@KimmoK
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Yes
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A bounty for the fusion of AOS4+AROS+MOS OWB.
It would/could bring OWB developers together to merge their doings to one combined browser.
Once the same code compiles for all flavours, the bounty would be given (split) to all three origins.
It could be done if the 3 would have a lot in common, but there are more differences than anything else:
- Different goals: The AmigaOS 4.x version is a port of OWB (with minimal features added to make it usable at all, for example a GUI, support for multiple windows/tabs and the much faster AmigaOS font implementation) while the author of the MorphOS OWB seems to try to implement a desktop browser around OWB (which makes no sense).
- Neither the AROS OWB nor the MorphOS OWB use an AmigaOS GUI but Zune or MUI4 instead, i.e. you can't use anything in GUI related parts from the other 2 in the AmigaOS 4.x OWB and most of the platform specific parts depend on the GUI. Or you'd have to downgrade the GUI of the AmigaOS 4.x OWB to MUI, but it's impossible to collect a bounty large enough for me to consider touching extreme crap like MUI ever again.
- To compile the same code for all OSes you have to replace every single OS function call by wrapper functions which have to be implemented for the 3 incompatible OSes. Even for my old AmigaOS 3.9 port of OWB I didn't do that, creating a new port from scratch instead which didn't share a single line of common code with my AmigaOS 4.x port was less work.
- Unless you want to limit the AROS version to AROS/PPC you have to do the same for all endian depending memory accesses, for example in the AmigaOS font implementation, since AFAIK the AROS compilers for little-endian CPUs don't support generating code which automatically fixes them like the Amithlon GCC did.
- No idea why, but the AROS OWB uses SDL. On AmigaOS 4.x using SDL graphics in OWB is a little bit (less than 5%) faster than using it's Cairo graphics implementation, but even if SDL would be twice as fast as Cairo on AROS they'd have to change it. The SDL graphics implementation of OWB is way too incomplete to be usable.
Cooperation would only make sense in OS and GUI independant parts of OWB, for example adding PowerPC support in SquirrelFish Extreme. The only difference between AmigaOS, AROS and MorphOS there would be allocating the executable memory.