I have said it before, Haiku feels like it is simultaneously 20 years in the future and 20 years in the past. The interface is so incredibly snappy but there is a lot of basics missing such as WiFi support.
Seeing a modern browser supported does fill a big gap however. Who knows maybe one day through a series of silly unpredictable events it will be the OS of choice and running Ladybird browser in a similar fashion.
Some history about Firefox and BeOS. Before Firefox, there was Mozilla, which had a BeOS port (called Bezilla). Bezilla was bloated and slow. So the BeOS community tried to make a stripped version of Mozilla with only the browser (minus all the bloat). This project became an inspiration to do the same for Mozilla, and that product became Firebug (or something similar - edit phoenix, then firebird), which due to trademark conflicts got renamed to Firefox that we all know today. So in a round-a-bout way, we have come full circle after 20 years, Firefox is finally ported to the platform that inspired its creation.
Kind of poetic. We should write a 3-5-3 Haiku about this journey.
With a fraction of the userbase it had 20 years ago, thanks to everyone that keeps shipping Chrome with their applications, testing only with Chrome developer tools, and so on.
Anyway, congratulations to anyone involved in the port.
Wouldn't 20 years ago have less people using Mozilla/Firefox since everyone was still using IE6? I remember around that time i was still encountering several (public, not internal) sites that refused to work with anything that wasn't IE6.
I think at least nowadays people try to pretend they care about web standards.
Well, that hegemony happened by the end of the Netscape days, which prompted the infamous United States v. Microsoft Corp. case.
We're getting the United States v. Google case so hopefully history doesn't repeat.
I actually hope that history does repeat itself, and google gets severely punished
If history does repeat itself, the punishment wont be very large, despite guilty judgment. Microsoft was found to have engaged in monopolistic practices, but was still given a relative slap on the wrist instead of outright broken up.
And Firefox got to where it was at its peak by being better than IE, not because of any pressure from political institutions. I think there are many parallel universes where Microsoft does in fact own the web.
As someone doing Web development during 1999 - 2002, on a dotcom startup, there were enough people using Mozzilla browsers.
Yeah. We were all sick of loading a website with Internet Explorer and getting 1930201 hot toolbars, blinking 'desktop buddies' and 32 new system tray icons with programs running.
Phoenix saved us.
There were some sites requiring IE6 but not that many, and the improvements like tabs were enough for people switch to Firefox where they could.
Unfortunately Mozilla’s refusal to implement process-per-tab, combined with Flash’s instability, let Chrome eat their lunch.
chrome eat their lunch for only one reason: everytime you were doing a google search, google literally begged people to download their browser while half of the smartphone were coming with google chrome by default.
In the head of people google and chrome slowly became a synonym of internet the same way the ie icon used to be in the previous decade.
I wonder how true that is in absolute numbers, given how many more people are online (/exist) now.
I guess Firebug was the original "developer tools": https://getfirebug.com/
It was an amazing revolution that made complex app development of JS based front ends finally tolerable.
IE already had debugging tools, however they had to be installed either via Visual Studio or Office Developer Tools.
Also they barely worked for anything non trivial, let alone what we now call SPAs
Firebug was amazing and one of the reasons I started doing front-end development again, after swearing it off because IE 5.x made it such a frustrating experience.
It wasn't Firebug, that was a developer tool extension. It was first Phoenix which hit trademark issues, and then Firebird which hit trademark issues, which then became Firefox.
Maybe it hit trademark issues, but the reason I remember from slashdot was that phoenix was already a semi-popular open source project in the debian repository, so firefox had to be named from phoenix to mozilla-phoenix. But firefox at the time still named phoenix just ran so much better on windows than linux, it was funny.
Both Phoenix and Firebird were over the naming and trademark clashes:
For firebird, https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/mozilla-holds-fire-i... and https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozillas-fir... in this case it was AOL Time Warner that owned the Firebird trademark for the database.
2) For Phoenix, https://web.archive.org/web/20070914035447/http://www.ibphoe... the main reporting on it seems to be lost but wikipedia still backs it up
From what I remember, Firebird was more related to the database open source project which was a fork of InterBase, so at that time it was relatively well known due to its roots with IB.
From ChatGPT
*BeOS whispers,* *From its ashes, Phoenix soars,* *Firefox finds home.*
Around that time, and probably for that reason, Opera was ported to BeOS.
Beautiful to see such passion and great execution, especially for 20 years in a row.
It's like a piece of art.
I suspect the company that created BeOS actually lost the source-code and that's potentially the real reason they don't want to share, because from an economic perspective there does not seem anything of value there.
I think it's more likely the original BeOS source code contains proprietary code licensed from third-parties, which means someone would have to spend significant effort on figuring out what can and cannot be released.
Just another proof that copyright laws must be heavily reformed asap because they continue to harm development also in cases where any reason of protecting some company's IP is long gone.
Is it though? I think there's scope to improve the laws around intellectual property, but I feel like it's a stretch to suggest that the lack of BeOS source code "harms development".
An open source desktop OS that was basically usable for day-to-day stuff and easy to install, released in 2001? I don't think it's hyperbole to say that that would have changed the course of computer history.
As someone that has the CD-ROM they shipped on magazines as advertising, it was mostly usable, for single users.
And after they lost to NeXT, regarding being acquired, not much else happened in regards to OS development.
"Promising OS dies after assets are acquired and put in a closet" is still one of the best arguments in favor of Open Source.
Were you there at the time? Because I was a big computer nerd at the time, huffing all the OS/OS fumes I could get my grubby little hands on. Windows 3 had already won the game -- and that was when non-computer-nerds were asking their computer-nerd friends for advice and getting PCs hand-built by the same. When win95 came out, the non-computer-nerds forgot that the command line existed. When win98 came out, even computer-nerds were losing interest in the command line. Win2k was (imho) the best windows operating system ever released. It was extremely stable and usable, supported everything but apple software and a few bits and bobs that nobody but us nerds cared about, and it took serious effort to buy a computer that didn't have it installed by default.
So a year after win2k is released, your selling points are "basically usable" ( vs "highly compatible"), "free/[nerd-shibboleth]" (vs "hidden in the cost of a computer"), and "easy to install" (vs "already installed"). I think it's hyperbole to suggest that BeOS being open source would have dramatically changed the course of computer history. If anything, I think it's worth considering what would have happened to the already-paltry Linux Desktop experience if BeOS absorbed developer attention.
While I agree that Win2k was good, I don't think it was quite that popular; The computers you could normally get were still Win98/Me until WinXP. The only way you'd have gotten Win2k pre-installed was either getting a workstation-class machine or unlicensed machines.
Much worse, it's likely the BeOS code includes a bunch of unlicensed stuff. Be had been caught more than once "accidentally" including GPL'd code in their proprietary OS back when they existed. I doubt it's just GPL code that "accidentally" gets copy pasted into a codebase like that. If somebody has the code (e.g. from a previous job) it's getting pasted in "Just temporarily" and never being removed because there are always higher priorities.
Palm bought BeOS back in the day, but they didn't do anything with it. It was spun out with the PalmOS into Palmsource when Palm went to other OSes, so it didn't follow the rest of Palm into HP (and then LG). Palmsource was then swallowed by a Japanese company called Access, which was and apparently still is making a browser for embedded applications called Netfront.
Early Toshiba smart TVs used Access software. Wasn’t pleasant to develop for.
Firefox ported to HaikuOS, before it's ported to Windows XP. :-)
(If you need a modern browser on XP, in the meantime try the Chrome port:
Why are you using windows xp?
Not him but I list my own personal motivations here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40528117
Why not Linux and play diablo 2 with wine? Last time I tried it worked great.
It amuses me.
"before it's ported to Windows XP"
what does this even mean???, I remember using firefox on windows xp back then, the reason they stop make a release version for windows xp because its too old and people already move on to newer windows 7 (microsoft already stop supporting it)
You can run an up to date port of Chrome on XP, 2000 soon as well. They're also finishing up hardware acceleration support for the d3d9 backend.
Are you telling me Windows XP is out of support? When did this happen.
there's mypal68 and latest runs with ocapi (though it's way too hacky tbh)
Firefox worked on XP when it wasn't dead yet. There's no reason to port newer versions to a system that's no longer maintained.
Firefox ported to HaikuOS, before it's ported to Windows XP. :-)
(If you need a modern browser on XP, in the meantime try the Chrome port:
Why are you using windows xp?
Not him but I list my own personal motivations here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40528117
Why not Linux and play diablo 2 with wine? Last time I tried it worked great.
It amuses me.
"before it's ported to Windows XP"
what does this even mean???, I remember using firefox on windows xp back then, the reason they stop make a release version for windows xp because its too old and people already move on to newer windows 7 (microsoft already stop supporting it)
You can run an up to date port of Chrome on XP, 2000 soon as well. They're also finishing up hardware acceleration support for the d3d9 backend.
Are you telling me Windows XP is out of support? When did this happen.
there's mypal68 and latest runs with ocapi (though it's way too hacky tbh)
Firefox worked on XP when it wasn't dead yet. There's no reason to port newer versions to a system that's no longer maintained.
That made me think how many non-Unix FOSS operating systems are out there? Haiku, FreeDOS, Genode, ReactOS, Plan9, AROS, and RISC OS comes to my mind quickly.
There's also FreeRTOS if you include microprocessors.
I believe Contiki is one. It runs on pretty much anything.
Arduino (yes I know it isn't really an OS, but still), Zephyr, Oberon, Active Oberon, Inferno, mBed, Android and Chrome OS (Linux kernel isn't really exposed to userspace as in an UNIX system), Azure RTOS.
Micropython is really neat as an embedded OS. I don't think there's a PC target right now though.
Kolibri also exists, not sure how alive it is nowadays, though.
SkyOS: https://youtu.be/4LOCyT12X0Y
Funny to see the main question in the forum is "How stable is it?" and does it crash less than other options.
Haiku is fantastic and seeing it still developed after 20 years is awesome.
But maybe it would benefit from some modern tech. Given the recent discussion on Swift for Ladybird, since huge parts of Haiku are written in C++ it might make sense to gradually introduce Swift to benefit from the language safety features.
since huge parts of Haiku are written in C++
Sometimes pre-standard C++ and sometimes C++ 98. There's a lot of "C with classes" and stuff that C++ proponents will insist isn't now "really" C++ because that no longer suits their understanding of the language. As is common for that era it has its own custom string type, BString, and so on.
So Swift is about 20 years over their horizon, and modern Swift is even further.
Some things never change, regardless of the modern C++ discussions.
Apple, Google and Microsoft "modern C++" frameworks also use their own types, instead of the standard library.
See Android NDK, IO Kit / Driver Kit / Metal bindings, C++/WinRT and WIL.
"Modern tech" often require significant corporate backing and/or significant amount of funds. I'm amazed that Haiku OS is still going considering it's surviving on donations.
I can't change the link now but this should be the correct link to the post: https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/progress-on-porting-firefox/1...
You mean
https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/progress-on-porting-firefox/1...
I.e.: "... /13493/143#post_143"
wtf? Now I am switching! :-) Oh, I get it "The current status is that no text can be shown due to some rendering issues,so it is not usable at all" (nine days ago). Still, if you got Firefox you are ready for mainstream adoption.
No, that was nine days ago. If you look at the most recent screenshots you can see that text rendering is working fine.
Any word on when the next version is coming out? Looks like the latest version (R1/beta4) was released in December 2022.
In a couple weeks.
Incoming MJD and Action Retro videos
... on a heavily modded BeBox that's cursed.
Here is a more recent screenshot.
https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/progress-on-porting-firefox/1...
This means Rust has also been ported to HaikuOS. Nice!
Great read. Thoughts on real-world impact?
The question of "Is it more stable than other browsers" being "It can't render text" is somewhat hilarious.
As of five years ago I still had an open ticket for a bug in BeOS Mozilla in their bug tracker from maybe the year 2000. I tried to search for it more recently and couldn't find it.
I seem to recall trying Firefox on HaikuOS circa ~2011, though searching around now it seems it was based on an outdated version at the time. Kudos for a modern port project.
So that feels like its 20 years in the past
So that sounds like 20 years in the past too
Where does the future bit come in?
Exactly what I thought as well. UIs get increasingly slower as time passes, not snappier. We had snappy UIs in the 80s and 90s.
I don't remember Windows 95 & MS Word 6 being especially snappy. I think this is nostalgia.
The apps were snappy, but the hardware wasn't. Every menu/window opened immediately and without unnecessary animation... unless it needed some unexpected processing - then you were potentially waiting for the spinning rust to handle the swap file.
The UI was minimalistic, but with better hardware we also wanted nicer fonts, transitions, wobbly windows (I actually miss those) and countless other nice things that take time.
Also, it’s pointless to open a menu in less time than it takes the screen to refresh.
No, that would be the goal.
There's an option to disable animations in Windows, but I find it disorienting.
Most desktop have such options, kde and gnome too.for instance.
I am pretty sure this is good old resistance to change. You would disabled them on all your systems, then force yourself to use them that way for a month and I am pretty sure that "disorientation" would quickly disappear.
Same for MacOS 6 and 7 on period hardware. It’s anything but snappy. MacOS 7 on PPC was snappy compared to Windows 95 on Intel, and that’s it. Amiga was snappy, compared to Windows, but I have a working Amiga 600 and it’s not a great platform even for email.
The interface themselves were snappy when there was no or little I/Os. Spinning drives were killing their snappiness.
Now we don't have such excuse, at least for non networked apps.
See for example:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446933 - Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened? (2023-06-23)
Follow up to the above by the original author:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983 - Fast machines, slow machines (2023-06-28)
That's just comparing CRT screens with 60Hz LCD panels. Get anything 120Hz+ and you will see that modern systems are very snappy.
I strongly disagree with this statement. Every new version of Windows feels slower than the last one. Linux DEs are either very outdated and very snappy or somewhat modern and only barely snappier than Windows. I have zero experience with MacOS.
CRT screens were also 60Hz. Look at the latency along all steps of the pipeline to get a keypress visible on the screen... https://danluu.com/input-lag/
No, an extra ~17 msec of delay is not even close to the cause of this. The speed difference between older and newer UIs is still apparent even at 60 Hz.
We had bloated UIs in the 80s and 90s, it's just that what's come after is so much worse.
Try using the old analog control systems where responses are basically instant. It feels like the controls are reading your mind.
Mac OS 9 felt pretty darned fast on my 400Mhz iMac G3 back in 2000. Same for Windows 2000 on my parents’ PIII 750Mhz Dimension 4100. The only time anything felt slow is when a significant amount of data needed to be loaded from their hard drives.
Not all machines were like this though, we also had a Compaq Presario with some kind of Celeron running 98SE and that thing did feel slow more often than not, especially after several months of usage with the cruft buildup that comes with that.
Future comes in at point were we actually circle back. "Black is always in fashion" kind of thing.
Ditch modern ad endpoints (a.k.a. operating systems) and go back to those distros we used 20 years ago. Accept that those don't support DRM, carefully choose our hardware (as its barely supported), and stick to it until it dies.
The thing i miss most from that time is Window Maker. I'd love to have again those tiny tiles with small graphs and buttons, but for more modern use cases.
Window Maker still exists. There's an ongoing Wayland port / reimagining: https://github.com/phkaeser/wlmaker.
The thing I liked most in the NeXT was the sparing use of color. It was part necessity, but also usability. What does the color of the window bar being blue communicate?
I am an enthusiast for Gnome’s less is more approach.
Original NeXT was monochrome, so of course it used no significant colors in the UI.
The original NeXTcube was 4-bit grayscale, but there was a graphics card available which supported 24-bit colour. The later NeXTstations supported 12-bit colours without any additional hardware.
That's actually amazing. Can't wait for dockable apps support. That could be a killer app for operators - half desktop, half monitoring dashboard, haha :) I can already see those dockable tiles with Prometheus metrics.
How would you use WiFi on Haiku if it were there? I thought people mostly use Haiku inside VMs like VirtualBox so network connection goes through an emulated fiber.
I dream of Haiku being ported to Raspberry Pi and I even was sadly surprised it isn't - to me the primary value of Raspberry Pi seems it being an uniform standard hardware platform, this sounds like a great enabler for alternative OSes as lack of need to support all sorts of different hardware makes the thing a lot easier.
The raspberry pie is a very odd computer which is hard to develop for. There are much better targets that are both simpler to develop for, cheaper, and easily available.
And we never really got any of them working, so I would contest that. Many years ago, I asked about Pi 2 support on the Haiku forums and there was a lot of ill will towards Broadcom closed binaries. I pointed at the Plan9 port and a couple more examples and nothing happened.
I tried the same thing several times with the Pi 3 and the Pi 4, and someone more vocally pointed towards RISC-V. Some four years later, there is a somewhat working RISC-V port, but in the meantime there is still no working ARM port of any real use.
On the whole, I was not overly impressed with the Haiku OS community where it regards exploring widely popular platforms that, despite having some challenges, would provide them with a larger audience. It's their call, but as an original BeOS user (and who can actually spot the Be Book from my couch as I'm typing this) and someone who's spent the past two years delving into the Rockchip ecosystem, I'm quite saddened by the way things went. It's not as if they lacked other ARM options, they just a) didn't have the resources and b) were perhaps a tad too opinionated.
Haiku in 3 x64 boxes, native with wifi
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ0Ijc5n6Y4
Quite a lot of people use Haiku bare metal, and wifi support absolutely is present.
Is there good laptop support? By that I specifically mean, good power control management and display brightness control.
I would seriously doubt that, when even Linux, which has broad support now conpared to 15 years ago, struggles with that.
I guess certain laptop models, those that the devs use, might be allright.
Nope. I run it under QEMU since even the nightlies don't support Ryzen power states.
WiFi support missing? Afaik it uses *BSD network "drivers" and I remember having a wifi dialog/support
Edit: https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/workshop-wlan.htm... here wifi seems to be working (which another commenter pointed out as well)
It doesn't support a lot of modern Wi-Fi chipsets. There was an entire wave of Broadcom-powered stuff that they weren't able to develop for.
That sounds more like licensing issues than "being 20 years in the past."
There is an alternative universe where Be is acquired, BeOS turns into MacOS, C++ wins the desktop wars, and POSIX on the desktop never makes it.
However in this universe Steve Jobs never rejoins Apple, and most likely it closes doors a couple of years after Be's acquisition.
What would be interesting is if AppleBe still ends up merging with NeXT a few years later, and Jobs doesn’t immediately scrap the hybrid BeOS platform immediately…
I have 3 x64 boxes with 3 different wifi chipsets that work with no issues. The only chipset that doesnt work for me is the bm4360 chips used in Apple hardware. A 7$ usb wifi dongle solves that problem.
Works on my old Thinkpads.
I ran Haiku on a laptop and the Wi-Fi worked just fine
I absolutely adore the way that HaikuOS looks and feels. It's like a direct evolution of the classic Mac OS UI. So incredibly snappy and responsive and with minimal visual clutter. I keep an old thinkpad around with Haiku just for when I need to do word processing with no distractions.
If you like Snappy, try Bodhi Linux with the Mosksha desktop.
https://www.bodhilinux.com/