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Questions and Answers for AROS AMIGA OS

Modern Browser for ApolloOS Based On Webkit ?page  1 2 

Steffen Häuser

Posts 16
06 Feb 2023 10:24

Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

   
  Also we need to mind that modern browser are huge beasts and their developer are used to use gigabytes of memory so they are bloated and demanding in resources. So porting such beast will result and something very slow and big.  ... I think they will run not fast on any Amiga.
   

Personally (though on Amiga x1000, not on Vampire) my experience is that they are really bloated - but the bloat is mostly starting them up. Once (ages later ^^^) the browser actually started up it runs quite decent (at least Odyssey, did you check if maybe an Odyssey port might be an option for your platform ?)

Still, if possible for the webpage I want to browse, and I want to browse it on my Amiga I usually prefer AWeb - that thing is so damned fast. But as you said of course it lacks a lot and is limited as to the pages supported. If something does not run there either I run it on my PC or I launch Odyssey on the Amiga (yawn, ages later...).

I guess the big problem is these "modern browsers" include SO MUCH optional stuff which has to be started (which also bloats the filesize of the executables).


Nick Fellows

Posts 170
07 Feb 2023 15:13

It sounds like a lot of the problems are down to lack of ram.
Even the Vampire V4's 512mb isnt going to cut the mustard and you cant rely on content creators to do the right thing and ensure their assets are appropriately resized and optimised for low power machines.

Do we have fast json encode / decode routines for Amiga OS ?
Write apps to talk to JSON API's, to perform CRUD operations to
talk to our favourite websites.

What about curl ? do we have that ? curl can be scripted.

These are the kinds of building blocks we need to build these apps.
And this is the way to put the amiga back in control of how to render assets outside of a HTML DOM we cant control.

Updates to the FPGA hardware maybe could include updates or improvements to accelerate encryption / decryption or compression  could also help. But thats not my call.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6039
08 Feb 2023 09:13

nick fellows wrote:

Updates to the FPGA hardware maybe could include updates or improvements to accelerate encryption / decryption or compression  could also help. But thats not my call.

 
In theory yes, but actually I do not see that we have a bottleneck
  there.
 
The network speed of our system is very good for Amiga.
Yes SSL decryption will add some overhead - but this is not critical.
 
You can surf today websites on AMIGA using SSL with no problem.
 
Our older Amiga browsers have compatibility limitations.
And them badly supporting new HTML features - does limit the usability of some websites.
 
Of course some websites like Aminet or Apollo-Core - work perfectly
But some others don't.

 
There are several options for mitigating this.
One option is surfing over a Proxy with "converts" the HTML to a lower version. This is trick that was used by people before.
This has of course also some limitations.
 
Latest browsers like Firefox are resource eaters.
They easily use huge amounts of CPU and memory.
With effort compile them and running them on ApolloOS could be possible but for sure the surfing will be really slow. With a not good user experience maybe this effort is not reasonable to do.
 

posts 23page  1 2