AWeb 3.6
The Amiga Web Browser
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A web, suddenly
Forty years meditation
Minds awaken, free
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A web, suddenly
AWeb 3.6 is the beginning of a comprehensive fork and modernization of the legendary AWeb web browser for Amiga.
Latest Release AWeb 3.6 Beta 8 (May 2026)
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Key Features of AWeb 3.6
• Improved HTML 4 and new XHTML 1.0/1.1 support.
• HTTP/1.1 stack with gzip, chunked transfer encoding, Range (resume), and keep-alive as well as corrected handling of Cache-Control and Redirect.
• AmiSSL 5.27 HTTPS with modern TLS; FTPS on the FTP module.
• JavaScript 1.5 (ECMAScript 3) with RegExp, try/catch/finally, and XMLHttpRequest (AJAX).
• CSS1/CSS2 — inline styles and external stylesheets.
• TTEngine + full UTF-8 when ttengine.library is installed.
• ShiftJIS Japanese charset encoding support when JKFF.font is installed in FONTS:.
• New about: pages (home, blank, fonts, version, plugins pages).
• Enhanced memory management, and Chip RAM usage optimisations including just-in-time image decoding.
• Mousewheel scrolling and Iconify gadget where supported by the operating system.
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• data: and cid: URL support for inline binary content.
• file:// directory browsing, including a volume list at file:///.
• view-source: any URL as plain text.
• Markdown textfile viewing, rendered with HTML styles.
• Support for the gopher-like gemini:// and spartan:// protocols.
• AWeb is now a Commodity with Show/Hide (Iconify) support.
• AWeb now uses the screen title to provide session status.
• Enhanced debug mode logging.
• Many more XML entities supported including the most common UTF-8 characters.
• Alpha channel images, where supported by DataTypes.
• Many hundreds of bug fixes, optimisations and modernisations, for memory leaks, Enforcer hits and overall stability.
• Updated zlib, GIF, JFIF/JPEG and PNG libraries.
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Release Notes
AWeb no longer requires an installer script. It can run from anywhere. Just run it from the folder it's in. Do note however that if the assign "AWeb:" does not already exist it will temporarily assign it to its current directory until it exits. On the other hand if you have assigned AWeb: to a different location then it won't find its plugins.
• AmigaOS 3.2+ recommended; AmigaOS 3.5, 3.9 or 3.1 with ClassAct are not specifically tested at this time.
• bsdsocket.library TCP/IP (e.g. RoadShow, UAE bsdsocket.library).
• AmiSSL 5.27+ for TLS (HTTPS / FTPS / gemini TLS).
• Picture DataTypes (e.g. GIF, JPEG) for image display unless using included AWebPlugins.
• Plenty of Fast RAM for real world websites (8MB minimum recommended).
• This release is built for 68020 CPU. Included AWebPlugins are built for 68020 CPU with 68881 FPU.
Fonts
AWeb will render HTML using whatever fonts are installed in the system, in this order:
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Using named fonts if the requested font exists on the system
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According to web safe font tag rules
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According to mappings defined in the AWeb settings, which default to using the CompuGraphic scalable fonts found on every Amiga
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Falling back to defaulting to system fonts
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A font pack containing common web safe fonts in Amiga compatible formats is available from https://www.ibrowse-dev.net/resources/yg/ibfonts.lzx
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Documentation
Complete user documentation for AWeb 3.6 is available in the AWeb Documentation section, including installation instructions, user guide, configuration options, and advanced topics.
Developer API Documentation:
Complete API documentation for AWeb 3.6 development and plugin creation is available in the AWeb API Reference section.
Contact
GitHub: https://github.com/amigazen/aweb3/
Web: http://www.amigazen.com/aweb/
Email: aweb@amigazen.com
Copyright
AWeb is Copyright © 1998 by Yvon Rozijn. All rights reserved.
Changes Copyright © 2025–2026 by amigazen project. Licensed on AWeb Public License terms.
See AWeb/Docs/legal.html, or LICENSE in the source code distribution.
amigazen project maintains this fork under the AWeb Public License; see project documentation for contributor and redistribution terms.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the ultimate aim of the new AWeb project?
The Amiga actually had one of the first graphical web browsers - AMosaic reimplemented Mosaic natively for Amiga using MUI, and came out not long after the Mac and Windows versions of Mosaic. This was later followed by IBrowse, Voyager and AWeb itself. A browser called Web Cruiser was announced by Finale Development, the team behind ClassAct, but was quickly cancelled as it became clear the Amiga platform would no longer be commercially viable.
Of these, the closest thing to a browser integrating tightly into the Amiga operating system is AWeb, due to its use of the ClassAct, now ReAction, user interface toolkit, as well as DataTypes, ARexx and extending the Amiga's BOOPSI and shared library architecture for its own plugin system.
When AWeb was originally developed, web standards were in a state of rapid flux and many websites relied on plugin technologies such as Shockwave Flash and Java Applets, making it a challenge for any browser developer to keep up let alone one working on their own. Ironically in 2025 the needs of a 'classic web browser' implementing the HTML4 generation of standards are lesser as both Flash and Java Applets have died off completely, although modern browsers employ a variety of new standards to provide similar capabilities for interactive 'web apps'.
The release of AWeb as open source was a generous act by its author, and the code itself a masterpiece of software design, one that deserves continued effort to "finish the job" started all those years ago.
In this context, finishing the job means both completing support for the final versions of those web standards and, with the benefit of hindsight, the way those features ended up being used in practice. It also means leveraging the AWeb architecture in new ways to extend the Amiga platform to provide reusable services such as HTML rendering and HTTP processing in a way that other platforms have enjoyed in the intervening years and true to the Amiga platform's famous modularity.
Which features from the various releases of AWeb 3.5 have already been cherry-picked for inclusion in AWeb 3.6?
For a full list of new features, bug fixes and improvements cherry-picked from AWeb 3.5, see the CHANGELOG.md. As of beta 8, all relevant AWeb 3.5 changes have been integrated and in many cases enhanced.
Are there any features from the various releases of AWeb 3.5 that are not going to be reintegrated into AWeb 3.6?
The implementation of HTTP/1.1, gzip and chunked encoding, as well as new features such as HTTP Range and keep-alive support, in AWeb 3.6 is vastly more sophisticated than the simplistic version in AWeb 3.5, it is an all new implementation, so no code from the AWeb 3.5 version has been reintegrated. Similarly the AmiSSL 5 integration is all new.
Other changes from AWeb 3.5 that have been reviewed and rejected are:
• FTP module changes were integrated, tested, and found to be completely broken. Rather than fix the AWeb 3.5 code, which made unnecessary changes to otherwise already working code, the changes were reverted out completely. AWeb's original FTP module already worked correctly.
• Support for multiple MIME entries for a given mime type was a kludge for a server side issue rarely encountered, and complicated the UI unnecessarily.
• The new About dialog (erroneously called splash screen in the AWeb 3.5 documentation) was overcomplicated and ugly, AWeb 3.6 keeps the original AWeb 3.4 About dialog
• Plugin API and version numbering was changed unnecessarily in AWeb 3.5. AWeb 3.6 Plugin API remains consistent with AWeb 3.4. But it remains important to not mix and match different versions of the main AWeb application, and its plugins.
• Borders around images was made a user configurable setting with additional AWebCfg settings. This is both unnecessary - images should simply not have borders unless styled as such - and rendered it necessary to localise the new settings
• Double buffering implementation was found to cause many regressions, as well as using twice as much memory
• AWeb 3.5 offered alternative toolbar layout options. AWeb 3.6 has an experimental simplified ‘modern’ toolbar option instead.
What is amigazen project's plan for the future of AWeb?
The first release 3.6 is designed to be a stable rebuild of version 3.4 updated to build with the latest NDK and relevant third party SDKs such as AmiSSL 5 and RoadShow, still also using SAS/C like the original release. The most important changes from the various beta releases of 3.5 will also be cherry picked for inclusion where they don't break compatibility with classic Amiga.
Later releases will then add new features missing from AWeb's standards support incrementally.
The intention will be to eventually reach a version of AWeb that implements at least some of CSS including CSS2, HTML standards up to XHTML and XMLHttpRequest() in JavaScript, with a DOM, which should give AWeb compatibility up to the equivalent of about 2008 to 2010 era web content.
Does the new AWeb work on Workbench 3.1, 3.5 or 3.9?
The new AWeb is built and tested using the NDK 3.2 but may still be compatible with Workbench 3.1 with ClassAct, or the 3.5 and 3.9 releases with ReAction. Likewise the network support is built with the Roadshow SDK but should work with any bsdsocket.library implementation, and is most heavily tested with the UAE networking for obvious reasons.
New features such as system settings for contextual mouse pointers are implemented using progressive upgrade techniques at runtime wherever possible, for example with branching code paths that check if intuition.library 47 or higher is available.
Will AWeb support modern websites?
Since the advent of HTML5, CSS3, WebAssembly, WebGL and more new web technologies, the browser has become an operating system unto itself. Indeed, many popular applications are these days written to use the Electron runtime, built on Chromium and Blink and are thus hybrid web apps, not truly native apps. This is why there are really only 3 browser engines left - WebKit as supported by Apple, Blink, originally forked from WebKit and used in Chromium which is the foundation of most current web browsers from Google Chrome itself to Microsoft Edge and new browsers from AI startups, and the venerable Gecko used by Firefox, now in its new Rust based iteration.
Some legacy forks remain such as the Goanna continuation of the original C based Gecko code, but the sheer cost involved in maintaining a browser engine in 2025 means no it's not realistic to expect AWeb can support these features on any platform let alone on classic Amiga with its legacy constraints.
What happened to the AWeb Open Source Development Team?
No idea, but their website at aweb.sunsite.dk has been deactivated since 2009 and their sourcecode only available in snapshots across various Amiga file libraries, in fact they seem to have frequently done their work not in compliance with the AWeb Public License. Some of their members remain active on other Amiga development projects mostly for OS4. It is now the year 2025. Some of their content, such as their ticket boards, can still be viewed on archive.org including a tentative plan for an AWeb 4 based on KHTML - the very same engine that later became WebKit - but it seems the sourcecode repository for any of their versions was never public or has been lost to history.
Will this new version of AWeb be available for OS4, AROS or MorphOS?
Ports of AWeb - version 3.5 - already exist, so at some point it should be possible to re-merge the platform specific changes in. Unfortunately most of the work done on the 3.5 beta releases made no effort to retain compatibility with a native Amiga classic builds, so this new release starts again updating from the original 3.4 release from Yvon Rozijn.
The first priority however is to get a good, stable build of AWeb in the form Yvon left it in when he gave it to the community.
The current AWeb 3.6 runs on OS4 as a 68k binary and as of version 3.6 alpha 7 all known OS4 specific issues are fixed.
Can I contribute to the new AWeb?
Yes please! Whether code, testing or translations and documentation, all contributions are welcome and will remain free and open source in the spirit and letter of the AWeb Public License. See also CONTRIBUTING.md.
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Downloads
AWeb 3.6 Releases
Note: This release is built for 68020 CPU. Included AWebPlugins (PNG/JFIF/GIF) are built for 68020 with 68881 FPU. To install, unpack the LhA archive and run AWeb; no installer is required.
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Latest - Beta 8
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AWeb36b8.lha - Latest beta release
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Alpha 7
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AWeb36a7.lha - Working support for AmigaOS 4
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Alpha 6
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AWeb36a6.lha - Further improvements to CSS and JavaScript
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Alpha 5
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AWeb36a5.lha - Experimental CSS support, XHTML 1.0, gemini:// and spartan:// protocols, and AWebView standalone file viewer
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Alpha 4
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AWeb36a4.lha - HTTPS security improvements, about: pages, file:// protocol enhancements, and various fixes
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Alpha 3
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AWeb36a3.lha - Contextual mouse pointers, Markdown support, about: protocol, and security improvements
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Alpha 2
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AWeb36a2.lha - Initial 3.6 release with ReAction migration, P96 support, AmiSSL v5.2, and HTTP/1.1
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Alpha 1
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AWeb 3.6 Alpha 1 was an unstable private release shared only with a few testers.
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Stable beta and final releases will be released to Aminet in due course.
AWeb 3.4 Releases (Original)
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