Some history about Firefox and BeOS. Before Firefox, there was Mozilla, which had a BeOS port (called Bezilla). Bezilla was bloated and slow. So the BeOS community tried to make a stripped version of Mozilla with only the browser (minus all the bloat). This project became an inspiration to do the same for Mozilla, and that product became Firebug (or something similar - edit phoenix, then firebird), which due to trademark conflicts got renamed to Firefox that we all know today. So in a round-a-bout way, we have come full circle after 20 years, Firefox is finally ported to the platform that inspired its creation.
Kind of poetic. We should write a 3-5-3 Haiku about this journey.
It wasn't Firebug, that was a developer tool extension. It was first Phoenix which hit trademark issues, and then Firebird which hit trademark issues, which then became Firefox.
From what I remember, Firebird was more related to the database open source project which was a fork of InterBase, so at that time it was relatively well known due to its roots with IB.
Maybe it hit trademark issues, but the reason I remember from slashdot was that phoenix was already a semi-popular open source project in the debian repository, so firefox had to be named from phoenix to mozilla-phoenix. But firefox at the time still named phoenix just ran so much better on windows than linux, it was funny.
With a fraction of the userbase it had 20 years ago, thanks to everyone that keeps shipping Chrome with their applications, testing only with Chrome developer tools, and so on.
Anyway, congratulations to anyone involved in the port.
Wouldn't 20 years ago have less people using Mozilla/Firefox since everyone was still using IE6? I remember around that time i was still encountering several (public, not internal) sites that refused to work with anything that wasn't IE6.
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.
Firebug was amazing and one of the reasons I started doing front-end development again, after swearing it off because IE 5.x made it such a frustrating experience.
> Some history about Firefox and BeOS. Before Firefox, there was Mozilla, which had a BeOS port (called Bezilla). Bezilla was bloated and slow. So the BeOS community tried to make a stripped version of Mozilla with only the browser (minus all the bloat). This project became an inspiration to do the same for Mozilla...
I have said it before, Haiku feels like it is simultaneously 20 years in the future and 20 years in the past. The interface is so incredibly snappy but there is a lot of basics missing such as WiFi support.
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.
I absolutely adore the way that HaikuOS looks and feels. It's like a direct evolution of the classic Mac OS UI. So incredibly snappy and responsive and with minimal visual clutter. I keep an old thinkpad around with Haiku just for when I need to do word processing with no distractions.
Future comes in at point were we actually circle back. "Black is always in fashion" kind of thing.
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 have 3 x64 boxes with 3 different wifi chipsets that work with no issues. The only chipset that doesnt work for me is the bm4360 chips used in Apple hardware. A 7$ usb wifi dongle solves that problem.
How would you use WiFi on Haiku if it were there? I thought people mostly use Haiku inside VMs like VirtualBox so network connection goes through an emulated fiber.
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.
The raspberry pie is a very odd computer which is hard to develop for. There are much better targets that are both simpler to develop for, cheaper, and easily available.
What would be interesting is if AppleBe still ends up merging with NeXT a few years later, and Jobs doesn’t immediately scrap the hybrid BeOS platform immediately…
I had decent success with it on an 11th-gen Framework 13. Power management was finicky, but it was also finicky under OpenBSD, which makes me think it was a hardware or firmware issue. I haven't tried it since upgrading to the latest firmware, so maybe the combination of that plus whatever bugfixes have happened in the last couple years might've improved things.
Beautiful to see such passion and great execution, especially for 20 years in a row.
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.
I think it's more likely the original BeOS source code contains proprietary code licensed from third-parties, which means someone would have to spend significant effort on figuring out what can and cannot be released.
Much worse, it's likely the BeOS code includes a bunch of unlicensed stuff. Be had been caught more than once "accidentally" including GPL'd code in their proprietary OS back when they existed. I doubt it's just GPL code that "accidentally" gets copy pasted into a codebase like that. If somebody has the code (e.g. from a previous job) it's getting pasted in "Just temporarily" and never being removed because there are always higher priorities.
Just another proof that copyright laws must be heavily reformed asap because they continue to harm development also in cases where any reason of protecting some company's IP is long gone.
Palm bought BeOS back in the day, but they didn't do anything with it. It was spun out with the PalmOS into Palmsource when Palm went to other OSes, so it didn't follow the rest of Palm into HP (and then LG). Palmsource was then swallowed by a Japanese company called Access, which was and apparently still is making a browser for embedded applications called Netfront.
> 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
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.
That made me think how many non-Unix FOSS operating systems are out there? Haiku, FreeDOS, Genode, ReactOS, Plan9, AROS, and RISC OS comes to my mind quickly.
Arduino (yes I know it isn't really an OS, but still), Zephyr, Oberon, Active Oberon, Inferno, mBed, Android and Chrome OS (Linux kernel isn't really exposed to userspace as in an UNIX system), Azure RTOS.
I seem to recall trying Firefox on HaikuOS circa ~2011, though searching around now it seems it was based on an outdated version at the time. Kudos for a modern port project.
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)
Are you telling me Windows XP is out of support? When did this happen?! :-D
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.)
Windows XP machines should not be connected to a network because they no longer receive security patches. They will get hacked if they are connected to a network (and please remember that not every piece of malware is obvious, some malware is stealthy, and just steal information from the hacked machine).
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.
And Retrozilla with the MSFN hacks to state TLS 1.3 at about:config
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...
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.
Readit News
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
https://www.wired.com/1998/08/opera-browses-beos/
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
Dead Comment
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.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ0Ijc5n6Y4
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.
https://www.bodhilinux.com/
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.
Deleted Comment
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:
https://win32subsystem.live/supermium/ )
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.)
https://github.com/win32ss/supermium
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.