The Amiga may soon see releases of two important pieces of Internet software. The first, Opera, is a web browser that claims
to offer the features of IE and Netscape, whilst being much smaller and quicker. Originally produced for the PC, Opera Software launched Project Magic to see what interest there would be in other platforms. It is now being ported to the Amiga by the UK firm Ramjam Consultants, and should be released December '98. Minimum specifications will be WB3.1 and 4MB RAM, and a PowerPC version is expected also.
The idea for Project Magic was that users of other platforms email them if they wanted to see a port, but originally they considered Mac, OS/2, Be and Linux, but no Amiga. Eventually, they were persuaded to allow Amiga votes - within three days, the Linux count was overtaken. After around five months of voting (and only one month of Amiga voting...) the order of popularity was: Mac, Amiga, OS/2, Be, Linux.
An Amiga port wasn't certain, even after the voting. You couldn't help getting an anti-Amiga feeling from their website - OS/2 and Be versions were well under way when the Amiga version was still uncertain, despite scoring less. The author went on about how he thinks a lot of the Amiga votes are from people just voting for the sake of it, rather than actually interested in purchasing the program. Whilst that maybe true, it would surely be true of all platforms, and not just the Amiga.
A port of Opera would be very welcome. Remember that even though the Netscape source has been released, we are unlikely to see things like Java - and the Amiga browsers have Javascript now anyway. Opera would give us a fully featured browser, and at the sametime keeping the smallness and quickness we are used to, rather than being bloated and slow like certain browsers.
There's a development team willing to port ICQ to the Amiga for free, but unfortunately their requests have been ignored to date. This resulted in Amiga users sending email requests to Mirabelis, which possibly resulted in annoying those at the receiving end, but they have agreed to talk at least.
What have they got to lose? ICQ is an excellent program, but restricting it to one or two platforms goes against the free and open spirit of the Internet. Gates is already out to have control of the net - the last thing we need is companies helping him along.