[haggi]

Hello, I'm Haggi 

and new to the forum, please excuse my bad English.

I saw the dilemma with the old browsers here a few years ago and as an Octane 2 user I think it's a shame that I can no longer browse with my Octane. There have already been a few suggestions. 

I have found a "new" project for the Classic Amiga. They either use a public server or a modern computer like the Raspberry as hardware and then send the data to the classic Amiga.

The project is called :

Amifox

https://amitopia.com/amifox/ 

If you could write a port for Irix for the display part, you wouldn't even have to do the work around it. Maybe there is someone here who would like to or can take care of this? I thought 

I'd just throw this in as a new idea for implementation. 

Many greetings, Haggi

[Raion]

Greetings Haggi,

Very interesting project you went to but I was looking through the documentation and I don't seem to see any source code. I would also need to know what the capabilities the browser were before I would be able to personally endorse the approach. 

Source code is number one and secondly it's very likely that the entire front end would need to be rewritten. I'm also convinced Mozilla as a whole is a lost cause because of the change from C++ to Rust. Yes, we can probably make Rust work for IRIX but at some point the amount of abstraction and resource requirements are too much for the majority of our machines. If it only runs good in an R16000A 1GHz then there's no point. It needs to run good on a 300 MHz O2 with 256M RAM frankly or even less to be useful to most of us. 

Firefox based code is generally pretty resource intensive and uses GTK2/3 which doesn't work properly on IRIX. The problem is hard to explain but basically from what I understand there's no hardware anti aliasing support for GTK style fonts so it renders it in software using Xrender and Cairo to calculate on the CPU.

We also lack SIMD which PowerPC G4s and G5s have. While we usually beat them on integer, they outclass us on certain floating point systems.

[haggi]

Greetings Raion,

Many thanks for the quick response.

I've just read it again and admit that at the beginning I only looked at the project itself, but not whether it was open source I was already so fascinated by the basic idea

Well, I'll put it this way. These are all intusiasts. Maybe you can talk to the guys so that they can either provide the source code or help with the development. According to the website, the backend is open source. This means that you can look at the query (albeit with a lot of effort) and know what the server expects and outputs.

Unfortunately, I'm completely out of the loop here because I'm not really deep into development. But maybe there's someone here.

I find your connections and explanations very exciting and I only knew part of them so far. Thank you for your comments!

I suspect that the basis here could be a GTK or something like that. It should just be compatible in order to be able to display the code from the server. As far as I know, everything is modified on the server and then sent to the client. If that is the case, you would “just” have to accept the data in the appropriate format and provide it accordingly. Which could perhaps be displayed via gtk.

That would be the basic idea for me, that you could do something like that.

Since they can run the whole thing on a 68k processor, I assume that it should be possible with 300 MHz and 256 mb I could even imagine if there was someone who could implement it and program it efficiently enough If necessary, the requirements are kept low so that he could even run it on an Indian. But that's really a thing of the future

[robespierre]

Looking forward to seeing your plans...

[jpstewart]

Based on a quick glance AmiFox appears to be just a front-end to "WRP", the "Web Rendering Proxy" at  https://github.com/tenox7/wrp.  That in turn uses Chrome/Chromium to render "a web page in to a GIF or PNG image with clickable imagemap".  WRP further states that all you need to access it is a browser that supports HTML FORMs and the ISMAP attribute.  In other words, you don't need the AmiFox (or any other proprietary) client.

AFAICT, the ISMAP attribute goes back at least as far as the HTML 2.0 spec so even the existing ancient browsers on IRIX should be able to access the browser-within-a-broswer provided by WRP without the need for a custom IRIX front-end. 

(Now, a new front-end might be more user friendly than having to ignore the ancient browser's built-in UI in favour of the interface provided by WRP.  So it might not be necessary, but it could still be useful.)

Before putting too much effort into an IRIX client, try setting up a WRP instance and pointing good ol' Netscape on IRIX at it and see how it works.

[haggi]

Hello jostewart,
Thanks for your comment and your research!

That actually sounds extremely good. I'll definitely test this out. It's actually just about being able to surf with all the boxes and so that would be possible on almost "every" model. I'll test it and report back.

It was also a concern for me, as there were already discussions about modern browsers in various forums. As already discussed above, it seems unrealistic to get something modern running.

I would also be happy to take such a “detour” with “modern” hardware if it were “that easy”.

Thanks again for your research