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Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

discuss.haiku-os.org

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Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#91

Post by pjmlp »

tialaramex wrote: post #36
throwme_123 wrote: post #23

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 fea…

> 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 furthe…

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.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#92

Post by fifilura »

smallstepforman wrote: post #42

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…

Around that time, and probably for that reason, Opera was ported to BeOS.

https://www.wired.com/1998/08/opera-browses-beos/

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#93

Post by donatj »

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.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#94

Post by teddyh »

ahoka wrote: post #77
rbanffy wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#95

Post by biglyburrito »

cdman wrote: post #44
smallstepforman wrote: post #42

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/

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.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#96

Post by unilynx »

pjmlp wrote: post #86
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#97

Post by squarefoot »

pjmlp wrote: post #88
rvense wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#99

Post by hodapp »

ahoka wrote: post #79
desdenova wrote: post #30

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.

That's just comparing CRT screens with 60Hz LCD panels. Get anything 120Hz+ and you will see that modern systems are very snappy.

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.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#100

Post by klyrs »

rvense wrote: post #78
bruce511 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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