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 trademark conflicts got renamed to Firefox that we all know today. So in a round-a-bout way, we have come full circle after 20 years, Firefox is finally ported to the platform that inspired its creation.<p>Kind of poetic. We should write a 3-5-3 Haiku about this journey.
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.<p>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.
Beautiful to see such passion and great execution, especially for 20 years in a row.<p>It's like a piece of art.<p>I suspect the company that created BeOS actually lost the source-code and that's potentially the real reason they don't want to share, because from an economic perspective there does not seem anything of value there.
That made me think how many non-Unix FOSS operating systems are out there? Haiku, FreeDOS, Genode, ReactOS, Plan9, AROS, and RISC OS comes to my mind quickly.
I seem to recall trying Firefox on HaikuOS circa ~2011, though searching around now it seems it was based on an outdated version at the time. Kudos for a modern port project.
Here is a more recent screenshot.<p><a href="https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/progress-on-porting-firefox/13493/143" rel="nofollow">https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/progress-on-porting-firefox/1...</a>
I can't change the link now but this should be the correct link to the post: <a href="https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/progress-on-porting-firefox/13493/143" rel="nofollow">https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/progress-on-porting-firefox/1...</a>
Firefox ported to HaikuOS, <i>before</i> it's ported to Windows XP. :-)<p>(If you need a modern browser on XP, in the meantime try the Chrome port:<p><a href="https://win32subsystem.live/supermium/" rel="nofollow">https://win32subsystem.live/supermium/</a> )
The question of "Is it more stable than other browsers" being "It can't render text" is somewhat hilarious.<p>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.
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.
Funny to see the main question in the forum is "How stable is it?" and does it crash less than other options.<p>Haiku is fantastic and seeing it still developed after 20 years is awesome.<p>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 features.
wtf? Now I am switching! :-) Oh, I get it "The current status is that no text can be shown due to some rendering issues,so it is not usable at all" (nine days ago). Still, if you got Firefox you are ready for mainstream adoption.