[Raion]

So I've been studying a number of possible solutions for a more recent browser, and I've come up with a few ideas and suggestions.

Before I start, let me explain there's no free lunch with these. We would probably need a community effort/crowd-funded bounty to get someone behind this. 

So IRIX has, moreorless, only a handful of GUI toolkits that are preferred, from most to least:

Motif
FLTK
FOX
EFL
GTK+1
QT3/4
GTK+2

It /is/ possible to port QT5 or GTK3 up to a certain point, but there are other issues. Of these, QT4 and GTK+2 have problems:

1. As I've discussed before, the biggest issue appears to be a lack of support for antialiased text for IRIX. Nekonomicon discussions pointed to Cairo being the cause, but it appears there may be other causes as well. This causes both to not function properly. There are issues with colors sometimes, and the applications are sluggish and painful to use

2. glib has issues on IRIX. In particular, it appears based on some of the issues I've seen that there's no proper support for threading for IRIX. It's also a Linux app, and I've had issues with it on BSDs before. This also partially extends into GTK+1

3. QT uses qmake and the build system is thus a bit esoteric. I've managed to build QT3 before, but 4 and 5 are like trying to break a bolt loose on a car while your junk is in a vise that's slowly closing. 

Presumably, these issues would extend into QT5 and GTK3, as well as cause applications to crash. 

This hampers our ability to provide for the entire echelon of the community, and I would personally not want to leave everyone who doesn't have the most powerful systems in the dust. 

That being said, all is not lost. Here's a few approaches I've brainstormed on and discussed at length, each with their own benefits, drawbacks and more:

1. Amaya

Amaya isn't the most advanced browser in the world, and its age (8 years since last commit) and using of antiquated components like libwww doesn't necessarily make it the best choice, but it does have some benefits:

Mostly complete CSS2/HTML4 rendering specifications.
Written in C, which means it'll be likely faster and more likely to get working on MIPSPro. 
Supports HTTPS, and could be patched to work with a more up-to-date SSL library.
Very permissive license and a well-documented codebase

Drawbacks:

No Javascript support
Uses GTK2 and WxWidgets. Which means the best port would require a rewrite of the UI. 
No HTML5 support
No audio support.

2. Odyssey

I was under the impression for a while this wasn't FOSS, because I couldn't find any repos, but I found their github recently. Odyssey is a descendant of Origyn, a browser for MorphOS. It has multiple frontends, including EFL. Here's the benefits:

Big endian support due to PowerPC ports
Supports HTTPS, and HTML5 video
Permissive license

Drawbacks:

Poor codebase documentation
Just a few minutes of browsing uncovered more than a few GCCisms
A dmedia backend would likely be needed

3. Netsurf

Benefits:

Portability
Multiple frontends

Drawbacks:

Would need a dmedia backend and motif or other frontend made, because it only would be able to use either a "framebuffer" port, or GTK2
No HTML5 support
GPLv2

4. Fifth
An FLTK browser for Linux using a recent port of webkit. 

Benefits: 

FLTK-based
Recent webkit, so presumably good webkit rendering support

Drawbacks:

Linux-only, so no upstream support at all
GCC-isms in code
No dmedia support, and doesn't use an audio shim
GPLv3

There's a lot we can do, but honestly this will require people who are far more clever than me to get around with.