Browser on Classic Amiga

[jmneedham]

Greetings:

I am not sure why I keep seeing that we cannot hope the "surf the web" with a classic Amiga (such as my 2000 or even a nice 4000(t)). I remember when I got started in the Internet and I was on an old Macintosh IIfx using Mosaic and later Netscape, this machine was also 68K based and by today's standards not very powerful.

I agree we might not be able to use a "modern" browser like Firefox on our beloved 3.1 or older Workbench, but to say that it is impossible to use the web is utterly ridiculous to me.

This rant actually comes out of looking for a web browser for my A2000 which is actually not at WB3.1 (yet). I was contemplating obtaining a NIC for it (likely an X-surf) and using it primarily as my goto box. I concede that it might be *nuts* to some to give up a modern computer in favor of a Classic Amiga box, but I know several other countries in the world are still using our platform and eagerly I await the new X1000 release and the "new" Amigas to come out.

The community has a long history of sporting the attitude that "you can pry my Ami from my cold dead hands"! The main reason I am even considering making my old Ami my box again is because of the cost of keeping the classic Ami(s) running and I just don't have the budget for a new computer and my Amis... I am right now considering selling my brand new AMD Phenom system and buying a new-old stock A4000T. The difference between the value is phenomenal (no pun intended)... I will be lucky to get $200 USD for the new system and the A4000 from Softhut is over $1000... but that is "new in a box" and I am always on the lookout for a good tower, but as we know, they are becoming kind of rare.

My rant is: Why couldn't we use a classic Amiga to do what we want, it may be a bit slower and so on, but if a system does what you need and want it to do, why not?

The other idea is just to get a netbook to do "web stuff" and use the classic Ami for everything else.

So now for my "serious" question, Does anybody have one of the early Internet Service Provider supplied diskettes for Amiga? Specifically if you had the one supplied by TFS net in Kansas City, I would love a copy in ADF form. These disks of course contained only freeware and shareware evaluation copies of Internet Apps such as FTP, mail, browsers and PPP/slip stuff to get you onto their system. I have a few for Windows or Mac, but as I used to run a BBS and later became involved with the afore mentioned TFS Net here in Kansas City, I never knew I would want to have a copy as I do now. But TFS was where I learned about the Amiga Community. More info on this when I do my introduction.

 

[desiv]

Several (many?) of us do browse the web on our Amigas..
The most common config seems to be the Amiga 1200 with a PCMCIA network card (wired or wireless, I use wired).

I use both AWeb and iBrowse, and both work fairly well for the basic sites.
Mostly, I use my Amiga to go to aminet anyway. ;-)

The sad part is one of the hardest things to do is forums...
They seem to be constantly updating forum software (for security reasons, this is a good thing), but I find it generally makes posting on the forums from the Amiga difficult. The "editors" don't seem to like the Amiga browsers much...

I would think something like a Tapatalk clone for the Amiga would be awesome in this area..

Good luck..

desiv

 

[Gouldin]

I use AWeb when my miggie's are connected to the net, useful for downloading from aminet, not much else though.

Think iirc it was just tedious telling AWeb to accept cookies constantly as I couldn't find a way of making accept that stuff permanently.

 

[commodorejohn]

Well, if you're talking about stock specs, the Mac IIfx was pretty mighty for a 68k machine (40MHz 030 with 32KB L2 cache, pretty badass for the time,) whereas the Amiga 2000 is just an A500 with slots, pretty much (7.16MHz 68000.) The 4000's better, though. Your basic point is fair enough, in any case, and as pointed out, some people do use their Amigas for web browsing.

The thing to remember, though, is that web pages today tend to be a lot different than they were in the mid-'90s - probably 25% of them are glitzy monstrosities that require Javascript simply to display text (as horribly wrong as that is,) and even many of the better ones use a lot of CSS for layout and formatting. There are exceptions (yay for simple, glitz-free web design,) but web pages today are simply more complicated (and require more processing power) than they did back then.

 

[Templar]

If you have a quite powerful classic Amiga, then you can try Netsurf (found on Aminet) which is an up2date browser.

 

[SpeedGeek]

Netsurf is a ported (SDL) browser and requires lots of CPU power and least 64 MB of memory just to run. Compared to Aweb or Ibrowse it will crawl along at a snails pace. However, it is more up to date than Aweb or Ibrowse. I used to use both Aweb and Ibrowse on my A3000/040/RTG system and they worked pretty well until more and more sites required javascript, css or flash plugins for proper rendering.

The bottom line is the web has changed quite a lot since the 90's and website designers like to assume you have a 2.5 GHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM, ultrafast PCI graphics and a high speed internet connection.

 

[khephren]

Shame opera mini is closed source, it would be perfect. We need something where the decoding is offloaded to a server.

 

[drwho]

Back in the early 90's I used my A2000 to surf a few sites. It wasn't too bad on an 030/25 with 8MB at the time. Things have changed quite drastically since then though. Web sites are much more complex and have a lot of active and dynamic content.

I mostly used it back then for ftp and IRC, which the machine excelled at. It would probably be better at those things today since my A2000 has an 040/33 with 16MB, 2MB chip, a Retina Z2 and a Hydra II ethernet card.

All and all though, browsing the web is painful with a classic Amiga, at least in my opinion.

Certainly not impossible though.

 

[rkauer]

I used my A1200/030 back in '94/96 with a (lol) 33k modem and it was pretty decent!

 

[QuillOmega0]

I use Aweb on myself, and it is very limited and crash prone (to me at least) when trying to handle more modern websites. For my Macintosh Quadra 950 I use iCab, works far better then Aweb for modern websites but not without slowness and "glitchyness".

 

[ancalimon]

There's Netsurf but it needs RTG.
The biggest limitation in our Amiga's are usually AGA. 8bit AGA is a bit slow. Even a 4bit screen is slow at scrolling web pages while a 24bit rtg can smooth scroll.

 

[khephren]

There's Netsurf but it needs RTG.
The biggest limitation in our Amiga's are usually AGA. 8bit AGA is a bit slow. Even a 4bit screen is slow at scrolling web pages while a 24bit rtg can smooth scroll.

AGA limitations can be got round, but nobody has done it yet. EG: C2P on the main display, separate palettes/resolution for the buttons at the top, using the copper to give more colour entries etc. There hasn't been a browser that that really makes use of the tricks you can pull on the Amiga chipset.

That's why porting a browser isn't ideal for OCS/AGA. Unless it's heavily altered to suit the Amiga.

 

[NovaCoder]

What people need to understand, is that the Net is evolving a rapid pace, the demands of a browser today are greater than a couple of years ago and miles away from what was needed to display a web page in 1994.

 

[ancalimon]

What people need to understand, is that the Net is evolving a rapid pace, the demands of a browser today are greater than a couple of years ago and miles away from what was needed to display a web page in 1994.

I think what we need is up to date css. We don't really need displaying all those flashy things such as pictures.

 

[Defjam]

*sigh* the good old days where browsing the web for me was new and exciting and the browser was a new fangled bit of technology. If I could go back in time i'd live it all again and appreciate it far more than what I did the first time around!

What people need to understand, is that the Net is evolving a rapid pace, the demands of a browser today are greater than a couple of years ago and miles away from what was needed to display a web page in 1994.

 

[NovaCoder]

look here

 

[paalrosen]

awesome