Origyn Web Browser is a discontinued web browser that was synchronized with WebKit and sponsored by the technology company Pleyo. OWB provides a meta-port to an abstract platform with the aim of making porting to embedded or lightweight systems faster and easier. This port is used for embedded devices such as set-top boxes, and other consumer electronics. OWB has also found popularity on the AmigaOS-like operating systems. Current versions include AmigaOS, AROS and MorphOS official ports. When Sand-labs disappeared, MorphOS developer Fabien Coeurjoly took over and eventually renamed project to Odyssey Web Browser when it didn't have any original Sand-labs code left.
History
OWB was created by Pleyo, a French software firm located in Montpellier, France in 2006.
OWB is a web browser optimized for consumer electronics devices and embedded system, such as mobile phones, portable media players, set-top boxes and TV decoders, and various other consumer electronic products such as GPS, home-gateways, Web-radios, digital video recorder, DVD recorders, wireless devices, etc. OWB is based on Webkit by Apple, and its ease of porting is based upon a browser abstraction layer called OWBAL. The existence of this abstraction layer architecture dramatically eases the task of integrating OWB in CE devices, resulting in fast and easy implementation on target platforms. The aim of the abstraction layer is to allow CE software producers to leverage extant libraries, instead of needing to port the browser and its full set of dependencies. OWBAL abstraction is based on interfaces, which are described through abstract classes, and these classes contain only pure virtual methods. No default implementation is allowed.
General characteristics
OWB supports full Cascading Style Sheet 2.1, CSS3 support, styleable form controls, enhanced rich text editing, XML technologies, XPath, SVG , XSLT processor, JavaScript API for XSLT, MathML, notifications, SquirrelFish Extreme on x86, HTML5. OWB features Netscape-style plug-ins including support for mplayer, Adobe Flash Player and DiamondX. The browser can pass Acid2 test with a 100% evaluation on all ports and Acid3 test with a 99% evaluation on SDL port and a 100% evaluation on ports for GTK, Qt, Amiga, and MorphOS. It features also accessibility support and support for cross document messaging, databases, datagrid, dom storage, filtera, geolocation, icon database, offline web application, server-sent events, sharedWorker video/audio, WebSockets, Worker and 3D support. Platform graphics engines include GTK, Qt, SDL, Cairo with Magic User Interface and Win32. The font engine used is Freetype. OWB is also POSIX compliant. Origyn can handle threads and supports GTK, Qt and uClibc.
Odyssey Web Browser
Odyssey Web Browser is probably the most mature of the Amiga and Amigalike-OS ports, as it has a download manager and much of the other UI features of a modern browser already separately added by its developer. Version 1.6 sports Adobe FlashSWF player plug-in based on Swfdec, version 1.6.1 has been integrated with web profiling and debugging tool called Webinspector. Since version 1.7, Odyssey supports also HTML5 tags and media content through FFmpeg. MorphOS release of OWB is also distributed in a Lite version for the minimal computer motherboardEfika.
Screenshots
The following are several screenshots showing the various features of OWB.
