Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS

[smallstepforman]

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.

Kind of poetic. We should write a 3-5-3 Haiku about this journey.

[simcop2387]

It wasn't Firebug, that was a developer tool extension. It was first Phoenix which hit trademark issues, and then Firebird which hit trademark issues, which then became Firefox.

[pjmlp]

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.

[asadotzler]

Not really accurate. I was there.

Native front ends like Galeon on Linux and Chimera/Camino on Mac inspired Firefox (m/b->Phoenix->Firebird->Firefox, my bad that naming mess was also my fault, see Chimera->Camino for more of my handy work with AOL lawyers right before Netscape shuttered and we got our independence with MoFo.)

We kept XUL because Dave made it great on Windows so no native front end but that let us preserve extensions and re-used a few key widgets in XPToolkit easily.

Bezilla was just another Mozilla suite port, one of about a dozen at the time, one that never got any core Mozilla team attention except as a niche port we were happy to host, so suggesting it was inspiration for what Blake and I did to get Firefox going (and later Ben, Dave and Joe and others) is a bit off-track.

[cdman]

I guess Firebug was the original "developer tools": https://getfirebug.com/

[tivert]

> 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...

I see no mention of that on the Firefox Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#History.

[wwweston]

From ash to famed flame

wings then fox feet now return

whence they were kindled

[fifilura]

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

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

[deaddodo]

> 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).

[kstenerud]

Mozilla

Through BeOS becomes

Firefox

[phlakaton]

A tale like that?

It might be very useful

But now it is gone

[anthk]

Galeon and Kazekahase existed too.

[DaoVeles]

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.

[drooopy]

I absolutely adore the way that HaikuOS looks and feels. It's like a direct evolution of the classic Mac OS UI. So incredibly snappy and responsive and with minimal visual clutter. I keep an old thinkpad around with Haiku just for when I need to do word processing with no distractions.

[BlackLotus89]

WiFi support missing? Afaik it uses *BSD network "drivers" and I remember having a wifi dialog/support

Edit: https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/workshop-wlan.htm... here wifi seems to be working (which another commenter pointed out as well)

[graemep]

> 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?

[smallstepforman]

I have 3 x64 boxes with 3 different wifi chipsets that work with no issues. The only chipset that doesnt work for me is the bm4360 chips used in Apple hardware. A 7$ usb wifi dongle solves that problem.

[qwerty456127]

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 support all sorts of different hardware makes the thing a lot easier.

[pjmlp]

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.

[ksp-atlas]

I ran Haiku on a laptop and the Wi-Fi worked just fine

[tetris11]

Is there good laptop support? By that I specifically mean, good power control management and display brightness control.

[popcalc]

>WiFi support

Works on my old Thinkpads.

[undersuit]

Maybe it's because setting up a Wifi connection is 20 years old.

[Beijinger]

If you like Snappy, try Bodhi Linux with the Mosksha desktop.

https://www.bodhilinux.com/

[rvnx]

Beautiful to see such passion and great execution, especially for 20 years in a row.

It's like a piece of art.

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.

[chucky]

I think it's more likely the original BeOS source code contains proprietary code licensed from third-parties, which means someone would have to spend significant effort on figuring out what can and cannot be released.

[kryptiskt]

Palm bought BeOS back in the day, but they didn't do anything with it. It was spun out with the PalmOS into Palmsource when Palm went to other OSes, so it didn't follow the rest of Palm into HP (and then LG). Palmsource was then swallowed by a Japanese company called Access, which was and apparently still is making a browser for embedded applications called Netfront.

[memsom]

> 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

Nope. The source code exists. You can find rather corrupted chunks of it archived on a very famous archiving site. The other posters are correct - it belongs to someone and they don't want to release it because it contains a lot of proprietary code and cleaning it up to make it releasable would neuter it in a way that makes it pointless. That and the ~24 years where nothing was done to it making is way past useful even to Haiku.

[haunter]

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.

[pjmlp]

Arduino (yes I know it isn't really an OS, but still), Zephyr, Oberon, Active Oberon, Inferno, mBed, Android and Chrome OS (Linux kernel isn't really exposed to userspace as in an UNIX system), Azure RTOS.

[katzinsky]

Micropython is really neat as an embedded OS. I don't think there's a PC target right now though.

[desdenova]

Kolibri also exists, not sure how alive it is nowadays, though.

[rbanffy]

I believe Contiki is one. It runs on pretty much anything.

[viraptor]

There's also FreeRTOS if you include microprocessors.

[Apocryphon]

SkyOS: https://youtu.be/4LOCyT12X0Y

[hodapp]

I don't think it is maintained anymore, but add AtheOS/Syllable to the list.

[oniony]

TempleOS

[Springtime]

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.

[smallstepforman]

Here is a more recent screenshot.

https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/progress-on-porting-firefox/1...

[return_0e]

I can't change the link now but this should be the correct link to the post: https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/progress-on-porting-firefox/1...

[mdp2021]

You mean

https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/progress-on-porting-firefox/1...

I.e.: "... /13493/143#post_143"

[actionfromafar]

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/ )

[tonyhart7]

"before it's ported to Windows XP"

what does this even mean???, I remember using firefox on windows xp back then, the reason they stop make a release version for windows xp because its too old and people already move on to newer windows 7 (microsoft already stop supporting it)

[desdenova]

Firefox worked on XP when it wasn't dead yet. There's no reason to port newer versions to a system that's no longer maintained.

[StressedDev]

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.

[aflag]

Why are you using windows xp?

[hexagonwin]

there's mypal68 and latest runs with ocapi (though it's way too hacky tbh)

[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.

[pornel]

This means Rust has also been ported to HaikuOS. Nice!

[WesSouza]

Incoming MJD and Action Retro videos

[theandrewbailey]

... on a heavily modded BeBox that's cursed.

[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.

[barbs]

Any word on when the next version is coming out? Looks like the latest version (R1/beta4) was released in December 2022.

[coolcoder613]

In a couple weeks.

[throwme_123]

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 features.

[tmikaeld]

"Modern tech" often require significant corporate backing and/or significant amount of funds. I'm amazed that Haiku OS is still going considering it's surviving on donations.

[tialaramex]

> 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 further.

[Aleksdev]

Only took like 20 years!

[csoup2]

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/sidebery/

[ofrzeta]

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.

[coolcoder613]

No, that was nine days ago. If you look at the most recent screenshots you can see that text rendering is working fine.

[jijojohnxx]

Great read. Thoughts on real-world impact?