The CEO of DiscreetFX will pay 3000+ USD to the first developer(s) to port the current version of Mozilla to AmigaOS. Read the announcement for the details and people can provide Bill suggestions here at the AmigaWorld.net portal. Update: The money pot is now at $3000+ and rising.
Wow. Thats what, 10 hours of work? Can’t be done. A pitiful offer aimed at getting a cheap workforce. Try higher (like 50k plus) and someone may bite.
Actually the offer goes to the one/those people who can give the Amiga a decent browser with the latest HTML, CSS, XML capabilities as well as the current version of Macromedia Flash.
Well an Amiga developer already has an older version working with AmigaOS. He did this without any funding and considering this is an open source project, there isn’t otherwise any commercial potential.
The current state of the three main Amiga webbrowser leave alot to be desired. Especially IBrowse (default AOS4 browser) allows you to do most of the important stuff, but that’s about it. Alot of enhancements are planned for version 3 though.
You can donate money to a paypal account, extending those $2000 for the first AmiMozilla (Now $2336).
Btw, wonder what will happen with the donations if there is no AmiMoz or equal browser developed?
Mozilla has a very portable codebase – what is the problem here?
>what is the problem here?
Doing a preliminary port is “easy”. Making that port usable, debugged and performing according to a standard, is the real job. It will take you 10% of the time to do a working port, and it will take these devs 90% of the time to actually make sure it works as it does on windows or linux. As an example, after 2 years of the BeZilla port on BeOS, BeZilla is still not usable (crashy, _extremely_ slow when compared to other OSes on the same machine, not all features there). That’s the real problem.
Eugenia put it well, but it’s a bit more complex than that.
AmigaOS lacks a lot of functionality needed for a proper port. Even
BeZilla, with how buggy and slow it is, would seem rock-on stable and
a speed demon by comparison to the Mozilla port for a long time.
But, we’re working on bringing together these efforts into one force,
to better tackle it.
That’s a very cool idea, but I don’t appreciate Bill calling BeOS a dead os…
Still, hopefully some one will port mozilla. That would be nice to see.
You should try the new builds, the most annoying bugs are now fixed and stability is on par or better than IE5. Seriously. It’ll still take some time to reach the stability level of IE6 and the current Win32 Mozilla, but we’ll get there. This doesn’t mean that Bezilla is “not useable”.
Prog.
I really suggest that you try the new Stripzilla builds: http://bebits.com/app/2715
>I really suggest that you try the new Stripzilla builds
Stripzilla is based on Bezilla, and BeZilla does not run well at all on my dual Celeron 533. Both are SLOW. The same machines runs (almost) fine Mozilla on Linux and Windows. The BeOS builds are way slower, crashier and buggier. Sorry.
Well, since your dual Celeron 533 has major problems with Mozilla on Win32 (e.g. terrible menu sluggishness), it is not surprising that you consider Bezilla nad Stripzilla to be “not useable” – they are after all, slower than the Win32 build and no one would deny that.
But, as you are probably aware, people have different experiences with Mozilla. Many don’t see *any* menu sluggishness, and I for one, think that Bezilla is very useable (and all I have is a Duron 850MHz). If you check recent bebit’s talkback, you’ll see that other users feel the same.
Prog.
I am not talking about menu sluginess Prognathus. We are talking about different OSes here. I am talking about general application performance, bugginess, stability and features. I also run BeOS on an AthlonXP 1600+ and while the whole OS flies in this much faster PC, Bezilla is still the slowest application under that OS, while it runs fine on the rest of the OSes there (which btw don’t exhibit the menu sluginess on that specific PC). It is way more usable on the AthlonXP than it is on the Celerons, but still slow. You probably run on a very fast PC, but try to run BeZilla on a “BeOS-approved” PC (e.g. PII and PIII up to 1 GHz), where BeOS runs like a wildfire, while BeZilla crawls comperatively. It is not Mozilla’s fault btw, it is the port’s fault. The port done to BeOS is just not good, neither optimized.
a working and usable port of mozilla would probably be the death for the native amiga browsers like ibrowse or voyager…
a working and usable port of mozilla would probably be the death for the native amiga browsers like ibrowse or voyager…
Yes and it’s about time.
Bezilla (the just browser bone release) seems pretty usuable on a 1GHz Athlon. Well at least I could view some
sites N+ doesn’t show 🙂
Anyone else look at this and wonder. If an OS that really will only be a geek os or for some very sentimental people won’t naturaly attrack enough people that will create a browser without being paid, what hope is there for Amiga anyways. I would think there would be plenty of people out there who would quickly start such a project. But if they are all ready thinking there will not be that looks like a not very promising outlook for amiga to me.
Actually, if someone made a working and usable Mozilla, it would mean the death of Mozilla as we know him, the slow old bloat monster.
Yeah, whatever…
Shit, I make more than that in one week…
Mozilla is a huge bloated application and I think Opera may IMO well be more in the ‘spirit’ of Amiga applications and current browsers. At least Opera at a time thought so too:
Snipped from Opera’s 1998 Press release:
—-
“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.”
—-
One of the difficulties and a good reason in the past for developers to not port Mozilla to AmigaOS was its immense bloat and relative inefficiency of Mozilla is combination with lowly powered 68k Amigas. Many Amigans still use 50 Mhz 060 CPUs or slower and Mozilla would probably be of no real use on such a lowly powered platform anyway. Luckily the currently available G4 AmigaOne boards are a totally different matter and Mozilla already runs on this hardware in combination with Linux already.
> Mozilla is a huge bloated application and I think Opera may
> IMO well be more in the ‘spirit’ of Amiga applications and
> current browsers. At least Opera at a time thought so too:
Don’t get it… are you suggesting Opera gets funded by people for the porting? You know Opepera is not OS, right? (or have I missed something?).
That said, if $2000 are a very very little prize for an occasional programmer, I let you figure out that Opera wouldn’t be of any different opinion about it
No doubt
I wouldnt be surprise if they all emidiatly gave up development. The only one that would continue is the open soruce AWeb!!!
To all these people who keep saying mozilla is slow bloated… How long has it been that you’ve used it? In the days when the application was still being refered to as Milstone 17 18 etc… it has improved beyond comparison.
I think its been pretty good ever since .9x.
Today i user firebird, i used pheoenix .5 on a P2 233 and it was awsome. It took a while to load, but lets think of it. It had to load not only the browser, but the mozilla code base (the environment on which it runs).
In my opinion, the menus arnt too bad… After working with Milestone 17 you’ll know what i mean. I love mozilla, i use it everyday and if im lucky, i wont touch IE at all…
I intend, once mozilla is more of an environment with standalone apps (such as firebird and thunderbird (mail/news)) i’ll use all those applications and get rid of the MS stuff…
Also, this is one reason to port Mozilla to Amiga. You not only get a browser and mail client, but a suit of appliations and their environment, which when other applications are developed, will make it easier for those to be ported to AmigaOS (since the mozilla environment will already be running on it, and all that is required is the port of the stand along app)…
Mozilla could be one of the best things to happen to the Amgia Platform (besides OS4
)
My menus on firebird work just as fast as any other menus on my system… i dont know what you guys are complaining about :}
@ Fabio
What I am hinting at is that I personally like Opera better and I believe the browser would suit the platform better. IMO it’s a little paradoxal to try to keep the OS superduper efficient while porting such a “hungry beast:
(Although this is still better than vice versa).
> That said, if $2000 are a very very little prize
But the money raised is at least more than the default amount an open source developer would otherwise earn. (niks, nada, nothing)
They’re talking about Mozilla on BeOS, not Mozilla on Windows or Linux.
Wrong. Initial story wasn’t about BeOS
That was old story when Eugenia was whining here at OS News that Mozilla is BS on his super-puper WinXP on dual CPU, because she saw some minor artifacts when moving mouse over menu bar.
This idea of a contest based on time is stupid. As someone mentionned before, it takes times to make something solid. Developpers need time and serenity for that. Its must not be a rush!
And what if two groups of developpers succesfully made a port of mozilla ? Tell to the second “sorry, you put so many hours doing a brillant work but someone presented us a working version before you”
This way of EXPLOITING “free software community” is definitively a shame.
DiscreetFX should better hires developpers and gives them a stable work.
And to people interested in porting mozilla : open your own compagny instead!
Some of you may think the US$2000 prize is a joke. There are places where $2000 is more than the annual salary of a PhD qualified computer scientist.
You won’t think is so funny when most of your well paid IT jobs go to India, China and Bulgaria and you’re flipping burgers or driving taxis.
??
Well i guess that could be fun scenario of 2020, McD hiring lost sould formerly part of the Guru computer world, as all the programming is done by cheaper workers, who are friendly and not crazy zealots with megalomania of gigantic proportions.
You have very few people that use the Amiga anymore, sure you have your fan base but I doubt you will have any takers, I would do it if I had an Amiga, porting is just so much fun
Hm, is $2000 even sufficient to buy AmigaHW and AmigaOS ?
$2667 (the current amount) is certainly enough to get you the free UAE emulator and the Amiga Forever ROMs (or a second-hand “classic” Amiga. AFAIK all the platforms listed support 68k code.
While it seems pretty drastic, a decent browser is something that AmigaOS desperately needs if it is to be taken seriously by more people – this might just do it.
so i really doubt that your variants are good even for running Mozilla, not to mention development.
Inspite i’m admiring 68K architecture, hardly 68030 can beat P166. And 64 MB RAM is most common requirement for running Mozilla.
And build on 68030 estimately will take 3 days if no more.
In hope we have here e.g. 128 MB RAM