Hi Gunnar,

I have been wondering about this lately, because the Amiga so very badly needs a CSS-capable browser.  Please excuse my ignorance for not being a 68k/GCC coder, but I noticed there is a 68k port of Firefox browser (In NetBSD 68k). 

My questions are -- why, and how?  Was there/is there a 68k-based machine that has gigabytes of RAM to run it, or does it have more modest requirements?  I thought Apple moved to PPC before their machines had that much RAM.  Could ApolloOS ever run Firefox 68k, or am I off the track?

Can you walk 500 miles?
Sure with enough patience you can.

What I really like a lot about Amiga OS ...
is that it not needs much memory and that is very swift and agile.

This is the opposite to many software on Linux ...
which is pretty slow and very resource demanding..

Now a webbrowser which can display all modern websites and all thier complicated standards correctly - while being swift and fast and not needing a huge amount of resources - as a challenge that no one did manage to reach so far.

Thanks very much for your reply, Gunnar.  I understand what you mean now -- just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean that it will run fast enough to be usable.  I do hope that one day, somehow, modern browsing can be done on the Amiga.  As stated above, all the currently available browsers seem to only be able to view the same few pages.  I suppose virtual memory would be a requirement if that ever happened. Too bad Commodore never made it part of the OS...

Virtual memory is slow ...
and its really slow - in the order of 100 times slower than real memory...
 

This means your whole system will get much much much much slower if you use virtual memory.

The trick is that system with virtual memory - use this not to run bigger programs than they have real memory - but to push put programs that were launched but are not really running.
Virtual memory can be used in an environment where you have many applications that need each a lot memory open at the same time ... and but of those porgrma use a few of them .. Or those programs not use the memory they allocated. These allows the system to push out programs taking memory and not running back to harddrive, to the virtual memory .. while the other that are really running are in real memory....
 
The point is what is really running should always be inside real memory otherwise the system will be slow as frozen molasses...
 
On Amiga the whole system is very slim..
The OS barely needs any memory by itself ..
and if you want to run a big application it can have all memory ..

 
The V4 system have 500 MB of memory - this is really a lot for Amiga programs .. adding virtual in my opinion would not improve the system but make it worse.