Nirvana – New KHTML-Based Browser
Stephen B. - June 23rd, 2006
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Many thanks to mikesum for sending in word of a new KHTML-based web browser for BeOS. Dubbed Nirvana, the project appears to be largely in the planning stages at the moment. Despite the simplicity of KHTML (relative to something like Gecko), it sounds as if they have quite a lot of work to do:
Anyone who reads this site regularly will probably expect me to make one of two bad jokes right about now: a “get KWQing” pun, or a joke about the old Mac error quack. I can’t really think of anything right now, however, so I’ll just take well-established literary cop-out of leaving it to the reader’s imagination.
Hot on the heels of a “semi-native” SeaMonkey build, a new build of Firefox has popped on on BeBits featuring “partial native-mode support”. While the native mode patches (courtesy of Sergei “fyysik” Dolgov) don’t magically turn Firefox into a true native BeOS app, they do help it behave much more like one – Firefox can now handle drag-n-dropped files, open links in EMail, act as the default app for HTML files, etc. A full description of the changes has been posted on BeZilla.org. Speaking of the BeZilla.org site, there have been some interesting recent developments there as well. Jorge “koki” Mare has outlined the recent / upcoming changes in a post on the BeZilla Blog. The site now sports a spiffy, more Mozilla.org-esque theme, and koki is working on a BeZilla.org blog for developers (to replace the current LiveJournal).
Rudolf Cornelissen, developer of the Haiku nVidia driver (and nVida 3d driver, and Haiku Matrox driver, and more other projects than I can count), has posted on his blog that he plans to take a hiatus from computers and BeOS-related development (first reported by HaikuNews and IsComputerOn). He still plans to finish up a few bits and pieces of existing projects, and perform regular maintenance on some of the video drivers he’s written – and the post also mentions that he would eventually like to to hand those projects over to other maintainers. There aren’t many folks who can claim to have put as much time and effort into BeOS-related development as Rudolf can, and I think that the BeOS community is unanimous in offering their thanks and wishing him the best of luck in re-discovering life away from the computer. BeOS-related news will seem much more boring without the weekly “new-cool-thing-from-Rudolf.”
Kian Duffy of HaikuNews has spotted a SVN checkin made by Fran??ois Revol (mmu_man) which enables horizontal sliding of window title tabs in Haiku. “Slidey tabs” were always one of my favourite little touches from R4.5/R5 (and pretty much indispensable for heavy BeMail users), it’s great to see the feature make its way into Haiku.
A sad story has been posted on HaikuNews, ZetaNews.com has apparently shut down. The site was originally the brainchild of Frans Van Nipsen (of Xentronix fame), and was later handed over to other editors such as the_leander. ZetaNews had been a fixture in the ZETA / BeOS community for nearly three years and it will be missed from my daily reading list.
A new Weekly Haiku update has been posted, showing off the break-neck pace of Haiku development. After some work, the networking kit is now able to respond to pings from remote machines; a few more R5 backwards-compatibility features have been added (in order to get BeIDE running); Haiku Images now include the hmulti audio driver and the Background preferences app as a Tracker add-on; the Workspaces app now supports switching workspaces and moving applications between workspaces; and lastly there’s a neat screenshot showing Quake 2 running under Haiku.
The second episode of the Haiku Podcast has been online for a little while now (reported by ICO), produced and hosted by Phil Greenway (sikosis). In the newest episode he interviews Michael Phipps, the Haiku project leader; Michael touches on many interesting topics in the interview, including HaikuBounties and the migration to the FreeBSD networking stack. Later on in the podcast, sikosis announces BePodder as the latest application of the month and there’s also a summary of some of the latest BeOS / Haiku-related news.
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