[News] New web browser for Amiga-like systems in development | ANN.lu |
Posted on 10-Jun-2004 18:15 GMT by The Paihia Team | 63 comments View flat View list |
The Paihia Team would like to announce the development of their new web browser, named Paihia. We hope to have an initial release by the end of 2004.
Amiga-like systems and their users are crying out for a standards compliant browser. Despite all the modern web standards being very old (CSS2 is 7 years old, HTML4 is 5 years old) Amiga-like systems still lack in this area.
The leading objective of the Paihia authors (there are now 3 of us) are the implementation of real web standards - we aren't interestd in partial implementations, or bits here, and bits there. All 3 of us have extensive experience with modern web standards and we are particularly keen on being able to use our Amiga-like systems with the web, both to their full potential. HTML 4, Java/ECMAScript 1.5, CSS2.1, and DOM level 3 will feature in our initial release, with us then looking at more recent XML-based web standards which are still not widely used on the web for subsequent development.
Although work has been ongoing for 5 months now (and only recently with 3 developers), we still have a significant amount to complete. Having said that, we've been monitoring the progress of AmiZilla, and looking at their recent progress update on ANN, we are satisfied that Paihia is at a somewhat more advanced stage.
Paihia will be shareware. The application has been written from scratch and does not utilise any existing web content engines. Although this seems duplication of work, our progress tells us it isn't.
We should mention that we all lean slightly towards MorphOS and AROS, however, economics tell us there will more than likely be a version for AmigaOS3, and OS4.
In the next few months we'll be making public a website, with screenshots, of the new browser.
Keep watching!
The Paihia Team
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New web browser for Amiga-like systems in development : Comment 50 of 63 | ANN.lu |
Posted by smithy on 12-Jun-2004 07:09 GMT | In reply to Comment 6 (damn): coding a fully modern web browser from scratch today (and also keeping it up-to-date) would imo probably be a lot more demanding than porting khtml or mozilla. remember that khtml/mozilla has been worked on for ages, and contributed by hundreds of people. it's undoubtfully a lot of hard work in any case, but i think a port of one of the existing modern web-engines would be the winner in the long run.
Interesting point. There are 2 sets of work to consider in both ways (porting or writing a new browser). There is the initial porting effort, then the maintenance effort.
Porting KHTML is a huge task - first you'd need to re-implement a good chunk of Qt, the libraries that KDE runs on top of. It took a large open source team 3 months to implement a third of it, before they gave up when Trolltech released a GPL version. How long would it take the 3 of us?
Similarly, Mozilla is enormous, and it needs to ported with future versions in mind - that is, you need to be able to compile future versions straight out of the box. Although I've never looked at the Mozilla sources, I assume this means re-implementing a Linux/X or win32 wrapper. Again, 2 more enormous APIs.
Writing a web browser from scratch will probably take a similar amount of time to the above two porting efforts.
Now, for the maintenance. You correctly say that we have to keep the browser up to date. But web standards today are very static - the last major standard that had any effect on the web came out 7 years ago. Today, web standards move very very slowly. The new recently published XML-standards will probably take 3-4 years before they're widely used.
On the other hand, new KHTML and Mozilla versions are released all the time. Any porting effort would have to ensure the new versions were ported too, involving constant effort. Paihia doesn't have this problem because the source is controlled by the authors.
So while the initial effort may be similar, the maintenance effort for ported applications is much bigger. |
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