Timberwolf

» see friedenhq.org/amiga/timberwolf/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Timberwolf was Firefox for AmigaOS 4, and two people built it. Thomas and Hans-Joerg Frieden were already core AmigaOS 4 developers when they took on a bounty posted at amigabounty.net, and the job in front of them was to drag Mozilla's build system onto a PowerPC operating system with an install base small enough to fit inside one large company. The first public alpha appeared on 9 June 2010, running Firefox 3.6. Mozilla was shipping betas of Firefox 4 by then.

The bounty is the reason any of this existed. Amiga users pledged money toward a named piece of software, the pledges were held in public, and whoever delivered a working build collected the pot. Timberwolf's pot came to 6,732.72 euros. Set against three years of porting work by two engineers that is a tip rather than a wage, and nobody involved pretended otherwise. On 23 July 2012 the project was declared complete and the money went to the Friedens.

Seven weeks after the payout, on 5 September 2012, Release Candidate 3 shipped: version 4.0.1.0252, built on Firefox 4.0.1. Nothing came after it. My first modem was a 14.4k in 1998, four years after Commodore went into liquidation, so AmigaOS has only ever been a platform I read about rather than logged into. In 2010 I was out of university on TTNet broadband watching Chrome take share off Firefox on ordinary x86 machines, and a two-person Gecko port for PowerPC Amigas would not have run on anything I owned.

~ the dossier ~

~ the bounty ~

amigabounty.net deserves a minute of attention as a funding mechanism. It was public escrow for platform software: a community with no vendor left would pledge money against the thing it needed and then wait for a developer to appear. Timberwolf was project 44. The predecessor effort, AmiZilla, had been running the same model since 2003 with a much bigger pot and collapsed in November 2009 without producing a browser, which is the immediate context for Timberwolf starting in early 2009 with a deliberately smaller target.

Smaller meant one platform. AmiZilla had promised three separate Amiga systems at once; Timberwolf promised AmigaOS 4.1 and nothing else.

~ what actually shipped ~

Two public milestones and one release candidate is the whole ledger. The 9 June 2010 alpha was Firefox 3.6. A beta for AmigaOS 4.1 followed on 16 February 2012. RC3, on 5 September 2012, was Firefox 4.0.1, a version Mozilla had itself superseded in April 2011. Mozilla had also moved to rapid release by then, so the target shifted every six weeks, and the distance between Timberwolf and current Firefox could only grow from there.

~ after the money ~

The Friedens stopped work at some point after the bounty closed. Wikipedia's article can only say "at some point", which is what an ending with no announcement looks like in writing. In 2013 Steven Solie, the AmigaOS 4 team lead, obtained the source and said he was working on it with an unnamed group of part-time developers. Nothing shipped from that. On 30 October 2015 Frieden pushed the source to GitHub under the MPL; that repository now returns 404, and the surviving mirror carries three commits, all dated the same day.

friedenhq.org, the address still printed in the Wikipedia infobox, answers with HTTP 500 and a zero-length body. A live web server hosting nothing is a slightly worse ending than a domain that simply expired.

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