Oregano

» see oregan.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On Saturday 20 May 2000 the Deputy Mayor and Mayoress of Wakefield cut a tape to declare a computer show open, and the product sharing top billing with the ceremony was a web browser. Browser launches did not usually look like that. Oregano belonged to RISC OS, the operating system Acorn built for British schools, and by 2000 the entire market it served could fit inside one hall in West Yorkshire.

The code came from Oregan Networks, a Cambridge company staffed largely by ex-Acorn engineers, and Oregano was a RISC OS port of the embedded browser they sold to set-top box makers. Castle Technology published it. Version 1 did roughly what a 2000 browser had to do, but the second version, out in March 2003, is the one that mattered: it shipped with Castle's Iyonix PC and became the browser most RISC OS users actually had. It handled HTML 4.0 and JavaScript 1.5 against the old DOM. There was SSL 3.0 for the pages that needed it, and Macromedia Flash 4, which was the part people noticed.

None of this reached me. Acorn machines were a British school fixture and a Turkish schoolchild in the nineties met a PC or nothing at all. When I got online in 1998 on a 33.6k modem, the browser argument was Netscape against Internet Explorer and there was no third option to have an opinion about. Oregano was a browser you bought in a box at a computer show, for a machine almost nobody outside one country owned.

~ the dossier ~

~ what castle was selling ~

The Iyonix PC was Castle's attempt to keep RISC OS on hardware that was still being manufactured, and Oregano 2 came in the software bundle. Think about what that meant in 2003. On every other platform the browser had been free for five years and the argument had moved on to which free one you used. RISC OS was still buying its browser, because the population was too small for anybody to give one away and recover the cost elsewhere.

From 1 August 2003 sales and support moved off Castle to a separate outfit, later trading as GeneSys Developments under Richard Brown. Oregano 3 was confirmed in April 2005 and Brown put testers on the betas. The last build that ever shipped to customers was Oregano 2 version 2.2.18rev3, in August 2005.

~ the day it died ~

On Monday 23 April 2007 GeneSys issued a press release, and Drobe ran it the same day under the headline "Oregano 3 scrapped". The statement from Richard Brown: "GeneSys Developments Ltd announced today the cancellation of the web browser project known as Oregano v3. This decision has been taken after much discussion within the company and with our business partners. The main business focus for GeneSys will now be on other projects."

The reason was money against a port that would not come right. Brown was looking at a five-figure sum owed to Oregan for a RISC OS build of the v3 engine, with no commitment on when the RISC OS specific faults would be fixed. Two of them had survived every beta: desktop windows redrew far too slowly when you resized them, and the fetcher simply stopped working after roughly twenty pages. Oregan, in Drobe's words, had been concentrating on larger clients to pay its bills. Castle was still selling Oregano 2 on the Iyonix site the day the announcement went out.

~ netsurf took the room ~

The comment thread under the cancellation notice turned into a NetSurf fundraising discussion almost immediately. Peter Naulls had a Firefox 2 port in progress, but it was judged bloated and slow even on an Iyonix and his four thousand pound funding target had not been met. NetSurf was free, written for RISC OS rather than ported to it, and it still gets releases now.

Oregan Networks is still trading. oregan.net sells Android TV launchers and set-top box modernization to carriers like Telus and BT, and the copyright line at the bottom of the page reads 2026. There is not one mention of Oregano or RISC OS anywhere on it. The company that made the browser outlived it by two decades and does not list it.

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