AWeb

» see aweb.sunsite.dk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

AWeb never ran on anything I owned. My first modem was bolted to a PC, and by the time I got online in 1998 the Amiga was a machine people discussed in the past tense. This is a grave for software I have never once launched.

Yvon Rozijn released AWeb in 1996. Commodore had been bankrupt since 1994 and the Amiga had already been sold on to new owners, so writing a fresh web browser for it was an act of stubbornness before it was a product. It was written in C and it was fast, which was not a marketing adjective on hardware measured in single-digit megabytes of RAM. Every byte the browser did not spend was a byte the page could have.

It went commercial as AWeb-II, distributed by Amitrix. On the Amiga it was never measured against Netscape; it was measured against IBrowse and Voyager, and by early 1997 those three were the whole field the magazines had left to compare.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

AWeb ran on AmigaOS and later on MorphOS, the operating system that kept the Amiga programming interfaces alive on PowerPC hardware long after the original machines stopped being manufactured. That is the shape of Amiga software after 1994 in one sentence: the platform kept getting rebuilt underneath the programs so that the programs could carry on.

A browser is the hardest thing to keep alive that way. Running is only half of the job, and the other half is keeping up with a target that moves every single year. The web AWeb was born into was documents with images in them. The web of 2003 had stylesheets and scripting and assumed a layout engine with a salaried team behind it. AWeb had one person in the Netherlands.

~ the slow stop ~

The last stable release, 3.4, is dated 17 November 2003. Rozijn had opened the source the year before under the AWeb Public License, a license written specifically for it, which is the move a maintainer makes when they want the work to outlast their own attention span. Development carried on at a much lower temperature in other hands, and the final preview build, 3.5.09 Beta, is dated 23 July 2007.

Nothing was announced after that. The open source project's home at aweb.sunsite.dk does not answer at all now, and the old AWeb page on amitrix.com still loads but hands you a domain parking lander. Neither of those is a death notice, and there was never going to be one. An open source browser for a discontinued computer does not get shut down by anybody. It gets a last commit, and then the calendar simply keeps going without it.

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