There’s not a lot of talk about running Firefox on Haiku,
not sure what the present ‘official’ browser is.
Mostly what I can piece together is stuff people have tried over the
last couple of years.
I can confirm that you can get it going, although it is fairly painful to use. There is little to no mouse support depending on how bad it flakes out while you are using it, so you have to be a real firefox keyboard guru and it is wretchedly slow at times but it crashes due to page content far less often than the available Opera browser and doesn’t disable itself after 30 days. Still the mouse issues make it fairly unpleasant for daily use.
I’d post a screenshot but it’s not really any different than the one
umccullough posted on flickr.
As far as I understand it, the primary browser will be based on Webkit. But I could be wrong.
And due to a few things, (primarily 2.0.X.X’s end-of-life) I would not suggest porting over Bon Echo… If anything, it would be best if those here interested in Gecko/Firefox/SeaMonkey… I would keep an eye on the moving target that is Mozilla 2.0 or work on porting 3.0.
Firefox will be the best browser we have in the 1.0 timeframe I imagine. Although the WebKit port has made great progress, there is still a lot of work to do to get that finished up, and then another job entirely to actually write a browser “shell” around the webkit core. There is no “official” browser.
Firefox is at least proven on BeOS and works pretty well. Once the input bugs are sorted it will be the best browser on Haiku by some distance for the foreseeable future.
FF 3 involves rather more work, as it has dropped the native graphics code in favour of using “cross-platform” libraries, that aren’t ported to Haiku/BeOS yet. The FF 2 series are good browsers though.
I have a lot of little things I need to do at the moment, but when I get around to updating my Haiku install I intend to look into the remaining issues with Firefox.
I suspect that once Haiku is actually stable enough to do native development on - Firefox (or any Haiku bugs that cause problems with it) will be fixed fairly quickly.
Furthermore, IIRC - quite a few of the FF 3 issues are related to BeOS’ use of an old 2.x gcc compiler - whereas Haiku and software running on it can be built with gcc4 in the future. This may also allow much easier porting of the FF 3 dependencies (and code) once Haiku is stable.
We havn’t had any problems before in fixing the gcc4 incompabilities. Gcc4 seems to be less strict than gcc2.95 and also automatically sets inner classes as friends, other than that there was no biggies. I stopped working on trunk though when they switched on Cairo.
If someone where to fix Cairo for BeOS, I think we could get back in working order quite soon.
