The following platforms are supported by w3browse:
The application may successfully be ported to other platforms such as Mac OS or Symbian OS too, but due to the lack of access to such systems, this has not been done until now.
The whole application is internally divided into two main components:
A platform dependent generic low-level part that implements a garbage-collected high-level programming language together with a virtual machine for it.
Only that comparatively small core-component and certain helper programs need to be ported to a new platform. All affected programs are written in portable C code that is suitable for (cross) compilation in ANSI-C and K&R-C environments. Re-compilation of the code is only required if new features are to be added to the low-level part of the application, but this happens quite infrequently. The code is well-tested by daily use and provides high reliability and stability.
The rest of the application, the application proper, is independent of the actual platform and just makes use of the features that are provided by the generic low-level part.
Several parts of the application make additional use of a scripting language. The scripting language itself is implemented by the application proper and may be regarded as the basis for a third component, because that language creates an operating environment for script applications. This is in fact true.
This separation of the application into basic components makes even a multi-platform installation possible (one application proper together with several low-level parts), but this has not been realized in the current release of w3browse.
A very important and heavily used feature of the application is the possibility to execute multiple tasks concurrently, which is also known as multitasking. The low-level part implements that as some kind of co-operative multitasking, but to the upper level of the application, it appears as pre-emptive, so that tasks can be interrupted at virtually any time. All running tasks are also time-sliced by a simple scheduler. Additionally, there are methods available for synchronization of and communication between different tasks, e.g. by using message boxes.
The system requirements of w3browse are very modest. Only about one megabyte of disk space is needed for an installation and about four to six megabytes of main memory are required to run the application. Furthermore, only (very) basic system libraries and no advanced features of them are ever used.
Support for SSL/TLS is only available if compiled into the application, but unfortunately, it has not yet been ported to MS-Windows. WTLS support is independent of the underlying system and is always available. Weak cryptography with SSL/TLS/WTLS is not supported, but server certificates are currently not verified!
This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project for use
in the OpenSSL Toolkit (http://www.openssl.org/). This product includes
cryptographic software written by Eric Young (eay@cryptsoft.com). This
product includes software written by Tim Hudson (tjh@cryptsoft.com).
For further information see also the file openssl.txt of the
distribution which is only included if SSL/TLS support based on OpenSSL is
actually available.