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Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

discuss.haiku-os.org

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Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#171

Post by deaddodo »

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…

> which due to trademark conflicts got renamed to Firefox that we all know today.

There wasn't a trademark issue, the Mozilla team opted to change the name out of respect for the other OSS project (Firebird SQL).

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#173

Post by deaddodo »

kiwijamo wrote: post #170
badsectoracula wrote: post #47

Earlier 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.

Sadly I now see sites refusing to work unless you use Chrome even though there is no technical reason whatsoever why it should break under other standards-complaint browsers. I've seen all sort of tricks to detect non-Chrome-usage and the result is anything from a snarky message advising you to use Chrome (sometimes a very specific version and OS is specified as well!) at best or a blank page at worst. And yes every…

> and Microsoft (ironically) seems to put some effort into ensuring their tools works across all the 3 major browser engines

I don't know why that's ironic. The Microsoft web teams have always had a focus on being fairly standards compliant. The Microsoft Browser team themselves definitely went down a route of stagnation with IE6, but a lot of that had to do with W3C's stagnation as much as Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior. They also implemented massively useful technologies that are ubiquitous today, such as XHR.

They get a bad rap, for deserved reasons, but that decade of stagnation and non-Standard ActiveX controls wasn't fully on them.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#174

Post by pino82 »

cgh wrote: post #145
mrinfinitiesx wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Konqueror says hello. I’m only half kidding, it was actually somewhat capable and I used it a lot. For those who don’t know, its legacy was khtml, famously forked into WebKit and Blink.

I cannot remember a moment when Konqueror felt good enough for me as a daily driver, but it was impressive anyways.

From a community perspective, it would have been a great thing to push it forward further, spend resources on it, and have at least one web browser that isn't somewhat wicked.

Admittedly, back then, we all hoped that Firefox would be that 'friendly' browser, and it probably truly was at that time.

Time has changed. Now I'm forced to like a browser that is always just slightly less evil than a one that would even IE look friendly. And with every version we are now waiting when they also will drop the manifest v2 support for dubious reasons. And even if that will never happen, they will continue to find other ways to disappoint me.

Yes, khtml was at least a nice time to remember. :)

PS: My personal feeling is that "impressive but not good enough as a daily driver" was and is true for some more KDE apps. This is why I use Plasma Desktop, but barely any more of their apps than Dolphin and maybe kate to some degree. I know all you're going to say now about free software and how it works and so on, and you're right, but technically, it would be sooo much better if just half of the email client projects (or office suites, IDEs, photo editing, ...; you name it) would exist, but with more developer powers behind it. But I'm digressing......

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#175

Post by pino82 »

desdenova wrote: post #30
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?

Exactly what I thought as well. UIs get increasingly slower as time passes, not snappier. We had snappy UIs in the 80s and 90s.

Not only slower, right? I mean, for UIs, there is the same race to the bottom going on as in other parts of the industry.

It needs to be a big show, and everybody must be able to directly understand it without any learning curve or even rtfm.

Everything else (ergonomics, features, ...) are too often secondary values.

I wouldn't say that UIs were great in the 90s. They weren't. It was also harder to implement them. The programming languages were more tedious, low-level, etc.

But as so often, it's disappointing what we do with our additional power today. Snappiness wouldn't even be my first concern, though.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#176

Post by hollandheese »

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/

Only the crappy ones were restricted to that.

My 22” Diamondtron went 2048x1536 @ 85Hz or 1600x1200 @ 100Hz (which is what I usually ran it at)

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#177

Post by phlakaton »

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…

A tale like that?

It might be very useful

But now it is gone

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#178

Post by KTibow »

Beijinger wrote: post #138
Beijinger wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why is this downvoted so badly?

Perhaps one reason is that it seems off topic and you treated "snappy" as a proper noun

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#179

Post by bruce511 »

rvense wrote: post #137
klyrs wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sa…

The problem with your hypothesis is that in the lead up to 2001 you have Linux as open Source, and Windows (et al) as commercial offerings. And the commercial stuff is waaaay ahead at this point.

The conclusion one draws from this is that "commercial development" (which is centered around intellectual property and copyright) is progressing faster than open source. In other words it's a kinda A/B test and copyrighted software is progressing faster.

From that point of view it's then hard to be convincing that adding another open-source operating system to the mix (one which has by this point failed commercially) would somehow improve development (as a whole).

(I'm referencing the original assertion in this thread; "Just another proof that copyright laws must be heavily reformed asap because they continue to harm development ")

Now clearly Linux has become a player in the server space. And the BSD's have some small market share. Would the addition of BeOS dilute those already megre resources? Can one, hand on heart, look at open-source development and say it's developing faster than commercial software? Is Firefox leading development in Browsers or is it Chrome? [1] Is Linux (even today) leading desktop development? Or is it Mac and Windows? Generally speaking, if we look at the "big improvements" over the last 20 years, are they happening in the commercial space or the open-source space?

I'm as big a fan of Open Source as the next guy. But I don't think "copyright harms development". I think Open Source is a superb benefit to humanity. But I don't think of Open Source (generally) as a hot-bed of innovation. The tag line of "xxx is an Open Source clone of yyy" seems more common than the reverse.

Do I think intellectual property law needs reformation? yes. There's a lot which could be improved. But claiming that BeOS is "proof" that copyright is holding us back is, in my opinion, a weak argument for said reformation.

[1] Yeah, I know Chrome is "open source" - but it's resourced by a very commercial company for very commercial reasons.

[2] It's also worth noting that _abandoning_ things like copyright law would affect GPL code as much as commercial code. Making everything into effectively "public domain" allows for GPL code to be shipped in binary form _without_ supplying source code.

Re: Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

#180

Post by StressedDev »

actionfromafar wrote: post #21

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: https://win32subsystem.live/supermium/ )

Windows XP machines should not be connected to a network because they no longer receive security patches. They will get hacked if they are connected to a network (and please remember that not every piece of malware is obvious, some malware is stealthy, and just steal information from the hacked machine).

Also, you connect a machine which can be hacked, you are not just hurting yourself. That machine can be used for a lot of malicious purposes including DDOS attacks, sending SPAM, allowing attackers to hide their true location, etc.

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