So you’ve installed Haiku from a recently nightly (or sometime soon, the R1 beta) and you’re launching applications from the Deskbar menu (the blue ‘leaf’ menu). Perfect, but there are a few more options to investigate if you want to quickly launch your favourite programs.
Neat little overview. For a second there I thought they were replacing Deskbar, and I nearly had a heart attack.
I use LnLauncher (mainly for launching common apps) and DockBert (mainly to see what’s already running). LnLauncher is pretty powerful and easy to use, once you realize that the right-click controls most functions.
Haiku is moving forward. The latest monthly report:
https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/pulkomandy/2017-02-01_haiku_monthly_ac…
goes into some detail on the status of progress toward the first Beta. There is hope!
Nice and fluid
However, the deal breaker for me was the lack of a modern browser, either firefox or chrome
The problem there is that Haiku is a very nice and light OS that avoids all the corporate spying going on in other certain OS’s. As such Firefox is far too bloated and slow to suit, and Chrome has all the spyware!
A way round it would be the open source Chromium (Chrome without spyware), Vivaldi which is a nice Opera replacement, or one of the many other browsers out there that are lighter and more secure.
We definitely don’t need a bloated or spying web browser on Haiku!
I think that a fully compliant, contemporary browser is needed for a huge range of tasks in 2017.
I wanted to use haiku for work and leisure, but both were proclived by the lack of such a browser. And, let me insist, I love the general experience.
I’m temtpted to remark you that the “we” in “we don’t need” is excessive. YOU may not need such a browser, but YOU cannot talk on behalf or all the haiku users and, even more, potential users
Wrong! The reason folk use a OS like Haiku in the first place, is to avoid all the bullshit that’s going on in the corporate OS’s. Having been around since the BeOS days on and off, and browsing the Haiku forum regularly, I think I can say that it expresses the majority feeling. If you want Firefox on Haiku that badly you are always free to port it yourself, there would be some people very happy with your efforts!
I cannot understand how can you talk in behalf of the majority of Haiku users. There are interesting qualities and skills like “respect to plurality”, “respect to other persons’ opinion and priorities” and, above all, humility.
Or even more easy and simple: there are people with different options than you. And needings, of course.
Even, even more: let’s say that a bunch of developers (I’m not one of them) port firefox, chromium or another FOSS modern browser to haiku OS. Do they know where do you live and are they force you to use their port?
Of course, you are free to choose other browsers or avoid any temptation of surfing the web and using web services. It would be your choice.
Contemporary PC experience is utterly uncomplete without a modern browser. Even OpenBSD (clearly more paranoidly created than haiku) has a firefox port. This is an objective fact, while speaking on behalf on the entire user base is puerile
What are you harping on about?
Firefox and Chrome aren’t the only modern browsers out there, you do know that right?
In fact if you want to get pedantic about it, you do know that Firefox is a continuation of Netscape that is over 20 years old? Hardly modern, it has become too bloated and slow because of it. I use it myself sometimes but not like I used to, there is better things out there.
Perhaps you need a tablet and lay down to calm down a little.
Let me translate it for you: it is retarded to suggest someone to port over software, if that person wants to use that particular software. The two are totally different things.
Now, if Firefox is not an option, and you are so familiar with Haiku, please let me know what is the currently suggested browser by Haiku? – and I am writing as a potential donor to the project
Hey, I’m not the one harping on about Firefox, I don’t care if someone ports it or not. I was just pointing out that Firefox and Chrome are not the be all and end all of modern browsers!
As a potential donor you should already know that WebPositive is the suggested browser for Haiku, it’s the one currently receiving all the browser related work.
Thank you very much for your answer.
I hope you are not one of the developers, because your responses are arrogant, your stance is elitist and your attitude appalling.
I recall some time in 2015 that even Chromium was downloading and installing closed source components after being compiled from source. I believe it was a Debian packager that discovered the issue. I wouldn’t be so quick to trust Chromium these days.
Found it: https://arstechnica.com/security/2015/06/not-ok-google-chromium-voic…
Even though Google eventually backtracked on this particular issue, they still control Chromium so if you decide to use it, you should do a full code audit yourself. If that’s too much to deal with, perhaps contribute to WebPositive code to help bring it up to parity with Chrome/FF/Opera etc.
Wow, that is a ridiculous statement. you would have the developers deny the potential users of Haiku a very necessary application because you believe it is bloated? That just limits the people who can use it to people who do not need a modern web browser, which is nobody.
Patches welcome. Firefox or Chrome are massive rapidly moving projects which would need a few full-time people to maintain 24×7 for Haiku. (The Haiku project actually tried, when Chrome was riding on WebKit it was almost impossible to keep up with at a few thousand commits a day) Now that Chrome forked WebKit into Blink, things are a bit calmer using WebKit.
WebPositive uses the latest WebKit engine and it drains a lot of developer resources already to simply keep up with Apple’s slower moving WebKit.
So, instead of complaining… how about helping out?
I am not complaining about Haiku or the developers, i was complaining about the OPs attitude. I have nothing but respect for the Haiku project and what they have accomplished.
Just a quickie about why there’s no recent Firefox in Haiku :
– There was a BeOS port of Firefox 2 back then, IIRC they even had our backend in the official code.
– for Firefox 3, they said “oh, native backends sux, let’s use Cairo”, and removed all the native backends.
– We took a lot of time and effort into porting Cairo.
– When we finally had a working Cairo port, they decided that Cairo was crap, and moved to using something else again for rendering.
– We grew tired of having to follow the rabit.
So the problem is *not* that we don’t want Firefox, the problem is we don’t have the resources to cope with their “oh, let’s try this!” development model.
Feel free to try and port Firefox and see how fast your branch becomes obsolete.
As for Chromium, we already have the issue with Qt that Qt5 now uses its own fork of Chromium for their internal web widget, which for us means a regression since the previous version could use a Webkit based widget.
Given that Chromium themselves maintain their own fork of a sh*tload of libraries, because they don’t care about upstreaming, it means we will need to maintain not just one but *two* Chromium ports, with *three* ports of each of its dependencies.
See https://github.com/haikuports/haikuports/issues/747
Forks are useful in Free Software, but at some points they become a hindrance when people disregard upstream at those levels. And then they complain people don’t want to contribute…
Edited 2017-02-02 17:21 UTC
(We already had lot of work merging the many Webkit branches we had due to their fast development as well…)
I’m confused… Last I knew, the native Haiku web browser, WebPositive, was being updated regularly, including with the latest WebKit back end(or whatever Chrome uses, I think?). Is that not the case anymore?
Or, by “modern browser”, do you literally just mean Firefox and Chrome?
Edited 2017-02-02 14:21 UTC
I think they literally mean “firefox or chrome”.
WebPositive runs on the latest WebKit engine which powers Apple’s Safari… so Haiku does have a modern Web Browser that supports the latest standards (including html5 video)
However, WebPositive can be a bit buggy at times… patches welcome! 🙂
Edited 2017-02-02 16:02 UTC
One of the suggested GSoC 2017 projects is porting over WebKit2 so that Web+ will render as well as Safari. It’s not Firefox or Chrome, but it’d be a major improvement over the ancient, janky WebKit 1.x engine the browser has now.
WebPositive isn’t exactly prehistoric
… the view never changes. And you grow weary of being dragged along with them. Upon breaking free of that chained mindset, strike out on your own and discover what it is like to think “outside the box” of conventional wisdom. 😀
Edited 2017-02-02 18:33 UTC
I’d love to see Vivaldi ported on over.
I really enjoy fiddling with Haiku.
It’s just “nice” .. must admit I had a mild panic attack at the launcher going till I re-read.
Really like what these guys are doing.