Haiku is already awash with browsers to choose from, with Falkon (yes, the same one) being the primary choice for most Haiku users, since it offers the best overall experience. We’ve got a new addition to the team, however, as Firefox – in the form of Iceweasel, because trademark stuff and so on – has been ported to Haiku. Jules Enriquez provides some more background in a post on Mastodon:
An experimental port of
FirefoxIceweasel is now available on HaikuDepot! So far, most sites are working fine. YouTube video playback is fine and Discord just works, however the web browser does occasionally take itself down. Still rather usable, though! If @ActionRetro thought that Haiku was ready for daily driving with Falkon (see first screenshot), then rebranded Firefox surely has to make it even more viable by those standards!It should be noted though that just like with Falkon, some crash dialogs can be ignored (drag them to another workspace) and the web browser can still be used.
↫ Jules Enriquez
It’s not actually called Firefox at the moment because of the various trademark restrictions Mozilla places on the Firefox branding, which I think is fair just to make sure not every half-assed barely-working port can slap the Firefox logo and name on itself and call it a day. As noted, this port is experimental and needs more work to bring it up to snuff and eligible for using the name Firefox, but this is still an awesome achievement and a great addition to the pool of applications that are already making Haiku quite daily-drivable for some people.
Speaking of which, are there any people in our audience who use Haiku as their main operating system? There’s a lot of chatter out there about just how realistic of an option this has become, but I’m curious if any of you have made the jump and are leading the way for the rest of us. Action Retro‘s videos about Haiku have done a lot to spread the word, and I’m noticing more and more people from far outside the usual operating system circles talking about Haiku.
Which is great, and hopefully leads to more people also picking up Haiku development, because I’m sure the team can always use fresh blood.
Posting from IceWeasel on Haiku nightly. Pretty snappy!
This is kind of a kludgy port (Firefox->Gtk3->Wayland>->BeAPI) but it’s a huge usability win for an alternate OS, so I’m conflicted. Firefox plus GPU accel would instantly make Haiku daily drivable for me, but at the same time being propped up by Linux/BSD API shims isn’t exactly the sort of “native computing” goal Haiku was built for.
The GTK and Qt ports to Haiku have been brilliant. Falkon uses Qt which is no more native than Firefox using GTK. Using Wayland is just an implementation detail for how those ports were done. It is really no different than using Xwayland to support X11 apps on Linux. In fact, Wayland is a lot lighter than X.
Regardless, it is not really fair to say that it is a hacky port of Firefox. The OS offers GTK support and Firefox is running on that. How the OS is doing that does not reflect on the quality of the app itself.
It’s no different than any other layering on any other OS… the exception being the unconventional Wayland Implementation but even so its not more layers.
I wanted to install Haiku on my 8yo daughter laptop (a old laptop from 2011). It ran so smoothly during the live install but unfortunately I could not make it to boot afterward. I had to install debian and xfce but it is not as smooth. Both does support Blobby volley so we are fine I guess. I am tempted to try and install it again and again but that would go against educational stability and right into distro hopping territory.
My experience with installing Haiku on devices from that era makes me think it’s a BIOS/UEFI issue. Specifically, try setting the laptop to boot in Legacy mode (ideally before UEFI mode), and turn on CSM compatibility. If it’s a Dell Latitude or Precision you may have to create a boot entry for it in the BIOS setup.
If you want you can email me with more info at my name at the URL in the website in my profile here and I’ll be glad to help. I’m also on Mastodon @[email protected] if you use that service.
Thanks for proposing your help, it is very kind ! I’ll give it another try when I find time !
I have used Haiku for “days at a time” but I cannot say that I have ever really used it as a true daily driver.
For me, the biggest blocker would be video meetings. I do not think Haiku webcam support is good enough for that yet.
I do quite a bit with containers and tools like terraform as well which could be an issue. However, a lot of the time you can RDP or SSH into something else and do it from there. For my personal workflows, I have been using remote desktops via Proxmox a lot.. I see no reason why that would not work just as well with Haiku.
I would need a second machine for video meetings but, other than that, perhaps I should give it a shot again just to see how close we are.
Isn’t there Firefox 2.something on Haiku already? Should be enough to load any contemporary (to BeOS) websites.
Yes, but ff2 is too old for web browsing.
Still enough to browse websites that are contemporary to BeOS (i.e. from 2001). As much as I like Haiku, it will never be a major operating system, because BeOS was never a major operating system. And “desktop operating system that isn’t Windows or OSX” niche has been filled by Linux quite successfully.
Porting software for all of the 15 Haiku users (I mean in daily driver role, not launching it once in a blue moon in a VM) worldwide is just not worth the effort.
If you want a free and open source OS to make waves with general users, you need something that is UI and techincally consistent, which is something Linux isn’t. You need to be able to google your issue and get a consisitent answer, which is something Linux will never be able to provide, because it’s too fragmented. Haiku offers the unique opportunity of a full GUI open source OS that is both consisitewnt and not fragmented, which ultimately general end users will aprrecciate
Not if they can’t play [insert windows-only game here]. Which Linux provides, in some cases natively, in others via Wine or Proton.
“which I think is fair just to make sure not every half-assed barely-working port ”
You should think twice before posting such ugly words.
I personally don’t know the exact differences between FF and IW, but probably I’d have chosen a different fork…
https://medium.com/@mihirgrand/comparing-popular-firefox-forks-6fa83fdfdaad
IceWeasel is probably the least controversial port… its just Firefox without branding so Debian can ship it.
I don’t get the trademark reasons. Firefox has been unofficially ported to a number of operating systems, including all of the BSDs and Solaris and Illumos, and even ArcaOS (OS/2) and they were able to use the normal branding.
I’m using Haiku as my daily OS for at least 5 years now on 3 of my computers. Actually, I boot into Windows only for printing something, because I have a win-printer, and for making video calls via Skype with my mother, who lives in another country and, being almost 80 years old, experiences problems with modern technologies. (If she were using Telegram, I would be able to have video calls with her from Haiku as well).
Haiku is definitely ready for most daily tasks. I would be happy if it has multidisplay support, though 🙂
Daily driver for 5 years?!?!! Wow, you are a pioneer.
Do you mind me asking what you are using for a webcam when you make those video calls ( in Haiku )?
I’m using the “IP camera” input node created by Gerasim Troeglazov (@threedeyes at Telegram) and connect it to the camera of my phone with one of the many IP camera programs. It works well with any software that can access video streams. But it can’t be used alongside Mesa, because it uses custom libglapi, incompatible with the system one. He tries to include his modifications in the system library, but I don’t know what’s the current status. The project is at GitHub, I can provide the link if you want.
And not, I’m not a pioneer There are at least ten users that I know who use Haiku as a daily driver longer than me. Most of them from the Russian Haiku community. Gerasim, mentioned above, even uses Slic3r under Haiku for 3d-printing tasks as well.