The web experience is what AmiFox will give when done. It will be an experience that you’ve never had on your Amiga. You will be able to interact with the web pages you visit more than just clicking on hyperlinks.

There’s lots of work in the background regarding the possibility to interact with web pages you visit.

The usual web browsers for Classic Amiga are either rather old and do not support CSS (like AWeb, Voyager), newer but still do not support CSS (iBrowse), or newer support CSS but are very slow (Netsurf).

AmiFox Behind The Scenes

Here is some interesting info about how the AmiFox now is more than what it was originally meant to be:

Alb42 noticed that when you let CutyCapt (a simple docker container) print the webpage as PDF, then the PDF contains all the links with position information. Therefore he wrote a PDF parser to get the links and position from the PDF and create a map for the image. You can read everything about AmiFox on his website.

AmiFox will work for Several Users

There is already something called WRP, which stands for Web Rendering Proxy. WRP is very fast and already has a lot of settings built in, it is already nicely usable in your Amiga web browser such as IBrowse if you like. But there is a big BUT. WRP is single-user only, so it is not suitable for a public service like AmiTube, which is the ultimate goal.

So, McDope who is the third person in our tiny AmiDev Team and a Member of the AmiTube Discord Channel is now trying to create a server with this WRP solution that can be used by more users at the same time.

Alb42s progress is then to meanwhile make a little app, which feels like a real Webbrowser but is in fact just an interface to the WRP. It solves also the problem that you cannot type anything into any form like search engines or so. Please check the video above that demonstrates this.

AmiFox is moving on!