Today's web, on your Amiga.
Opening a modern website on a classic Amiga sounded like something from another century. Tachyon does it: it understands HTML5, today's CSS and JavaScript, opens sites over HTTPS, and does it all inside a good old MUI window, with its menus and its icon.
tachyon.lha · version 0.5.0-alfa · 6.6 MB
It's an alpha: some pages still put up a fight, or take their time.
It speaks today's web
No bare text and crossed fingers. Tachyon lays out each page the way the browser on your PC would: with its style sheets, its typefaces and its JavaScript.
- HTML5
- It reads today's HTML with the same parser NetSurf uses (Hubbub) and builds its DOM tree in UTF-8.
- CSS
- Flexbox, Grid, calc(), clamp(), :has(), @layer, modern colours, transforms and animations. What today's sites use for their layout, now on your Workbench too.
- Typefaces
- Every site brings its own (TTF, OTF, WOFF and WOFF2) and Tachyon turns them into Amiga fonts, thin weights included.
- JavaScript
- QuickJS with ES2023, tuned for the Amiga: it keeps proper track of its memory, stops runaway scripts without leaving the page half-done, and does its maths with fdlibm, because the ROM's gave wrong results. DOM, events, fetch, XMLHttpRequest, IntersectionObserver… Even Next.js and GSAP start up on a 68k.
- Network
- HTTP/1.1 with gzip and HTTPS with AmiSSL 5, reusing the TLS session. And known trackers are never even downloaded: your Amiga has better things to do.
- Images
- JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, WebP and SVG, decoded in another process so the window doesn't freeze while they arrive.
And the standards tests? Acid2: 10 of its 11 pieces. Of the CSS 2.1 normal-flow Web Platform Tests, 76 of the first 100 pass on the Amiga itself.
Everything you expect from a browser
Type in the address bar and search: DuckDuckGo by default, or Google, Bing, Brave, Wikipedia and even Aminet. A padlock tells you whether the connection is encrypted and a star adds the page to your bookmarks. History by day, up to four windows, downloads to disk, forms and cookies remembered between sessions. And while the page is being laid out, downloads keep going: the window doesn't freeze.
It also looks after itself. When a new version is out, a green icon lights up: one click, and Tachyon downloads it, checks it arrived whole and installs it. No hunting on Aminet, nothing to unpack.
What it doesn't do yet
It's an alpha, and I'd rather you knew before you download it:
- Big pages (Wikipedia, newspapers) are slow on a slow Amiga: tens of seconds to lay out.
- Google shows you its cookie notice first.
- YouTube doesn't play inside the browser yet.
- It hasn't been measured on real hardware: testing is on emulators (FS-UAE and Amiberry).
What your Amiga needs
- AmigaOS 3.2 (or 3.5/3.9) for images. With 3.0 or 3.1 pages show, but without images. It also runs on AmigaOS 4, under its 68k emulation.
- A 68020 with an FPU, or a 68040 or 68060. With a graphics card (Picasso96 or CyberGraphX) it looks much better.
- Fast memory: today's sites want tens of megabytes.
- MUI 3.8 or 5, a TCP/IP stack (Roadshow, AmiTCP, Genesis, Miami) and AmiSSL 5.1 or later.
Unpack tachyon.lha and double-click Instalar (the installer), or copy the Tachyon drawer anywhere you like. If you already had it, your bookmarks, settings and cookies are kept.
Made in Dash
Tachyon is Dash's acid test, an Amiga language that compiles to native 68k: over 29,000 lines. Everything the browser needed that the language lacked (networking, TLS, fonts, images) was added to Dash. Now it's yours too.
Discover Dash