Amiga: IBrowse 3.0 Released | Hacker News Reader

Amiga: IBrowse 3.0 Released

ibrowse-dev.net

10 pointsdoener8 comments

Excellent! It's so interesting to see the development of a tiny browser that'll run in 16 megs in a world where contemporary browsers can use gigabytes of memory.

It's also interesting to see how well they keep with SSL/TLS, how they're immune to games like .webp because of DataTypes, and how web sites can, in fact, be loaded on an m68020 or m68030 class processor from the mid '80s.

If nothing else, it's something that can be pointed to when people are quick to say it can't be done :)

I don't have an Amiga, but How slow is SSL/TLS on a m68020 or m68030?

Back in the day it was "best practices" to serve images on a website over http, not https, because decrypting an image-sized binary could take minutes on a 68030.

It's not so bad. It takes less than a minute to connect to most sites on a 25 MHz m68030 Amiga 3000.

(FWIW I've got AmigaForever+Amikit for my pi400 just for fun, even though I've never actually owned an Amiga)

I assume that people who buy this browser this have either a PowerPC accelerator or run it under emulation? Can be used to browse (with limitations) to view modern websites?

It's hard to make a modern comparison. You simply can't visit most of the web because javascript doesn't work. This limits you to the handful of sites that are configured for amigas to visit. Those usually use very small pages with very lightweight use of HTML and few assets. so there's usually not too much to decrypt and pages load in ok time.

Timing Feels a lot like trying to use the web over 3G with first gen,2008 era smart phones. Though with many fewer sites to visit.

Being for Amiga my first question was 'how much for a dead horse?', and I wasnt disappointed, $40 for a toy program you will run once for 5 minutes. Amiga, perhaps the only vintage scene where almost everything is commercial.

Be the change you want to see.

Join the few of us working on open source software and hardware for classic Amiga.

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