Haiku, the platform grossing in ported browsers while its native WebPositive browser languishes, has added another notch to its belt – and this time, it’s a big one. Firefox has been tentatively ported to Haiku, but it’s early days and there’s no package ready to download – you’ll have to compile it yourself if you want to get it running. It’s version 128, so it’s the latest version, too.
Without the ability to easily test and run it, there’s not much more to add at this point, but it’s still a major achievement. I hope there’ll be a nice Haiku package soon.
Last I read there though it was an interesting way that port was proceeding as the guy was posting patches and someone else was having to integrate that into git etc… haven’t even visited thier site since they banned me though, apparently constructive and stubborn criticism is unwelcome.
I still like Haiku itself… but some of the developers are quite toxic. And have shown that side of themselves on several occasions through the years…. BeBits drama, Drama with a few developers trying to make changes for the better, and criticism of how bad the package system is (not the build system the packages itself is) always being shot down despite the validity. Unless they fix those problems and thier personal problems it will always remain a developer clique with a few drive bys.
Hey, I’m not claiming this is the case for you (we don’t know each other) … but often, when a bunch of people who don’t know each other behave the same negative way towards you, sometimes it is prudent to take a look in the mirror.
It’s a post about a major achievement, a Firefox port. Your contribution to is to say how the developers are toxic, have shown that for years and stuff about drama. I mean ….
Either way, I’m pretty hyped. While I’ve been following Haiku for a long time, loved BeOS to death and haven’t yet become a regular user of Haiku, this gets everyone closer to being able to. I think that’s something to celebrate.
bsneed,
I don’t know anything about these devs, but based on interactions here I don’t see cb88 having a bad personality.
It happens. If I had a negative encounter with the developers, I might bring it up too. There is such a thing as toxic developers. Even Linus Torvalds was notorious for cultivating toxicity, something he’d go on to apologize for decades later:
https://www.pcmag.com/news/linuxs-linus-torvalds-sorry-for-being-a-jerk
I was literally very active on thier forum for over a decade… fairly active in submitting bug reports and testing also.
Everything went south with Haiku when they did a contract years ago to implement package management and did some polls early on then went all skunk works and implemented a bloated overlay immutable system similar to how livecds work. It’s taken it years and years just to not have excessive memory bloat from this nonsense.
I whole heartedly am glad they implemented a ports and package management system… but the packagefs implementation is for the birds. Every time anyone criticizes it or tries to implement an alternative there is a “steve jobs” like reality distortion bubble that comes into effect, without the steve jobs, that everyones says we will loose feature X or Y… or that converts my criticism into personal attacks inside their own minds (because it certainly doesn’t exist coming from me).It also made Haiku unusable on pretty much every machine I had for Haiku at the time… because it went from requiring around 96-128MB (or was it around 190 I forget I know it would boot on my Crusoe Powered Fujitsu Lifebook P2120 just barely) to hundreds of Mb which is still the case. I will grant that it is not entirely without benefit but it would make more sense if we didn’t have SSDs that make caching of mostly read only data moot anyway.
Criticism is supposed to be something developers value and take to heart, and I will point out that Waddlesplash definitely did as he put a good deal of effort into debloating packagefs. Not where I’d want to see that effort go but I do appreciate the passion required.
Also webpositive is being worked on for GSoC afaik… the port for the native browser is based on the older webkit API which fewer browsers use, but that is what the GSoC project aims to fix. I imagine things will be a bit better once those changes are in place as it wills share more in common with other browsers based on webkit perhaps that may reduce the workload overhead in the Native port.
It’s funny that. Firefox has changed so much since FF2 that they’re trying to port Gtk Firefox rather than bring BeZilla up to date.
Barely believable. One of the biggest missing pieces of the puzzle moving slowly into place.
Having FF as a browser seems like an important/useful milestone. Of course they’ll need to package it for end users. Are there any haiku users here willing/able to build it?
Last I read there was interest… it will probably just take a bit of time for it to get done. People have been clamoring for FF much to the native browser developers chagrim for since forever. Maybe once it gets ported people interest will pick up a bit more and the native browser can get some attention too beyond just the GSoC project (Adrien Destugues / Pulkomandy is who you want to hit up if you are interested in helping that)
If only a video editor could be ported too….
You wait ages for a decent browser and three come along at once (Falcon, Firefox, maybe Ladybird). Next stop hardware graphics acceleration.
I am in process of switching to Haiku from Apple, influenced in no small part by the gumshoe work of OSNews and the likes of Cory Doctrow.
Also: the next beta is imminent. I look forward to reading this sites’ impressions!
The Falkon browser has been available on Haiku for a while and so using the modern web on Haiku was already pretty much no problem.
As a Firefox fan though, this is pretty great. It is also more likely that more people will find Firefox when looking for a browser. I am not sure that everybody finds Falkon now.