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Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

discuss.haiku-os.org

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Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#131

Post by pjmlp »

Apocryphon wrote: post #114
pjmlp wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Given the famous keynote where he announced killing OpenDoc and other efforts, I am not so sure about that, regarding scrapping the hybrid BeOS platform.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#133

Post by pjmlp »

tialaramex wrote: post #129
pjmlp wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone doing Web development during 1999 - 2002, on a dotcom startup, there were enough people using Mozzilla browsers.

At the turn of the century, Mozilla are trying to ship a web browser (also to be called Mozilla) based on the work they've got from Netscape. They shipped a series of "M" numbered (ie milestone) releases, which preview what we today think about as normal dynamic HTML but at the time it commonly just crashes the entire browser. Like, a colleague was working on code that would reach into the DOM and just tweak the CSS…

React only became possible due to JavaScript JITs being made available, almost a decade later.

We are talking about V8 being released in 2008, Chackra in 2011, and SpiderMonkey in 2009.

With GCs that can handle the amount of stuff that React throws away on each update.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#134

Post by wwweston »

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…

From ash to famed flame

wings then fox feet now return

whence they were kindled

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#135

Post by goosedragons »

morning-coffee wrote: post #105
ahoka wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Many were above 60Hz and it depends on resolution. An iMac G3 for instance could do 75Hz at 1024x768 or 640x480 at 117Hz. Someone recently got a CRT at 700Hz too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zm3lLlaEC8&t=0s

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#136

Post by lelanthran »

szszrk wrote: post #48
graemep wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The interface is so incredibly snappy So that feels like its 20 years in the past > there is a lot of basics missing such as WiFi support. So that sounds like 20 years in the past too Where does the future bit come in?

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…

> The thing i miss most from that time is Window Maker.

I use WindowMaker as a daily driver. Still.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#137

Post by rvense »

klyrs wrote: post #100
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.

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 comp…

I was kind of there. I ran BeOS for a while for fun some years after it had died, in between moving from Macs (which I grew up on in the 90's) to BSD and then Linux.

My point was basically what you're saying: BeOS was not nearly where Windows was, but it was miles and miles ahead of Linux, and it provided a unified graphical OS instead of the fragmented Linux base with all its duplicated efforts. Now, it's hard to say whether we the cascade of attention-deficit teenagers would have united behind an MIT/GPL BeOS and succeeded in producing something actually usable by people who were interested in doing more with their computers than setting up Conky and Fluxbox to post screenshots online, but I think the landscape might have looked different if it'd been an option. BeOS when I used it in 2005 or so was already curiosity, an antique, but if you take all the people who were working on Haiku (which started as OpenBeOS around the end of Be, Inc.), and throw in a handful of the people who were working on KDE and XFCE, starting from everything BeOS could do in 2001, instead of Linux and raw X, what do you have in 2005-6 when Ubuntu started picking up steam?

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#138

Post by Beijinger »

Beijinger wrote: post #19
DaoVeles wrote: 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.

If you like Snappy, try Bodhi Linux with the Mosksha desktop. https://www.bodhilinux.com/

Why is this downvoted so badly?

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#139

Post by vuna »

They didn't port it, but the first one (or rather the second one, but it doesn't matter) once we launched some new version via Wayland. So far, everything has not been tested enough and there are no implementations of different platform code, as a result of which it often crashes. This is still a draft port, not suitable for the average user. Someone wrote an article much ahead of time.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#140

Post by The_Colonel »

prmoustache wrote: post #104
Uvix wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Beware of simplistic reasoning.

What you mention was certainly a major reason, but not the only one. Another one was that Chrome was simply a better browser for many years for normal users (mainly because of its performance).

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