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You probably know Oliver Roberts as he's the current author of the iconic Amiga browser, IBrowse. Maybe his name also makes you think about the Warp Datatypes. He kindly answered our questions...

The interview was done by Glames and published in our (French) Amiga magazine BOING, issue #9 (November, 2024).

Hello Oliver, can you tell us some words about yourself?

I'm from the UK and some will know me from my handle, Futaura. As well as being an Amiga enthusiast, I'm a general all-round techie type person, dabbling in all sorts of tech, old and new. I love to develop software and websites, fix anything that is broken, whilst my day job is in digital print which unfortunately means continually having to deal with bugs and expensive broken software on PCs!

From an Amiga point of view, I have been and still am involved in the development of various components of AmigaOS 4.x, whereas most of you probably know me more for IBrowse, AmiSSL and the Warp Datatypes where most of my free time is spent. Going back further, some of you may even remember my early projects such as F1GP-Ed, ButtonMenu or PowerDC, or my late involvement with Amiga Format magazine and some tools I made for their cover CD-ROMs.

How did you find out about Amiga?

As a Commodore 64 owner, I discovered Amiga from Commodore 64 magazines, if I remember correctly, and a school friend had an A500 which I used to play on. Wanting an Amiga myself, I saved enough to trade my Commodore 64 in to for an A600 in 1991, which came with Lemmings which I played a lot of! Then came the Microprose Formula 1 Grand Prix game, which ultimately resulted in leading me down the path into software development, with F1GP-Ed, which initially was done on my floppy only A600.

Do you remember your first use of the internet on Amiga?

Yes, it was in 1996, when I graduated from university, having been introduced to and using the internet there for 3 years. I remember buying a 28.8K modem from HiSoft, which was very expensive! I used THOR for email and Usenet news and, of course, I purchased IBrowse 1.x soon after. Good times back when the Amiga could do it all!

Which Amiga do you use today?

I mainly use an AmigaOne-XE for most Amiga related things, but I have my A1200 with BlizzardPPC + BVision for testing IBrowse, AmiSSL and compiling the Warp Datatypes. I still have an A600 somewhere too.

You are known as the current author of IBrowse: when and how did you join the team?

Having been a user since 1996 and helping run the mailing list (maybe I created it - I can't remember!), I became a beta tester in 1999 after frequently pestering Stefan with bug reports for the then new IBrowse 2.0 (World of Amiga preview version). In 2000, I became involved in development of the JavaScript library component, which is what I mainly worked on until 2002 when I started working a little on the whole of IBrowse. This would have been for what was eventually IBrowse 2.3.

It seems that Stefan Burström, the original author, is no longer involved in the development of the browser: when did he stop? Are you still in contact with him? Do you sometimes ask his opinion?

IBrowse 2.4 was the last version of IBrowse that Stefan directly worked on and the first version that he didn't actually release completely by himself. His involvement mostly ended in 2007. I last spoke with him in 2017, whilst discussing how to move forward with the IBrowse 2.5 release.

Between 2007 and 2019, IBrowse was no longer available for purchase: what was the reason? Was the development of the software on hold during this period?

The reason was initially that IOSPIRIT left the Amiga market and as Stefan had pretty much done so too, it was hard to set up another distributor. At the time, I had no interest in managing this myself as I was busy continuing IBrowse development.

Development of IBrowse 2.5 started in 2007 and continued throughout those years, which is why IBrowse 2.5 was a relatively big update. In hindsight, maybe it should have been called IBrowse 3.0 instead, but we had already decided on 2.5 way back when, but now at least everything has become re-aligned. The beta testers received regular updates over those 12 years. It was always in the back of my mind that all this work could not be wasted and had to be released as soon as possible.

Part of the reason that IBrowse 2.5 became so delayed was due to AmiSSL. It would have been pointless for IBrowse 2.5 to be released with the outdated SSL support provided in AmiSSL v3, as most websites were becoming SSL only and would not even connect in IBrowse. I knew AmiSSL had been handed over to an open-source group to update and maintain, but this unfortunately took some years to complete in the form of the AmiSSL v4, which required me to become involved to help get it completed, which was finally released in 2017.

At this point, I knew I could at last move ahead and prepare for a public release of IBrowse 2.5, with Stefan's blessing. I obviously had many years to iron out even more bugs with the help of our beta testers.

Since 2019, the development of IBrowse has resumed its normal course with very regular updates until the delivery of version 3 a few months ago. What do you think are the most important new features?

The biggest changes are more internal and not so obvious, now that the IBrowse 2.x and 3.x source branches have been merged. The new HTML parser should be faster and is designed for future changes in mind. Again, the HTML parser might not be visibly different, but I have also made improvements to the HTML engine that do make rendering of certain things better than before.

Another area I always try to improve is SSL, which is never going to be fast on a real 68k, so I'm always looking for ways to make it faster by utilizing anything useful that OpenSSL provides. Now with 0-RTT support in IBrowse, this helps speed up TLSv1.3 connections.

Did you have help to deliver this new version or did you work alone?

I worked alone on delivering both IBrowse 2.5 and 3.0, with help from our loyal beta testers, but both did contain some new previously unreleased code written before 2008 by other members of the team.

Are you satisfied with the sales since you took over the distribution in 2019? Do you also sell copies for Amiga NG (AmigaOS 4, MorphOS)?

The sales of IBrowse 2.5 were a surprise when it was first released. I went ahead with the release because I knew there were users keen to see it, but there were far more than I had anticipated. However, the Amiga market is so small now and continually shrinking, so obviously sales are not as good as they once were.

A fully AmigaOS 4.x native version of IBrowse is available, but for MorphOS only the JavaScript library is native - the AmigaOS 3.x version of IBrowse contains many MorphOS specific enhancements which are activated when running under emulation on MorphOS.

Regarding the future, can you confirm that the development of the browser will continue?

It will. This year has been complicated due to various reasons, mostly not IBrowse related, so I have not been able to spend as much time on it as I would have liked to have done. I always keep the website updated with what's coming in the next version.

Are you looking for other people to help you? In what area?

Not really for IBrowse, but for AmiSSL we could really do with some help from some clever developers who are good at writing optimised 68k assembler code. Many of the encryption algorithms in AmiSSL are PowerPC or AltiVec optimised, but for the 68k there is just a small optimisation which can only be used on 68020-68040. This is not my area of expertise, but I'm sure there is room for big improvements, which ultimately will affect performance for any application that uses AmiSSL, not only IBrowse.

Do you plan to manage Cascading Style Sheets in a future update?

I will try. Stefan did do some early work on this, but not enough to actually render anything properly. This code is present in IBrowse 3.0, but not used, but I intend to start converting the HTML engine to use the new approach Stefan used, as although it was far from complete, I can see the idea behind it.

Obviously, running WebKit on a real classic Amiga would never be fun - it is slow enough even on next gen Amigas to be honest. So, I'm not even going to attempt to go down that road. I want to keep supporting classic Amigas and although it is never going to be perfect, I hope to make IBrowse display modern websites in a much better manner than it does today.

What other features do you have planned for IBrowse?

The next version will have a built-in WebP image decoder, plus various other improvements and bug fixes.

You are also the author of Warp DT: can you tell us when and how you came up with the idea of delivering improved Datatypes?

WarpJPEG was born in 1999 due to the slow decoding of JPEG images on my A1200 - I preferred to use WarpOS on my PPC card. At the time, I think the only datatype available was mainly for PowerUp, with an inefficient port for WarpOS. I thought I could do a much better job, targeting the datatype purely for WarpOS at the time, which maximized the dual 68k/PPC capability of those machines by using both processors concurrently.

Later I added PNG, TIFF and more whilst also adding MorphOS and AmigaOS 3.x versions, while later AmigaOS 4.x versions were released. The datatypes supplied with AmigaOS 4.0 were originally also developed by me, based heavily on my existing datatypes.

You keep updating them regularly: what kind of improvements do you make after so many years?

Not so much these days, honestly, unless I figure a way out to make them even faster. Should the OS add new features, I try to support those too, especially to maximise before like I did for AmigaOS 3.2. Things like zlib, libpng and jpeglib are pretty mature these days and do not get or need many updates, but I like to update the Warp Datatypes to use the latest versions. My main plan is to add support for other popular image formats, such as WebP, which was the most recent new addition.

A last word for our readers?

Thank you all for your support over the years, especially when it comes to IBrowse, the Warp Datatypes, AmiSSL and those early years with F1GP-Ed. Hoping for more Amiga fun in the coming years!