Great read. Thoughts on real-world impact?
Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS
101–110 of 223 posts
Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS
#102Some 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…
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Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS
#103Some 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…
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.
I wonder how true that is in absolute numbers, given how many more people are online (/exist) now.
Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS
#105Earlier 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.
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/
Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS
#106Earlier 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 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.
Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS
#108Firefox 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: https://win32subsystem.live/supermium/ )
there's mypal68 and latest runs with ocapi (though it's way too hacky tbh)
Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS
#109I 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.
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…
Haiku in 3 x64 boxes, native with wifi
Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS
#110Earlier 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.
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)