That is not what Pulkomandy said.
Web+ is a native application, and will eventually work better and do more than any ported application.
In some aspect, it already does. Try to make another browser, and all it’s dependencies, fit on an iso image… And since not everyone has network access on boot, you need one, at least to read the user guide.
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I don’t think it’s a good idea to switch to a non-native browser as default.
It’s nice that so many choices are available nowadays and I personally like playing around with them sometimes,or trying to get newer Ladybird versions to work.
But none of them use native features,they don’t integrate with the special features and design philosophy of Haiku.
Yes,Qt application can look almost like native,but they aren’t,and if we shipped a Qt-based browser as default browser,we’d also have to ship the whole Qt library with Haiku itself.
Currently,we already use WebKit which is developed by many paid workers at Apple to do the hard work and only have to care about the Haiku-specific integration and the browser user interface.
Yes,it’s a lot of work,but it gives us better integration than any alternative would,and the possibility to make own choices how our browser should be.
And Ladybird is still a rather fresh project that has issues with some websites,while WebKit is a longstanding production-ready project.
The switch to WebKit2 (which will hopefully happen soon) will give us better performance (multithreading…) and some nice new APIs we can make use of (adblocking,to name the most important),but WebPositive has already improved a lot since I first tried Haiku.
By the way,I just tried building Ladybird on Haiku again,it needed a few additional patches but otherwise still works:
As with so many of the things we keep discussing over on these threads (security etc) the counterfactual is on Genode/Sculpt. THe first thing many of us try is the Falkon browser. Users see a number of downloads as it fetches and installs Qt and the browser, making quite a delay before the window opens. A lightweight browser - such as what we have - would be nice in that instance. Perhaps Genode should port WebPositive? Assuming they don’t do things their own way and give us a Gemini browser for basic docs, etc!
I don’t mean to put down the arguments that we need a browser to read startup documents. Quite true, but not even the whole story. After all, we could just ship the documentation in markdown.
Having our own browser is a point of pride. We are not just a neutral platform on which we can run stuff ported from elsewhere. Sure, we use a common webkit backend. But what faces the new user is uniquely Haiku.
This is going to be more and more important. We now have a way to identify native apps in the depot. We are slowly getting more and better native apps. And while nobody is planning a jihad against ports, native apps must be the drawcard, a reason to install Haiku rather than the linux flavour-of-the-month.
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We could if we had a native markdown viewer
I’m a bit confused why we’d want to switch to a worse markup language when we already have html… the docs already exist in html and work fine, and it’s not really any more maintenance effort 
also we already ship man, and info, and html docs… so that is already 3 seperate interfaces.. markdown would be a 4th… we should maybe investigate how to get info and man documentation available via html aswell… the man ↔ html conversion git uses is pretty suboptimal, we can probably do better with translators
I think that is generally what is confusing windows users when they come to open source. They come from somewhere the doc is minimalist but handy. On linux distros, for example, there are too many docs formats and docs can be located everywhere. Sometimes the doc you’re looking for is only in the source tree and that’s when you don’t end up looking in source files comments.
Hopefully, Haiku doesn’t suffer much of that but having an unique interface would be great. Docs are an help, as such they should always be easy to find.
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@nephele, my friend, you really do take people too literally some times
Markdown is readable as text. That was the whole point of creating it.
Anyway, that was not a formal policy proposal. It was just a way to say that there are alternatives if space in the distro image was really a crisis. It is not a crisis, and we don’t need to do it. But having a browser, the central, defining piece of software of this period, of our own is just an important thing in its own right.