Could you introduce yourself and briefly describe what you do?

My name is Chris Young, I live in a fairly quiet corner of Bedfordshire in England and am unofficially "Joint Software Manager" of Unsatisfactory Software, whatever that means (it's not my day job). I'm responsible for Facts, Wet, the 7-Zip and (partially) RAR3 plug-ins for XAD, various other things which aren't quite as popular, and of course the OS4 port of NetSurf.

Which Amigas do you use?

An AmigaOne G4-XE, 800 MHz, 512 MB RAM with AmigaOS 4.1. It's one of the ones with a 933 MHz G4 but I daren't clock it up to that! I also have an A1200 with AmigaOS 3.5 but I can't remember the last time I switched it on.

Could you describe circumstances that made you interested in Amiga?

My Dad bought one, I hijacked it mostly to play "Lemmings", eventually got my own and it spiralled out of control from there.

What is NetSurf?

NetSurf is a fast, open source, CSS capable web browser written originally for RISC OS (an operating system by Acorn for their Archimedes/RiscPC computers which were popular in schools in the UK - subsequent events unfortunately mirror the Amiga situation quite closely)

How long have you been secretly working on it?

Possibly one of the world's worst-kept secrets! I started working on it back in July I think.

Why have you chosen NetSurf? What is so special about it that you have decided to focus on it?

I ported an emulator called ArcEm - see this link - a couple of years ago, and had NetSurf for RISC OS running on that (albeit rather slowly). It then cropped up again in a thread on amigaworld.net - the usual "why doesn't somebody port this?" affair. I didn't realise quite how portable NetSurf was until this thread pointed it out, despite having used it and briefly checked out the source in the past. Edgar Schwan compiled it for his OS4 X11 environment very quickly, so I thought I'd take a look at it. I was expecting the project to end up on my increasing pile of software I'd started writing/porting and then given up with, but the support from the developers mailing list was very good and it didn't take very long to get it to compile, or to add a very basic GUI to get a display out of it.

What other function are you planning to add to NetSurf port in addition to what`s already in original version?

The most recent beta I've uploaded is fairly complete in terms of features. A text search is quite high priority, and opening local files is obviously useful. I have a context menu on my build now. The options GUI needs writing. There are a lot of bugs and bad/temporary implementations of features which need fixing (such as frames opening in individual windows).

What way of evolution of do you foresee for Amiga version of your port?

Once it is feature-complete and bug-free, it will mostly inherit features implemented in the core code.

Will it support/work with Flash?

Not at the moment. With Flash going open source and Flash libraries already available, I'm sure it will be added in the future - however it's something which needs to be added to the core code, so probably won't be me implementing it.

There is a group of people working on NetSurf. Why haven`t you decided to support author of OWB or to develop something more advanced?

OWB is a great browser, it certainly has the best rendering engine of any of the OS4 compatible Amiga browsers. However, it was designed for handhelds so anything which needs to be added needs to be written from scratch. The rendering side is complete but slow, and startup of OWB takes several seconds. NetSurf however has a custom-made rendering engine which is designed to be very fast (RISC OS coders are like Amiga coders in that regard), but is still in development so missing some features. It is designed for desktop platforms, so features like bookmarks (hotlist), downloads etc are already implemented and just need a small amount of AmigaOS specific support code for them to be used. This has enabled me to very quickly get it up to some sort of minimum browser standard.

The situation with web browsers for AmigaOS 4.x is amusing. There was none and suddenly there 10 of them. Instead of working on many browser the developers should unite and make one good product. Don`t you agree?

Yes, to an extent. However a bit of competition in the browser market helps spur the development and we end up with stronger browsers in the end and some more choice. Also I think we'd all be standing on each other's toes, and have to use the AWeb core as that's the only one we have half a chance of knowing how it works :-)

Currently there are three OS4 native browsers and they all have different strengths - AWeb has the most complete UI and featureset, is fast and 100% Amiga native but doesn't support CSS. OWB is the other end, has the best rendering engine with CSS but is slow and the UI is minimal. NetSurf falls somewhere in the middle - the UI has most of the basic features that are expected, the rendering engine is fast and supports CSS but is incomplete in places (and there is no support for JavaScript yet).

Are there any chances for AmigaOS 3.X, MorphOS or AROS versions of NetSurf?

I originally started out writing the NetSurf Amiga specific code in such a way that it would work on OS3.x, if somebody had the time to port all the dependecies. That quickly went out the window when features I needed were either only available on OS4 or there was a better way of doing them on OS4. I still think it can be done, but it would require a lot more work. Certainly the speed of NetSurf is comparable to AWeb and should be ideal for the sort of hardware OS3 is running on. I have had contact from people interested in helping port to OS3 but nothing has come of it yet.

MorphOS and AROS have the additional problem of using MUI as their native UI. Somebody did contact me regarding porting NetSurf to AROS and I'll help out where I can, but if you're using MUI (or Zune or whatever) then most of the work I've done needs to be repeated again for MUI. MorphOS users may be better off sticking with Sputnik unless somebody particulary wants to put the effort in.

Are you planning to develop WET program further?

Yes, but it has taken a back seat. I intend to update the HTTP code to that in http-handler (Wet's HTTP code doesn't support HTTP/1.1 properly), and I have plans for an ARexx-based plug-in system so Wet can be expanded to get data from other sources.

Let's imagine you successfully finished NetSurf port. You are happy with the result. What's going to be next? Which software you would like to put your interest in? Or maybe you already have one? Something to be ported or written from scratch?

I can't imagine a time when people are no longer bugging me for features! I'd probably implement the answer to previous question, and then see what comes along. I don't tend to plan what I'm going to do - something will spark me off and it'll be "I wonder if...", and then I won't get any sleep for the next three days as I start working on it.

Could you shed some light on the projects which are on the pile of the software you weren't able to finish? What are they? Which of them are rather close to be finished? Which of them you would like to be finished?

Heh. A quick browse through my old Projects directory reveals:
DTZ - a joint collaboration with Russell Glover and Juha Niemimaki to bring little-known secret Saturn game Death Tank Zwei to OS4. It's a reasonable tech demo: you can move and fire pixels to take chunks out of a randomly-generated landscape.
Triffic - a little commodity which was going to do for travel news what Wet did for weather. At the moment it will happily drag reports of the latest jams down from the BBC's website.
There are others, such as the AmigaInput driver for parallel-port connected CD32 pads, a MailNotifyDocky, TuneNet XMP plugin, the long-awaited FactsPPC - which will never see the light of day, although an OS4 compile of the old version might - and various intentions of porting things (even an AmigaGuide reader, although I forget why). I have little patience for ports - if they don't compile straight away, unless it's something I really want or need I'll give up quite quickly. I also hate lazy ports, I try to add some element of "Amiga-ness", even if it is only replacing some dodgy SDL-rendered custom file requesters with ASL equivalents. Overall though, I prefer to work with my own code. Some things which start out with the intention of being an "enhanced port" of something, and end up being written from scratch when I can't decipher the original code or it isn't flexible enough for my needs.

Most of my projects get released in one form or another, if they sit around for long enough and are in some way useable, I'll upload with the usual intentions of updating them later - or include the source and refuse to have any more involvement (which doesn't seem to deter people from reporting bugs - I swear I get more questions about programs I have no further interest in).

What do you think about whole situation related to AmigaOS 4.0 and Hyperion-Entertainment?

Hyperion are doing a great job on OS4.x, it's a shame they have been hampered by legal issues.

Apart from Amiga, what are you interested in? What are your other hobbies?

I'd like to say something exotic, but it's reading, sleeping, eating and going to various comedy events. Oh, and my Wii.

17. What are your best and the worse experiences related with Amiga?

I had my car door taken off by a bus as I attempted to secure an AmigaOne. That was a low point. There were many more good experiences but after the downfall of Commodore amount mostly to short-lived optimism.

Do you have any final words you would like to say to our readers?

If there's a piece of Amiga software you use regulary, tell the person who created it how much you like it. Also, buy a SAM440 and OS4.1.

Thank you very much for your time answering all these questions. Good luck in your present and future projects.