Editorialities
by Eric W. Schwartz
from the AmiTech-Dayton Gazette, February 2003
Welcome back. Welcome back to the wonderful world of waiting around for the next bit of news. It seems both the Amiga One and PegasOS hardware are ready for their public, and Morph OS still has a head start over Amiga OS. That news hasn't really changed much over the last few months. With a bit more available money, I would gladly buy both systems, choosing which combination of hardware and software is best suited to what applications. Unfortunately, thanks to economic circumstances, money is tight, and I want to be sure what I'm getting, and at what price, before I could toss down the money. It's no wonder the Amithlon/Amiga XL package seemed to do well. It's the cheapest high-powered Amiga system you can buy, costing at most the purchase of a suitably beefy PC to go with the software, something many computer enthusiasts already have lying about. I've spoken of the benefits to having the Amiga OS migrate to common PC hardware in such a fashion, the downside being that the Amiga-specific hardware business will be practically dead, not that it's particularly healthy now. (Editor's note: It's come to my attention that Thendic/Genesi has filed suit against Amiga, regarding their statements about illegal use of Amiga's intellectual property. Funny I hadn't heard about a lawsuit in the reverse, since Amiga promised to take action against anyone who used their l.P., instead of bitching about it until they get sued for slander or libel or whatever. Actually, it's "breach of contract," which I don't fully understand.)
Sorry to ramble, but I come to the other main focus of my droning. Just recently, a long-overdue update to the lBrowse Amiga web browser, version 2.3, has arrived, free to those who already have version 2. The new version isn't groundshaking, primarily improving Javascript support and basic stability, two areas lBrowse needed the most help. I've only been using it a short time, but it definitely seems improved, along with the AmiSSL 2.2 secure connection package in use over the SSL that works with Miami. There's going to be some fiddling required, but overall I'm quite pleased. It's no secret that lBrowse is my browser of choice, but there are two other main choices, both of which I own. Last I heard, lBrowse will be the included web browser for the Amiga 0S4, in a PPC-native form. It should be interesting to see. Prior to 4.0, Amiga's browser of choice was Aweb, quite capable, and probably the most rock-solid stable of the three browsers in use, though it seemed a bit clunky for my tastes at times. The author of Aweb has moved on to other pastures, and the software itself has become an open-source project, much like the popular YAM e-mail program. This has resulted in a port of Aweb to MorphOS, but I've heard little else about it so far. The final, and possibly strongest browser in the triad is Voyager. Voyager is probably the most cutting-edge of the Amiga browsers, being first to handle such things as Shockwave Flash, PDF, Built-in SSL encryption, and being ported to MorphOS. Voyager seems to apparently be the official web browser for Morph as well. Taking on new things often resulted in clumsy implementation and instability, though recent versions have been much better behaved than past ones. They also seem to have a better track record for software updates than the other browsers. While lBrowse is my personal fave, I couldn't really recommend one browser over the other two. They all handle the web near-equally well, that it comes down more to personal preferences for specific features or even look and feel. It would be like advocating the color red to someone who likes blue things. Actually my real recommendation is to get all three if possible. None are very expensive, and you're always likely to find something on the web that one browser handles better than the other two. I'd imagine people on most platforms would take this approach if Microsoft's Internet Explorer wasn't so fidgety about letting any other web browser share a computer with it. (Of course, that's probably Windows' fault more than anything else).