[heavyfuel]

Final point, I would strongly advise against considering any real form of modern web browsing on an SGI machine. They're simply too old for it, and modern browsers are an absolute nightmare to port (hence Firefox 3 is the latest we have - and even then it is very slow). You're far better off using rdesktop to remote to a PC or something and browse that way, or browse properly on a PC and use your SGI for other purposes.

What exactly makes it hard to port browsers to new architectures/systems?

On Irix, the lack of modern libraries and compilers at least.

But how about Linux or modern BSDs on SGI MIPS systems?

Is it because of hardware acceleration or video decoding? Aren't there fallback options when suitable HW APIs aren't available?

Javascript JIT compiling? Again, fall back to interpretation?

Are other browsers easier than Firefox or Chromium?