Kind of poetic. We should write a 3-5-3 Haiku about this journey.
Anyway, congratulations to anyone involved in the port.
I think at least nowadays people try to pretend they care about web standards.
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.
I see no mention of that on the Firefox Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#History.
wings then fox feet now return
whence they were kindled
There wasn't a trademark issue, the Mozilla team opted to change the name out of respect for the other OSS project (Firebird SQL).
Through BeOS becomes
Firefox
It might be very useful
But now it is gone
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.
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)
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?
Ditch modern ad endpoints (a.k.a. operating systems) and go back to those distros we used 20 years ago. Accept that those don't support DRM, carefully choose our hardware (as its barely supported), and stick to it until it dies.
The thing i miss most from that time is Window Maker. I'd love to have again those tiny tiles with small graphs and buttons, but for more modern use cases.
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.
However in this universe Steve Jobs never rejoins Apple, and most likely it closes doors a couple of years after Be's acquisition.
I guess certain laptop models, those that the devs use, might be allright.
Works on my old Thinkpads.
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.
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.
https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/progress-on-porting-firefox/1...
https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/progress-on-porting-firefox/1...
I.e.: "... /13493/143#post_143"
(If you need a modern browser on XP, in the meantime try the Chrome port:
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)
But to answer your question seriously. Is a river today the same it was before? Is Firefox today the same it was when XP roamed the Earth with the dinosaurs?
The answer is, no, and yes, some of it. So it's a cheeky way to point out that someone managed to get Firefox running on a presumably very different OS HaikuOS, before getting it to run on Windows XP, which arguably must be pretty similar to say, Windows 10, when it comes to Win32 APIs.
(But of course, also Windows 10 is a slightly different river to the Windows XP creek.)
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.
Altough with Gopher and gopher://magical.fish (and invidious instances plus Gopher services to search in Youtube and such) most of the web modulo complex logged sites can be avoided if the user wants to read some news without bogging down its machine.
Even http://portal.mozz.us works well against Gemini services such as gemini://gemi.dev to read Ars Technica, The Register, most newspapers...
El Reg: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/vi...
Ars: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/fe...
Wired: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/li...
BBC: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/li...
No videos, but you can read the articles and see the images. Pretty cool for a Pentium 2 for instance.
Anyway, Synchro.net with some NNTP client against FIDO/Dove and the actual Usenet will give and XP user far better talks on retro and current news.
Also, old IRC clients can connect to http://bitlbee.org against public servers and use current protocols such as Discord and modern IRC (TLS) and Jabber, among others.
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.
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.
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.
Apple, Google and Microsoft "modern C++" frameworks also use their own types, instead of the standard library.
See Android NDK, IO Kit / Driver Kit / Metal bindings, C++/WinRT and WIL.