a form input field in a separate window. Been in IBrowse for years. Just click the E button in the corner and it’ll launch your favourite editor.
Tabbed browsing has also been in IB since 1999. What other browsers had it back then?
Isn’t anti-aliased font rendering really an essential these days?
Alas, the Amiga never had anti-aliased fonts. There was one moderately successful attempt (worked slowly, under certain specific conditions, don’t recall the name unfortunately) but in general you have to deal with what are, by today’s standards, bad fonts. Of course, when Commodore went under ten years ago, that would have made a snazzy-looking picture.
Mike: is anti-aliasing one of the feautres of AmigaOS4?
@Mike
I meant of course Times, not Topaz. =)
@Trenton
We’ll see if there will be any KHTML port when faster hardware arrives. Bloat and compilation time will be one obstacle eliminated then.
I’m not Mike, but OS4 will include FreeType, like seemingly every other OS in this world nowadays. So AA will be no problem if the application asks for it. But I don’t think it will be retrofitted so easily (though hacks such as Smooth exist).
“Looks don’t count for everything, but still that is probably the ugliest browser since IE 3.0! It really does look
about 5 years out of date. Isn’t anti-aliased font rendering really an
essential these days?”
Yes, that screen shot is horrible. I don’t know how Mike managed to
get it to look so bad – it doesn’t look at all like that here.
I think he is using a bitmap version of Times that came with the
Amiga OS 12 years ago. There are better fonts around. However, the
font used for web text would be too small on most screen resolutions
to be anti-aliased.
One annoying thing (with webmasters) is that spoofing is sometimes needed. If some websites know that you aren’t using one of the better known webbrowsers, you will be told to download a modern webbrowser and sometimes will be even re-directed to a PDA version!
Then, with spoofing enabled (the browser saying it is a browser it in reality isn’t) everything seems to be OK.
@ Iggy Drougge & Don Cox
It really looks hideous with the standard bitmapped Topaz.
Well IBrowse is very functional but not my main webbrowser for websurfing. I currently only use Amiga browsers to quickly download new Amiga software.
Anyway, IBrowse may not look too pretty by default, but the webbrowser is very functional and IMO a reasonable starting point for a new OS platform like AmigaOS4.
Of course, AmigaOS4 should come with some great looking fonts supplied.
“One wonders why they didn’t use the mozilla or khtml cores.. they’d likely provide much better site
compatibility?”
It would take years to port them, and any new GUI for them would be
based on MUI just as the GUIs for Voyager and IBrowse are.
“Still, I guess beggars can’t be chosers, and certainly the Amiga
market has to take any new software they can get.”
The big problems with IBrowse are that it doesn’t yet support either
CSS or Flash. These are promised for Version 3. Maybe late this year?
The big problem for AmigaOS is that it has no Java VM. The main
problem here is the AWT – that is a lot of coding.
@ Don Cox
don’t know how Mike managed to get it to look so bad – it doesn’t look at all like that here.
Hey, my screenshots were not meant to look pretty! They were meant to look functional.
And no, I did not configure the fonts, its not really necessary for the stuff I do with Amiga browsers. I do believe there are many more “uglier” screenshots out there.
BTW, Java support for AmigaOS4.x is also planned for the future through AmigaDE integration, albeit only pJava and J2ME initially.
While I have not used my Amiga 4000 for a while I thought MUI supportted color fonts and that some AA fonts had been done that way. Am I wrong?
On BeOS NetPostive is still my favorite browser, fast, simple and can’t be taken over by an outside website. After learning to read the HTML code of a page so I can go to the frames that without using JavaScript I can honestly say that 95%+ of all my browsing is done with Netpostive. The remaining is with Opera and Mozilla. IBrowser should let you get to 98% of the site you want to, and too often you will find the sites you can’t get on are all flash and no subtance (pun intented).
Netscape 3 looked much more impressive that that!
So when does this OS and PPC platform ship for the general public in the US? It’s hard to tell if this is all available right now… links?
Thanks!
Well, we’ll see if they’ve got anything to show when it’s CeBit time.
So when does this OS and PPC platform ship for the general public in the US?
A definite date will hopefully be announced soon. Sadly some issues, including some unfounded legal disputes currently deserve some resources and time.
It is very important for the Amiga companies to launch their product in a proper manner, when the product becomes available to the general public. Sadly some rival companies know this too, and have chosen a bad time to bug the Amiga team. Regardless AmigaOS4 in combination with already available AmigaOne hardware should become available within the coming months.
links?
Alot of information regarding AmigaOS4 can be found at the following link, including extensive information on AmigaOS4’s Feature Set and some non-polished but informative screenshots:
http://os.amiga.com/os4/OS4Features.php
Regarding the hardware platform, the latest information can be found on Eyetech’s website and at the AmigaOne mailing list:
http://www.eyetech.co.uk/amigaone/
http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/amigaone
However, the font used for web text would be too small on most screen resolutions to be anti-aliased.
Yes I agree, taking TTEngine (based on FreeType2 project, although not used for AmigaOS4) as an example. Underneath, at the following link, you can compare different sizes of Times New Roman being antialiased or not. In these given examples I believe that only the 18 pixel size example truly looks better, the smaller examples simply look smudged.
http://www.amiga.pl/ttengine/tutorial.html
… at least for the moment. I use PayPal for my eBay auction transactions. And PayPal uses… “https://“, so Ibrowse would be useless for me to access PayPal to do my business.
Luposian, do note however that Linux is also available for the AmigaOne platform. For the things you cannot yet get done within an AmigaOS environment, you could boot into Linux for instead. In this case you could boot into SuSE in combination with Mozilla.
The way the Amiga team sees it, the most important advantages of AmigaOS will be offering: very good performance and reponsiveness, low bloat and tranparent OS, almost instant boot and shutdown procedures, a high degree of user customization options, etc. I expect that mainly multimedia usages will attract any new users initially, not webbrowsing.
However there are plans for porting at least one good browser and office solution to AmigaOS. So stay tuned.
Right… and? What do you *use* your computer for exactly?
Sure, looking good is a nice bonus (and yes, the standard Amiga fonts are gruesome and any user should change to different ones as soon as they first boot up) but it seems these days that for a piece of software to be usable it has to be pretty… what a wierd world we now live in…
Wow, I’ll never complain about the state of BeOS browsers again.
Tabbed browsing has also been in IB since 1999. What other browsers had it back then?
Off the top of my head, Opera probably did.
Sure, looking good is a nice bonus (and yes, the standard Amiga fonts are gruesome and any user should change to different ones as soon as they first boot up) but it seems these days that for a piece of software to be usable it has to be pretty… what a wierd world we now live in…
Not necessarily so, or at least not in my case. If a piece of software is usable, it can make up for a less-than-attractive UI (Forte Agent, for example, or versions of Opera pre-4.0). However, it is nice when a UI is more aesthetically appealing than a Soviet worker housing block.
>Wow, I’ll never complain about the state of BeOS browsers again.
The best BeOS webbrowser is probably Opera. Some time ago Opera also planned to do an AmigaOS port, but due to uncertainty regarding the AmigaOS platform at the time and already popular and fairly competent (low bloat, efficient and fast) AmigaOS webbrowser alternatives they eventually cancelled the project.
Opera is very portable, so hopefully they will change their minds in the near future. Anyway, here’s the original press release from 1998:
——-
Opera Software Announces Development of Amiga Version
13 May 1998
Following the tremendous reponse to its Project Magic initiative, Opera Software AS today announced the development of an Amiga version of its popular browser. The development will be carried out by Reading, UK, based company Ramjam Consultants Ltd, under the leadership of Tim Corringham.
“We are delighted to be involved in porting Opera to the Amiga. Opera has an Amiga ‘feel’ to it even under Windows 95, so I’m confident it will make a high-quality Amiga application, and will offer a degree of commonality with Windows 95 that few applications achieve”, says Corringham.
“Being a long-time Amiga user myself, it provides me with great pleasure to announce the official development of Opera for the Amiga platform”, adds Business Director for Opera Software, Jon von Tetzchner. “It was one of our goals to make Opera available to as many Internet users as possible, and being able to offer an Amiga version not only adds credibility to Opera as an efficient and user-friendly application, but also constitutes a boost to the Amiga platform.” “This step is just the logical result of Project Magic, which since its inception has seen several thousands of users pledging their support for Opera for platforms other than MS Windows. The Amiga community has come out in full force, and we are proud to be able to soon offer a product that is as advanced, efficient and frugal as the Operating System it runs on”, explains Helmar Rudolph, initiator and manager of Project Magic for Opera Software.
Both companies aim at a release date of December 98, just in time for the Christmas shopping season, providing a source of fun and satisfaction for many loyal and die-hard Amiga followers. Opera for the Amiga is expected to support the same level on functionality as its Windows counterpart, thus putting it at the forefront of browsers on the Amiga platform.
The price for this version is not yet established, but it is planned to keep it in line with the Windows version.
I don’t get it, do Amiga people just love to bludgeon themselves with ugliness? *GAG*
My god, those screenies are hideous. But I like, yes I very much like!
In fact the whole retro feel is exactly what the doctor ordered. I just hope OS4 retains the old feel and doesn’t look like some MacOSX or XP wannabe. Amiga was all about innovation and cutting edge, but not at the expense of originality or its authentic charm.
I don’t get it. Exactly what is it that is so ugly about those screenshots, save for the fact that they all use the admittedly ugly standard fonts?
Would Eugenia care to enlighten us and perhaps the IB developers?
@Luposian
IBrowse comes with the latest AmiSSL, so where’s the HTTPS problem?
I don’t get it, do Amiga people just love to bludgeon themselves with ugliness? *GAG*
No, actuallly we have a relatively large percentage of graphics artist amongst the Amiga community. The missing eyecandy you are reffering to, simply relates to the fact that Amiga developers try to make their distributable files as small as possible (i.e. IBrowse 1,54 MB) and for AmigaOS users to be able to use these applications on relatively lowly powered Amiga computers.
This default look has been introduced with AmigaOS 2.0 in 1990. At the time the OS and applications looked much better than their rivals by default. Luckily most Amiga applications can easily be customized with custom toolbars, custom textures, custom UI, etc.
There are still many low powered Amiga out there (currently one can even argue that they are all lowly powered, ranging from 7 MHz 68k systems to 66 MHz 68k systems), so it does make sense to satisfy as many potential customers as possible, especially considering the high degree of customization options available to users.