Comments on: Haiku developers want native browser

By: chicas en tanga

chicas en tanga — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 23:29:52 +0000

I should email you about it.

By: Pat

Pat — Mon, 18 May 2009 04:44:39 +0000

What about NetSurf? The BeOS/Haiku binary for version 2.0 was released April 25th. It works great and has a very small memory footprint (6M).

By: Jacob

Jacob — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:01:48 +0000

Hear hear. Good riddance to Firefox. If we can get a Webkit browser, I’d use it any day based upon rendering speed, snapyness, and I’m sure the code base is also so that a lot more Haiku contributions could go in.

- What about Flash however?

By: mario

mario — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:15:57 +0000

I agree about FireFox 3: it really brought more grief than browsing joy to me. Maybe there are people who like it, but for the most part, people are either indifferent to it or hate it vs. Firefox 2.

By: Ryan Leavengood

Ryan Leavengood — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:41:38 +0000

I understand your frustration but as Stephan B says getting a working Firefox is no easy task either, and in my opinion the direction Firefox 3 has taken is not the kind of browser I would want to use on Haiku. Though I would not complain if others made a nice port of it, and I might even help on that one day.

But believe it or not, right now I think the fastest way to get a nice, fast, modern browser on Haiku is to develop a native one using WebKit. It won’t be trivial, but it certainly isn’t as difficult as the work done to get Haiku to where it is now.

I also think the code will be much more accessible and easier to develop on than Firefox. I intend to make it that way because that is the kind of code I want to work with.

By: Ryan Leavengood

Ryan Leavengood — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:37:34 +0000

Actually the Syllable port of WebKit provided a lot of ideas for my Haiku port, and I have certainly taken a look at ABrowse. The code is quite simple and could possibly serve as a base for a Haiku browser, but I think it makes more sense to do a cleanroom browser using some of the best ideas now in the various mainstream browsers.

Plus the Syllable API is different enough to the Haiku/BeOS API to make porting ABrowse more trouble than it is worth.

By: Stephen B.

Stephen B. — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:48:37 +0000

The Firefox port has largely stalled in the 2.x series. Not due to any lack of effort on the part of BeZilla devs, but because newer versions have dependencies that either aren’t present on Haiku yet, or aren’t yet mature on Haiku (Cairo, the DB engine used for storing user data in newer versions, etc).

I also don’t think that developing a native browser will have any effect on the speed of Haiku’s overall development. No one appears to be suggesting that dev. of a native browser should take priority over more critical parts of Haiku development.