[HN Gopher] Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS
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Firefox Browser Ported to HaikuOS
Author : return_0e
Score : 381 points
Date : 2024-08-11 08:23 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (discuss.haiku-os.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (discuss.haiku-os.org)
| return_0e wrote:
| I can't change the link now but this should be the correct link
| to the post: https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/progress-on-porting-
| firefox/1...
| mdp2021 wrote:
| You mean
|
| https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/progress-on-porting-firefox/1...
|
| I.e.: "... /13493/143#post_143"
| rvnx wrote:
| 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.
| chucky wrote:
| 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.
| squarefoot wrote:
| 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.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Is it though? I think there's scope to improve the laws
| around intellectual property, but I feel like it's a
| stretch to suggest that the lack of BeOS source code "harms
| development".
| rvense wrote:
| An open source desktop OS that was basically usable for
| day-to-day stuff and easy to install, released in 2001? I
| don't think it's hyperbole to say that that would have
| changed the course of computer history.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As someone that has the CD-ROM they shipped on magazines
| as advertising, it was mostly usable, for single users.
|
| And after they lost to NeXT, regarding being acquired,
| not much else happened in regards to OS development.
| squarefoot wrote:
| "Promising OS dies after assets are acquired and put in a
| closet" is still one of the best arguments in favor of
| Open Source.
| klyrs wrote:
| Were you there at the time? Because I was a big computer
| nerd at the time, huffing all the OS/OS fumes I could get
| my grubby little hands on. Windows 3 had already _won_
| the game -- and that was when non-computer-nerds were
| asking their computer-nerd friends for advice and getting
| PCs hand-built by the same. When win95 came out, the non-
| computer-nerds forgot that the command line existed. When
| win98 came out, even computer-nerds were losing interest
| in the command line. Win2k was (imho) the best windows
| operating system ever released. It was extremely stable
| and usable, supported everything but apple software and a
| few bits and bobs that nobody but us nerds cared about,
| and it took _serious effort_ to buy a computer that didn
| 't have it installed by default.
|
| So a year after win2k is released, your selling points
| are "basically usable" ( vs "highly compatible"),
| "free/[nerd-shibboleth]" (vs "hidden in the cost of a
| computer"), and "easy to install" (vs "already
| installed"). I think it's hyperbole to suggest that BeOS
| being open source would have dramatically changed the
| course of computer history. If anything, I think it's
| worth considering what would have happened to the
| already-paltry Linux Desktop experience if BeOS absorbed
| developer attention.
| mook wrote:
| While I agree that Win2k was good, I don't think it was
| quite that popular; The computers you could normally get
| were still Win98/Me until WinXP. The only way you'd have
| gotten Win2k pre-installed was either getting a
| workstation-class machine or unlicensed machines.
| rvense wrote:
| I was kind of there. I ran BeOS for a while for fun some
| years after it had died, in between moving from Macs
| (which I grew up on in the 90's) to BSD and then Linux.
|
| My point was basically what you're saying: BeOS was not
| nearly where Windows was, but it was miles and miles
| ahead of Linux, and it provided a unified graphical OS
| instead of the fragmented Linux base with all its
| duplicated efforts. Now, it's hard to say whether we the
| cascade of attention-deficit teenagers would have united
| behind an MIT/GPL BeOS and succeeded in producing
| something actually usable by people who were interested
| in doing more with their computers than setting up Conky
| and Fluxbox to post screenshots online, but I think the
| landscape might have looked different if it'd been an
| option. BeOS when I used it in 2005 or so was already
| curiosity, an antique, but if you take all the people who
| were working on Haiku (which started as OpenBeOS around
| the end of Be, Inc.), and throw in a handful of the
| people who were working on KDE and XFCE, starting from
| everything BeOS could do in 2001, instead of Linux and
| raw X, what do you have in 2005-6 when Ubuntu started
| picking up steam?
| tialaramex wrote:
| 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.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Early Toshiba smart TVs used Access software. Wasn't pleasant
| to develop for.
| sillywalk wrote:
| Palmsource did open-source Binder, which is still around, and
| widely used.
| tadfisher wrote:
| Thanks for that history. I was under the impression it was
| an Android, Inc. invention, but that it came from BeOS is
| blowing my mind.
| DaoVeles wrote:
| 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.
| popcalc wrote:
| >WiFi support
|
| Works on my old Thinkpads.
| BlackLotus89 wrote:
| WiFi support missing? Afaik it uses *BSD network "drivers" and
| I remember having a wifi dialog/support
|
| 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)
| rcarmo wrote:
| It doesn't support a lot of modern Wi-Fi chipsets. There was
| an entire wave of Broadcom-powered stuff that they weren't
| able to develop for.
| katzinsky wrote:
| That sounds more like licensing issues than "being 20 years
| in the past."
| broodbucket wrote:
| The result is the same for users, regardless of where the
| blame lies.
| drooopy wrote:
| 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.
| Beijinger wrote:
| If you like Snappy, try Bodhi Linux with the Mosksha desktop.
|
| https://www.bodhilinux.com/
| Beijinger wrote:
| Why is this downvoted so badly?
| tetris11 wrote:
| Is there good laptop support? By that I specifically mean, good
| power control management and display brightness control.
| lukan wrote:
| I would seriously doubt that, when even Linux, which has
| broad support now conpared to 15 years ago, struggles with
| that.
|
| I guess certain laptop models, those that the devs use, might
| be allright.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Nope. I run it under QEMU since even the nightlies don't
| support Ryzen power states.
| graemep wrote:
| > The interface is so incredibly snappy
|
| 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?
| desdenova wrote:
| Exactly what I thought as well. UIs get increasingly slower
| as time passes, not snappier. We had snappy UIs in the 80s
| and 90s.
| llm_trw wrote:
| We had bloated UIs in the 80s and 90s, it's just that
| what's come after is so much worse.
|
| Try using the old analog control systems where responses
| are basically instant. It feels like the controls are
| reading your mind.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Mac OS 9 felt pretty darned fast on my 400Mhz iMac G3
| back in 2000. Same for Windows 2000 on my parents' PIII
| 750Mhz Dimension 4100. The only time anything felt slow
| is when a significant amount of data needed to be loaded
| from their hard drives.
|
| Not all machines were like this though, we also had a
| Compaq Presario with some kind of Celeron running 98SE
| and that thing did feel slow more often than not,
| especially after several months of usage with the cruft
| buildup that comes with that.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I don't remember Windows 95 & MS Word 6 being especially
| snappy. I think this is nostalgia.
| viraptor wrote:
| The apps were snappy, but the hardware wasn't. Every
| menu/window opened immediately and without unnecessary
| animation... unless it needed some unexpected processing
| - then you were potentially waiting for the spinning rust
| to handle the swap file.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The UI was minimalistic, but with better hardware we also
| wanted nicer fonts, transitions, wobbly windows (I
| actually miss those) and countless other nice things that
| take time.
|
| Also, it's pointless to open a menu in less time than it
| takes the screen to refresh.
| bmacho wrote:
| > Also, it's pointless to open a menu in less time than
| it takes the screen to refresh.
|
| No, that would be the goal.
| ahoka wrote:
| There's an option to disable animations in Windows, but I
| find it disorienting.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Most desktop have such options, kde and gnome too.for
| instance.
|
| I am pretty sure this is good old resistance to change.
| You would disabled them on all your systems, then force
| yourself to use them that way for a month and I am pretty
| sure that "disorientation" would quickly disappear.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Same for MacOS 6 and 7 on period hardware. It's anything
| but snappy. MacOS 7 on PPC was snappy compared to Windows
| 95 on Intel, and that's it. Amiga was snappy, compared to
| Windows, but I have a working Amiga 600 and it's not a
| great platform even for email.
| prmoustache wrote:
| The interface themselves were snappy when there was no or
| little I/Os. Spinning drives were killing their
| snappiness.
|
| Now we don't have such excuse, at least for non networked
| apps.
| omoikane wrote:
| See for example:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36446933 - Windows
| NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?
| (2023-06-23)
|
| Follow up to the above by the original author:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983 - Fast
| machines, slow machines (2023-06-28)
| szundi wrote:
| Windows Vista gave this feeling retroactively
| ahoka wrote:
| That's just comparing CRT screens with 60Hz LCD panels. Get
| anything 120Hz+ and you will see that modern systems are
| very snappy.
| wao0uuno wrote:
| I strongly disagree with this statement. Every new
| version of Windows feels slower than the last one. Linux
| DEs are either very outdated and very snappy or somewhat
| modern and only barely snappier than Windows. I have zero
| experience with MacOS.
| hodapp wrote:
| No, an extra ~17 msec of delay is not even close to the
| cause of this. The speed difference between older and
| newer UIs is still apparent even at 60 Hz.
| morning-coffee wrote:
| CRT screens were also 60Hz. Look at the latency along all
| steps of the pipeline to get a keypress visible on the
| screen... https://danluu.com/input-lag/
| goosedragons wrote:
| Many were above 60Hz and it depends on resolution. An
| iMac G3 for instance could do 75Hz at 1024x768 or 640x480
| at 117Hz. Someone recently got a CRT at 700Hz too:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zm3lLlaEC8&t=0s
| szszrk wrote:
| 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.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Window Maker still exists. There's an ongoing Wayland port
| / reimagining: https://github.com/phkaeser/wlmaker.
| szszrk wrote:
| That's actually amazing. Can't wait for dockable apps
| support. That could be a killer app for operators - half
| desktop, half monitoring dashboard, haha :) I can already
| see those dockable tiles with Prometheus metrics.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The thing I liked most in the NeXT was the sparing use of
| color. It was part necessity, but also usability. What
| does the color of the window bar being blue communicate?
|
| I am an enthusiast for Gnome's less is more approach.
| ahoka wrote:
| Original NeXT was monochrome, so of course it used no
| significant colors in the UI.
| teddyh wrote:
| The original NeXTcube was 4-bit grayscale, but there was
| a graphics card available which supported 24-bit colour.
| The later NeXTstations supported 12-bit colours without
| any additional hardware.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > The thing i miss most from that time is Window Maker.
|
| I use WindowMaker as a daily driver. Still.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| 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.
| llm_trw wrote:
| 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.
| rcarmo wrote:
| And we never really got any of them working, so I would
| contest that. Many years ago, I asked about Pi 2 support on
| the Haiku forums and there was a lot of ill will towards
| Broadcom closed binaries. I pointed at the Plan9 port and a
| couple more examples and nothing happened.
|
| I tried the same thing several times with the Pi 3 and the
| Pi 4, and someone more vocally pointed towards RISC-V. Some
| four years later, there is a somewhat working RISC-V port,
| but in the meantime there is still no working ARM port of
| any real use.
|
| On the whole, I was not overly impressed with the Haiku OS
| community where it regards exploring widely popular
| platforms that, despite having some challenges, would
| provide them with a larger audience. It's their call, but
| as an original BeOS user (and who can actually spot the Be
| Book from my couch as I'm typing this) and someone who's
| spent the past two years delving into the Rockchip
| ecosystem, I'm quite saddened by the way things went. It's
| not as if they lacked other ARM options, they just a)
| didn't have the resources and b) were perhaps a tad too
| opinionated.
| waddlesplash wrote:
| The RISC-V port was done almost entirely by one developer
| who took an interest in it. It wasn't as though the
| project got together and decided to prioritize RISC-V
| over ARM; it was just that someone did a port, and then
| it got (mostly) upstreamed. Nobody has taken an
| equivalent interest in ARM, in large part because, well,
| the developers are all running x86 machines as you might
| expect, so that's what Haiku gets developed on. If
| someone comes along (or one of the existing developers
| takes interest) in working on the ARM port more, we will
| hardly reject the patches!
| coolcoder613 wrote:
| Quite a lot of people use Haiku bare metal, and wifi support
| absolutely _is_ present.
| hodapp wrote:
| Are you one of them? I am curious what the experience is
| like trying to use it as anything like a daily system.
| coolcoder613 wrote:
| I am, although I do not use it as a daily driver, I have
| bare metal installs on two different computers. In my
| experience, it is very snappy, and always fast, except
| for some browsers, and wifi support for my specific wifi
| cards is there, and works fine, although not perfectly.
| In regard to using it as a daily system, browser-wise,
| especially since Firefox has been ported, it works well
| enough. Webmail can be used fairly easily, but most of
| the email clients available only support regular pop/imap
| authentication, and not oauth. But then, whether you can
| daily drive it depends on your specific use cases and
| hardware.
| smallstepforman wrote:
| Haiku in 3 x64 boxes, native with wifi
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ0Ijc5n6Y4
| smallstepforman wrote:
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| There is an alternative universe where Be is acquired, BeOS
| turns into MacOS, C++ wins the desktop wars, and POSIX on the
| desktop never makes it.
|
| However in this universe Steve Jobs never rejoins Apple, and
| most likely it closes doors a couple of years after Be's
| acquisition.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| 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...
| pjmlp wrote:
| Given the famous keynote where he announced killing OpenDoc
| and other efforts, I am not so sure about that, regarding
| scrapping the hybrid BeOS platform.
| ksp-atlas wrote:
| I ran Haiku on a laptop and the Wi-Fi worked just fine
| undersuit wrote:
| Maybe it's because setting up a Wifi connection is 20 years
| old.
| Springtime wrote:
| 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Firefox ported to HaikuOS, _before_ it 's ported to Windows XP.
| :-)
|
| (If you need a modern browser on XP, in the meantime try the
| Chrome port:
|
| https://win32subsystem.live/supermium/ )
| desdenova wrote:
| Firefox worked on XP when it wasn't dead yet. There's no reason
| to port newer versions to a system that's no longer maintained.
| aflag wrote:
| Why are you using windows xp?
| mouse_ wrote:
| Not him but I list my own personal motivations here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40528117
| aflag wrote:
| Why not Linux and play diablo 2 with wine? Last time I
| tried it worked great.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| It amuses me.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| "before it's ported to Windows XP"
|
| 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)
| mouse_ wrote:
| You can run an up to date port of Chrome on XP, 2000 soon as
| well. They're also finishing up hardware acceleration support
| for the d3d9 backend.
|
| https://github.com/win32ss/supermium
| actionfromafar wrote:
| 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.)
| Borg3 wrote:
| Its not that easy. Win32 API is not static, in evolves.
| While yes, it can provide great backward compat, new stuff
| is introduced ever new OS release (or Win10 update), so its
| pretty much easy to destroy portability to older version.
| To keep portability, you must target lowest API version you
| want, and keep it using like this.
| hexagonwin wrote:
| there's mypal68 and latest runs with ocapi (though it's way too
| hacky tbh)
| throwme_123 wrote:
| Funny to see the main question in the forum is "How stable is
| it?" and does it crash less than other options.
|
| 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.
| tmikaeld wrote:
| "Modern tech" often require significant corporate backing
| and/or significant amount of funds. I'm amazed that Haiku OS is
| still going considering it's surviving on donations.
| tialaramex wrote:
| > since huge parts of Haiku are written in C++
|
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Some things never change, regardless of the modern C++
| discussions.
|
| 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.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| wtf? Now I am switching! :-) Oh, I get it "The current status is
| that no text can be shown due to some rendering issues,so it is
| not usable at all" (nine days ago). Still, if you got Firefox you
| are ready for mainstream adoption.
| coolcoder613 wrote:
| No, that was nine days ago. If you look at the most recent
| screenshots you can see that text rendering is working fine.
| barbs wrote:
| Any word on when the next version is coming out? Looks like the
| latest version (R1/beta4) was released in December 2022.
| coolcoder613 wrote:
| In a couple weeks.
| haunter wrote:
| 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.
| desdenova wrote:
| Kolibri also exists, not sure how alive it is nowadays, though.
| viraptor wrote:
| There's also FreeRTOS if you include microprocessors.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I believe Contiki is one. It runs on pretty much anything.
| katzinsky wrote:
| Micropython is really neat as an embedded OS. I don't think
| there's a PC target right now though.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| SkyOS: https://youtu.be/4LOCyT12X0Y
| hodapp wrote:
| I don't think it is maintained anymore, but add AtheOS/Syllable
| to the list.
| smallstepforman wrote:
| 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.
| cdman wrote:
| I guess Firebug was the original "developer tools":
| https://getfirebug.com/
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It was an amazing revolution that made complex app
| development of JS based front ends finally tolerable.
| pjmlp wrote:
| IE already had debugging tools, however they had to be
| installed either via Visual Studio or Office Developer
| Tools.
| unilynx wrote:
| Also they barely worked for anything non trivial, let
| alone what we now call SPAs
| biglyburrito wrote:
| 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.
| simcop2387 wrote:
| 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.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| 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.
| guessbest wrote:
| 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.
| simcop2387 wrote:
| Both Phoenix and Firebird were over the naming and
| trademark clashes:
|
| For firebird, https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-
| industry/mozilla-holds-fire-i... and
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozillas-
| fir... in this case it was AOL Time Warner that owned the
| Firebird trademark for the database.
|
| 2) For Phoenix, https://web.archive.org/web/20070914035447/
| http://www.ibphoe... the main reporting on it seems to be
| lost but wikipedia still backs it up
| asadotzler wrote:
| Phoenix was because of a challenge from Phoenix
| Technologies, the BIOS maker. Firefox was because of
| concerns about stomping on a small OSS project, the
| Firebird Database. I was responsible for all of this at
| Mozilla. Happy to answer any questions.
| asadotzler wrote:
| No.
|
| Phoenix Technologies, the BIOS maker sent me an email
| telling us they made a BIOS web browser and our name would
| confuse things. Under advice from our legal support, we
| agreed to change the name.
|
| We changed to Firebird and the OSS database project bombed
| my inbox (and Mitchell's too) for a week with hundreds of
| nastygrams and though we were in the clear on TM, we didn't
| want to stomp on the little OSS project so we changed
| again.
|
| I was at the whiteboard when Jason Kersey of mozBin,
| mozillaZine, and later Chrome fame came up with Firefox. We
| had two columns of names, forces of nature and animals and
| were pairing them up.
| dataf3l wrote:
| was waterduck considered?
| blackenedgem wrote:
| Stormcow
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| 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.
| Uvix wrote:
| There were some sites requiring IE6 but not that many, and
| the improvements like tabs were enough for people switch to
| Firefox where they could.
|
| Unfortunately Mozilla's refusal to implement process-per-
| tab, combined with Flash's instability, let Chrome eat
| their lunch.
| prmoustache wrote:
| chrome eat their lunch for only one reason: everytime you
| were doing a google search, google literally begged
| people to download their browser while half of the
| smartphone were coming with google chrome by default.
|
| In the head of people google and chrome slowly became a
| synonym of internet the same way the ie icon used to be
| in the previous decade.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Beware of simplistic reasoning.
|
| What you mention was certainly a major reason, but not
| the only one. Another one was that Chrome was simply a
| better browser for many years for normal users (mainly
| because of its performance).
| kryptiskt wrote:
| Also, Google paid a ton of money to bundle the Chrome
| installer with Flash and Adobe Acrobat downloads.
| Uvix wrote:
| They're doing that _now_ (and for the last several
| years). I don 't remember them doing that back when
| Chrome overtook Firefox in 2012, though...
| spookie wrote:
| Well, that hegemony happened by the end of the Netscape
| days, which prompted the infamous United States v.
| Microsoft Corp. case.
| llm_trw wrote:
| We're getting the United States v. Google case so
| hopefully history doesn't repeat.
| usrnm wrote:
| I actually hope that history does repeat itself, and
| google gets severely punished
| lightedman wrote:
| If history does repeat itself, the punishment wont be
| very large, despite guilty judgment. Microsoft was found
| to have engaged in monopolistic practices, but was still
| given a relative slap on the wrist instead of outright
| broken up.
| rvense wrote:
| And Firefox got to where it was at its peak by being
| better than IE, not because of any pressure from
| political institutions. I think there are many parallel
| universes where Microsoft does in fact own the web.
| miohtama wrote:
| Microsoft did not get severely punished for bundling the
| IE.
|
| Google was force feeding Chrome to everyone at
| google.com.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Well, it would appear that Google will be forced to stop
| paying companies to make Google the default search. This
| is actually kind of a death for Mozilla as that's where
| most of their money comes from.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As someone doing Web development during 1999 - 2002, on a
| dotcom startup, there were enough people using Mozzilla
| browsers.
| mrinfinitiesx wrote:
| Yeah. We were all sick of loading a website with Internet
| Explorer and getting 1930201 hot toolbars, blinking
| 'desktop buddies' and 32 new system tray icons with
| programs running.
|
| Phoenix saved us.
| cgh wrote:
| Konqueror says hello. I'm only half kidding, it was
| actually somewhat capable and I used it a lot. For those
| who don't know, its legacy was khtml, famously forked
| into WebKit and Blink.
| tialaramex wrote:
| At the turn of the century, Mozilla are trying to ship a
| web browser (also to be called Mozilla) based on the work
| they've got from Netscape. They shipped a series of "M"
| numbered (ie milestone) releases, which preview what we
| today think about as normal dynamic HTML but at the time
| it commonly just crashes the entire browser.
|
| Like, a colleague was working on code that would reach
| into the DOM and just tweak the CSS for a bunch of items,
| delete other items, move things around, and maybe 40% of
| the time it would work as intended, and 60% of the time,
| boom, dead browser, segmentation fault.
|
| React, where it's just normal for Javascript to rewrite
| the entire page in response to a keystroke, would have
| been completely unthinkable, there's no chance you could
| fill out an entire form before the browser crashed if you
| do that.
| pjmlp wrote:
| React only became possible due to JavaScript JITs being
| made available, almost a decade later.
|
| We are talking about V8 being released in 2008, Chackra
| in 2011, and SpiderMonkey in 2009.
|
| With GCs that can handle the amount of stuff that React
| throws away on each update.
| Lammy wrote:
| > They shipped a series of "M" numbered (ie milestone)
| releases
|
| Relevant: "A Visual Browser History, from Netscape 4 to
| Mozilla Firefox"
| https://www.andrewturnbull.net/mozilla/history.html
| Vinnl wrote:
| I wonder how true that is in absolute numbers, given how many
| more people are online (/exist) now.
| MattTheRealOne wrote:
| According to Mozilla's own numbers, Firefox Monthly Active
| Users have been trending down for years and are currently
| sitting at around 155 million.
|
| Source: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
| Hammershaft wrote:
| If you switch from 'Worldwide' to 'United States' Firefox
| has shed 1/3 of its MAU in the last 5 years, much worse
| then I thought.
| fifilura wrote:
| Around that time, and probably for that reason, Opera was
| ported to BeOS.
|
| https://www.wired.com/1998/08/opera-browses-beos/
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| From ChatGPT
|
| *BeOS whispers,* *From its ashes, Phoenix soars,* *Firefox
| finds home.*
| kstenerud wrote:
| Mozilla
|
| Through BeOS becomes
|
| Firefox
| wwweston wrote:
| From ash to famed flame
|
| wings then fox feet now return
|
| whence they were kindled
| asadotzler wrote:
| Not really accurate. I was there.
|
| 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.
| smallstepforman wrote:
| Here is a more recent screenshot.
|
| https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/progress-on-porting-firefox/1...
| pornel wrote:
| This means Rust has also been ported to HaikuOS. Nice!
| donatj wrote:
| The question of "Is it more stable than other browsers" being "It
| can't render text" is somewhat hilarious.
|
| 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.
| WesSouza wrote:
| Incoming MJD and Action Retro videos
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| ... on a heavily modded BeBox that's cursed.
| DaoVeles wrote:
| Is the curse that it is running 13th or 14th Gen Intel core
| processor.
| sillywalk wrote:
| The Blinkenlights are _also_ cursed.
| jijojohnxx wrote:
| Great read. Thoughts on real-world impact?
| vuna wrote:
| They didn't port it, but the first one (or rather the second one,
| but it doesn't matter) once we launched some new version via
| Wayland. So far, everything has not been tested enough and there
| are no implementations of different platform code, as a result of
| which it often crashes. This is still a draft port, not suitable
| for the average user. Someone wrote an article much ahead of
| time.
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