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»Introduction:
The promise the Vapor team made with the last release of Voyager was fulfilled on 9-Apr-2000. Version 3.1 of Voyager was released. But because this version was far from being bug-free, the new version 3.2 was already available about one week later from the Vapor server.
The development of the new release took about 4 months. Here we're going to see whether this work was worthwhile. I'm refering to my last report about Voyager, which can be found in AmigaAktuell 3/2000, and this time I will mostly write about the new features and problems of this browser. Because there is (at the time of writing) no updated documentation available, I can guarantee for the correctness of this report. In the further test, Voyager may be abbreviated as V . When I'm writing about the APdf software, I'm refering to the new version 2.2 by Emmanuel Leseur. The system used for this test was a Amiga1200 with a Blizzard1230/IV, FPU, 64 MB Fast-RAM, several GBytes of harddisk space and the standard AGA chipset. The running software was (among others) FBlit3.56, MCP1.33 and AmigaOS3.5. The requirements for hardware, software and user(!) haven't changed since the last version, so I'm just over this skipping to the...
Installation:
For those of you who already have version 3.1 installed, it is sufficient to download and install the archive v3_update_31_32. The installation has be carried out manually . Just copy the file V in the Voyager-directory and the file mui/SpeedBar.mcc into MUI:Libs/MUI . Everyone else should download the archives v3_32, vflash_1.2 and pophotkey_1715, which corrects a problem in the V preferences window. Developers interested in the V's new Plugin-API (Application Port Interface) should also get the voyager-sdk archive. It contains the sample plugin Zapster with source and all other developer files.
If you want to install the PDF-plugin, you should get the Apdf distribution from the subdirectory VPDF on the Vapor server or from the website of Emmanuel Lesueur. It consists of the archives Apdf_common.lha, Apdf_fonts.lha and the Apdf-binary-archive suitable for your CPU. You can read about the installation in the test report by Uwe Pannecke. I would just like to mention that during the installation of Apdf, you can also install the PDF-plugin for Voyager.
After downloading and unpacking all archives, you can start the installation itself. It is done through the Amiga installer and without problems. It takes care of older versions of Voyager and existing keyfiles. Older icons are overwritten.
The archive vflash_1.2 contains a plugin to display flash animations. It is available in different versions optimized for several 68k-CPUs. The archive also contains a version for PPC boards. It makes use of the PowerUp system. I couldn't test whether it works with the PowerUp emulation for WarpUp, due to the lack of a PPC board.
Of course the plugins should be installed after Voyager itself. They use the Amiga installer, too, and are again without any problems. If you should experience crashes while using the preferences window of Voyager, you should copy the file pophotkey.mcc in the directory MUI:Libs/MUI. It comes it the archive pophotkey_1715.lha.
Here we go:
The icons still have the a little old-fashioned look of MagicWB. Hopefully Vapor will find an artist to polish these up, since they look quite strange under OS3.5.
Another thing I was missing was an updated documentation. As it is, the user has to explore the menus and windows on his own and try to guess how the new new feature work. The MUI bubble help is quite helpful but can not replace a documentation.
The requester which nags you at every start of Voyager about registering has been slightly modified. In this version there is a pause of 30 seconds. After 30 days (?), the pause gets one second longer. After reoval fo my keyfiles for testing purposes, I had to wait 2 minutes before I could start browsing ;-). Also new is a small progress bar displayed during startup. When the browser window is up, you can't see much of the new features. Most of them are internal or hide inside the menus or the preferences.
For example is the patch FBlit , which can speed up the graphics speed of AGA-Amigas and reduces the Chip-RAM consumption of the Workbench, now supported directly. This is results in a faster layout of pages and graphics and a lower usage of Chip-RAM. Furthermore, the internal Plugin-Interface was reworked, the keyboard shortcuts now work as they are supposed to be and TurboPrint 7 is used for printing, if installed. Voyager can now be iconified from any window. In earlier versions this was only possible from the first browser window.
But the most important new feature in Voyager is the support for different font faces in websites and the ability to use TTF (True Type Fonts).
If you stumbled over such a website in the Internet, you may have noticed that the layout of the frames, tables etc was somehow messed up or that the text was unreadable or not visible at all. Now the Voyager user has the possibility to get rid of this mess. But only the possibility.... because suitable fonts are not included. I have listed the sources for the most commonly used web fonts at the end of this article. Matt Sealey has written a brilliant tutorial about the usage of TTF onts in Voyager, I can only recommend it to every user of Voyager. With these instructions, the appearance and compatibility of Voyager is greatly enhanced. For example: Before installing the fonts, I was absolutly unable to read anything on the website of MetaCrawler (www.metacrawler.com).
If you want ot use TrueType fonts you will have to install the ttf.library. It can be found on aminet or from the sources listed on the end of the article.
Some bugs in the cache managemant have been fixed. The upper limit of the cache size is no longer ignored and exceeded. A new Cache-Pruner has been added. With this function, you can cut down the cache while still being able to view the remaining sites with all objects. Under version 3.0.52 you had the choice of all or nothing (if you were able to delete the cache at all....).
If problems with certain websites should arise after the installation, it might prove useful to flush the complete disk cache, without using the cache pruner.
As many Amiga users will have noticed, some webdesigners try to make sure that their works only can be shown with the right browser. To circumvent such restrictions, V has a feature called Spoofing . It enables you to mask Voyager as Netscape Navigator or Interent Explorer. This feature has been updated, too. You can now spoof with 3 different browsers and even edit their ID strings. So if you want, you can always appear as if you were using the newest Internet Explorer of version 9.5 of Netscape Navigator (a version that doesn't even exist yet...). The webmasters will be astonished ;-).
Whether these pages, which insist on a special browser for a reason, can be displayed properly is another issue. The Javascript(JS) compatibility has been enhanced. Even though I can't say yet how much it was improved, I noticed that finally JS-based ad banners are displayed and the Help function of GMX (www.gmx.net) works now. Of course the Javascript-problem on the amiga is far from being solved.
The new VPDF Plugin surely is a special goodie. It makes it possible to display PDF (Portable Document Format) documents wihtin a webpage. It is based mostly on the source code of Apdf2.2 and behaves accordingly. Further informations on Apdf2.2 can be found in test report by Uwe Pannecke in this issue. VPDF uses the same postscript fonts as Apdf2.2. This results in an efficient usage of disk space and en excellent quality. Options like zoom, anti-aliasing, etc. can be changed from a popup menu. The navigation inside the pdf files is just the same as in Apdf, only that the user interface is integrated inside Voyager.
The speed of VPDf on a 68030 processor is, compared the AcrobatReader under a Mac emulation still a little slow, but in comparison to older ports like xpdf and taking the postscript fonts into consideration, it is quite good. The PDF decoder modules are the same as in Apdf. This means also that, provided you have PPC board, you can of course the PowerPC module, which should make the question of speed irrelevant ;-). The module for encrypted PDF files, ApdfDecrypt_xxx.module (replace xxx by 68k resp. PPC), is supported, too. The preferences are set through Voyagers Plugin prefs window. If you encounter problems with PDF files, you can select the correct module from the preferences window (on the test system, it was Apdf_68030fpu.modul ).
Contrary to Voyager, the VPDF plugin is localized. It supports the same languages as Apdf.
Another plugin that has been heavily reworked is VFLASH. It finally is out of the beta status. Now it can handle sound output and some animation that weren't compatible with older versions. The speed has been improved and many bugs have been fixed. If you visit a website with Flash animations, the plugin will load the whole animation into the memory (resp. the disk cache) and play it from there.
For this plugin you should at least have a 040 processor and a graphics board, since with AGA and a 030 the sound and framerate is very faltering, even with small anims.
In the plugin preferences, you can choose how the sound should be played. It offers for example the audio.device or the AUDIO: driver from AHI. But you should not change the preferences while viewing an animation, because this has always caused a total crash in the test configuration. Spekaing of total crash , this laeds us to....
Stability:
While I was disappointed with V3.1, the update to 3.2 is more convincing. The stability was enhanced compared to prevous version. It is no longer possible to crash V by moving TearOff objects around. It also got stabler on some website which tended to cause a crash after loading. But the crashes have not disappeared completely. Especially the plugin interface seems to be a little unstable. Furthermore, Voyager doens't know a soft crash (when the OS just tells you that the task was halted. If Voyager crashes, then completely. Because of this, you should always save important data before starting V.
Result:
Voyager is a fast and comfortable web browser which even has some features unknown in the Wintel world. The new features are very useful and increase the compatibilty. It may even be that the instabilities were only noticeable on the test system. Anybody can get the public demo to see how stable Voyager is on his won system. But I doubt that the choice of PowerUP as PPC system is wise. The alternate system by Haage&Partner seems to me the better way for future versions. And the missing documentation, which will hopefully be delivered soon by Vapor, is especially missed for the new features.
Sources:
Voyager and plugins:Final words:
I always welcome constructive criticism, suggestions and anything else about this text.
Christian Aichinger <aichi@gmx.de>«
