Re: Opera

[Jo Even Skarstein <joska@nuts.edu>]

On Mon, 26 Jan 1998, Konrad Kokoszkiewicz wrote:

> > I don't think it's realistic to expect them to do this port, the
> > market is just to small.
> 
> It costs us nothing to try mailing them.

No, ofcourse not. I'm going to do so myself :-)

> > with 10-20Mb RAM. The average Atari-user still has the good old ST
> > with 1-4Mb RAM and a 000@8MHz. Opera will never run on something like
> > this.
> 
> I've never thought about a ST. It has to be at least a Falcon or a TT.

I agree 100%, but this is the problem: How big is the
TT/Falcon/clone-market? Are there 3000 potential Opera-buyers out
there? I'd say mail them, but I wouldn't expect Opera to invest a lot
of time and money in a product they most likely won't make any money
on.

> should try to convince them to do Atari version, as MiNT users - to select
> MiNT as the OS and MiNT Net as the networking stack. Otherwise we'll just

I don't think there are enough MiNT/MiNTnet-users with powerful
computers out there to make a Opera-port commercially viable.
Hopefully I'm wrong, but I'm afraid I'm right. But as I said, I'm
going to mail them anyway.

> ST. I would also like to remove one sentence from Atarians dictionary: 
> "It can't be done..." and one thought from their mind: "... because Atari
> is dead". 

"It can't be done" is quite often a very realistic thought when it
comes to a 8MHz 68000 with max 4Mb RAM ;-) Seriously, I get your
point, but think about it: Would you consider releasing a commercial
product that requires MiNT, MiNTnet, N.AES/MultiTOS and an Atari with
atleast a 030 and 8Mb RAM? I wouldn't. Remember that these guys do
this for a living.

I like developing software for this platform, but I don't expect to
make any money on it. 

Enough negativity, why not make our own, free browser instead? If it's
written exclusively for MiNT/MiNTnet/AES4[1] it should be a lot more
compact and faster than e.g. CAB or any port.

Basically we need the following stuff:

* An app that's capable of throwing up one single window and display a
  piece of HTML in it. Frames could be realised by forking out and
  display another window inside it's parent.

* A small program that can retrieve an URL and pipe it back to the
  calling process.

Make this 100% thread-proof and we have a small and efficient
web-browser with none of CAB's limits. With a proper design it would
be relatively easy to add modules later on. You could even write other
apps (emailer, desktop, ftp...) that displays everything in HTML.

I don't have the necessary knowledge or skills to manage such a
project, but if anybody volunteers I'm more than happy to help out
with design and coding :-)


/*
** Jo Even Skarstein    http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~josk/
**
**    beer - maria mckee - atari falcon - babylon 5
*/