Hi everyone,

Today I want to share some news with you concerning AmigaOS 4.1 and Timberwolf.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with this stuff, AmigaOS 4.1 is the latest version of the operative system for next-generation Amiga systems, while Timberwolf is the Amiga equivalent of Firefox. The software is being developed by Hyperion Entertainment, which is a Belgian-German company founded in 1999.

AmigaOS 4.1 Update 4

Let’s have a look at what’s currently happening with the development of the upcoming update for AmigaOS 4.1. Here’s the hottest information from Steven Solie, AmigaOS Development Team Lead:

Just a quick note to say the development and testing teams are working on AmigaOS 4.1 Update 4 right now.

Several issues identified in Update 3 and earlier are being addressed thanks to direct customer feedback via Hyperion’s support forum. A huge thanks to all those that have taken the time to register and post your bug reports! AmigaOS can only get better with direct customer feedback so keep it coming.

Along with the usual assortment of bug fixes, there may well be a surprise or two as well.

Steven Solie
AmigaOS Development Team Lead

Sounds good. It’s great to see that they’ve had a lot of use for the bug reports submitted by end-users. He also mentions a surprise or two.. what can that be? Makes me curious. 🙂 This version will, as far as I know, be used in the awaited AmigaOne X1000. Looks to me like Hyperion are doing all they can to enhance the OS as much as possible before the release of the new Amiga.

Timberwolf

As mentioned earlier in this post, Timberwolf is the Amiga version of the popular Firefox browser. There are other browsers available for AmigaOS 4.1, like Netsurf, OWB and iBrowse, but none of them are like Firefox.

The bounty for Timberwolf at Amigabounty.net is currently worth a total of 5342.44 EUR, which is a lot of money. It is clear from how much that is donated, that the next-gen Amiga community is hungry for the “Firefox experience” on their preferred OS of choice.

Anyway, on to the news concerning Timberwolf.

First the new screenshot..

One of the developers, Thomas Frieden, informs us about the following:

As you can see in the new screenshot, we are getting closer to having a usable Timberwolf 4. Even though it currently is only using pure software rendering (for drawing and composition), it’s become usable, and already better than the original alpha version of 3.5 that we released previously.

Stability is OK, although not great yet (sadly, the browser was just crashed when I made the screenshot of the WebM video). Speed is still an issue, although a recent non-debug build is actually usable, even for script and graphics heavy websites.

So in essence, we’re close to releasing a new test version. I don’t want to give a date, though, since the speed at which I progress depends on too many factors.

Stay tuned for more updates.

That’s the latest on Timberwolf. Could it be that there is a plan to have it running on the AmigaOne X1000 when it is released? Time will tell. 🙂

One thing is clear, a lot of stuff going on the Amiga front these days. The Natami-team are making progress, Hyperion and A-EON are working hard on the AmigaOS and AmigaOne X1000, ACube Systems released the AmigaOne 500, Individual Computers have released turbo-cards and a new Indivision is in the pipeline.. I could go on and on with more news, as there’s so much happening at the moment. 🙂