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Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

discuss.haiku-os.org

61–70 of 223 posts

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#61
post #58
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#62
post #8

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.

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.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#63
post #44

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 trade…

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.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#65
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#66
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#70
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tile…

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.

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