On 2004-08-18 sd20@york.ac.uk wrote:

> Yes I also have had problems compiling browsers such as firefox,
> mozilla, opera and netscape on the z50 (db> crashes, error source 1, or
> just not happy on mips)

  If you get random gcc crashes you most likely have bad memory.

> This is a shame as I simply needed to access various webmail sites
> (https and spa) - if this isn't possible on the z50 I will relucantly
> have to go down a standard laptop route probably with windows - oh well
> - least I tried ;-)

  Would a text browser work?  I think both links and lynx have https
support.   A MIPS opera would be nice (and not too horrendously large),
but unfortunately they seem to only support i386, sparc, and powerpc.  I
don't know if any other commercial browsers are available for MIPS
platforms that might be used under emulation.  There are a few java based
browsers available.  I don't know if a good java runtime or a java
compiler could be made to work, but if so then this might be a good
possibility.  I don't know if any support https, but I would imagine some
do.  One I came accross (but have not tried yet) is multivalent (at
sourceforge), however it does not seem to have https support.  As a
somewhat extreme possibility it might work to run a commercial
microbrowser under emulation if none are available for MIPS, however I
don't know if there are any particularly good such browsers or if they
would perform reasonably.

Matthew Orgass
darkstar@city-net.com