There is an old version of Thunderbird available (called MailNews because it’s not an official Mozilla supported product, and trademark protections apply). If you use Thunderbird in Zeta, this should be pretty much the same except for the branding.
You can install and run hblock, it will set up a /etc/hosts file blocking quite a lot of things. It does 99% of the job. Web browser extensions can go a little further as they will reformat the pages a bit to not leave blank spaces where ads “should” be. And hblock probably won’t succeed with things such as Youtube crazy anti-blocker javascript.
Thanks for the nudge, well it would be one of many use cases actually.
SEN embraces the inherently data-centric design of BeOS/Haiku and uses attributes for modeling relations that are navigable and manipulable in Tracker and CLI.
One of my personal use cases I am working on is to keep my sources (books, papers,…) on a BFS volume and extract metadata into attributes.
So I can write notes on specific papers, books and articles, and semantically link them to the source files. As a nifty extra, I can simply add relation properties as attributes to point to a specific page or section, or a specific range in the text for quotes.
When working with these sources, I can reference them by building relations that I can then put anywhere as a link using an application specific sen:// protocol. Clicking on this link would quickly have SEN server intercept and resolve the relation, then continue to open the target file and navigating to the location specified in the relation properties.
As for the writing, you could use any markdown editor and manually add those links, or there might me a plugin, and later a native editor with some twists and unique features.
I am making serious progress but it’s not there just yet… so keep watching the SEN Substack blog for the most up to date info, and the SEN Twitter/X account for quick blurbs.
I installed it - from git, there isn’t a haiku port, but all it seems to need is to change /etc to /boot/system/settings/network.
It’s immensely easier to read my (used-to-be) local newspaper online, without all the circus of ads loading. I don’t normally have this problem so much with other browsers, somehow they cope with it, but if this fixes it, that’s great.
Unfortunately, it comes at a fairly severe cost, as somewhere among the half million blocked addresses is one that seems to be involved in authentication/authorization for the site. So authentication is broken. That’s just what turned up in the first few minutes. hblock: crude, but effective – too effective.
Not exactly a default, it’s just the first tab. Click on the second tab and you will find hundreds of apps that are not “Featured”. If you run your search in the second tab you will find it.
The disadvantage is that you have to wade through a lot of libraries to find applications on that second tab, though at least you can switch off seeing _devel and _src packages in the Show menu. The command-line is easier and faster:
pkgman search hblock
But your comment raises valid issues for the usability of the HaikuDepot app. Just yesterday I saw a YouTube video of a newbie running HaikuDepot and he never found that second tab, App visibility might be better if those two tabs’ positions were reversed.
Maybe the Show menu could also switch off all lib*** packages in the future (with an exception for LibreOffice )?
Who do I have to bribe to get an app on the Featured tab anyway?
Sure, it’s the first tab. Now that I switched to the 2nd tab, that’s how HaikuDepot comes up, but the first time ever, it comes up on the 1st tab. The word we use for this is “default.”
It’s a user interface design problem. The motive for a featured applications page is fairly obvious, but when you search for something that’s there to be found, the application simply should show it to you. Not only if you checked the right boxes.
If searches return too much junk that a user wouldn’t normally be interested in, that’s another unresolved problem.
The Featured list can’t really contain thousands of items (more than 3000, IIRC), in the first place.
I would suggest limiting it to 20 maybe 30 entries and splitting this tab into the featured list itself and a “browse by category” immediately below it while keeping the “All packages”.
Thing is, there seems to be no system to it. I’m looking at it right now. It contains things like Pe and Vision, which are part of a standard installation. Why? The punter already has that app, there’s no point in “featuring” it.
Gimp, LibreOffice, Calligra, sure, though I would like to see some extra love given to native apps. But DjvuViewer? I have literally never come across a djvu file, although I’m told they were big in Japan thirty years ago. Even the Internet Archive has dropped support for it. Sure, we have it, might as well keep it, but what makes it worthy of being “featured”?
Perhaps we could have a list of fifty packages voted on by the community, but only show half of them. Then once a week, one drops off the list and a new one gets rotated in. From time to time, we revisit the larger list. That should keep the Featured list vibrant.
Every week seems too much to me. Maybe quarterly? I would also review the categories and prevent the libraries from being shown by default as @michel suggested.
Lastly, what about an annual award for native apps in each category?
Many amazing ports get made on a near weekly basis. It would leave out alot of new software for 4 whole months. However I do agree that weekly seems a bit too often (for me atleast).
I would like to add to the discussion that the current categories on Haiku depot are a little messy. Fonts is empty despite there being many. I still can’t figure out why. Some have no point existing like audio since most software in that category also acts for video. Video & Audio would make more sense to me atleast. Education is near empty, graphics is filled with fonts and the list goes on. I really believe that a new categorisation effort must happen.
Doesn’t this appear as a reply but it’s to Nexus-6
For thirty years, I worked at an organization where the rule was “Feel free to come up with bright ideas, but be prepared to do the actual job.” Also known as the “Me and my big mouth” rule.
That is actually in accordance with the current HDS rules Somebody decided, long ago that fonts should fall under Graphics. Don’t know who, don’t know why,
But a package can have up to three categories, so all it would take is for someone to dig in there and add the fonts to the Fonts category manually, one by one. Call it a day’s work.
A long time ago, there was no “Fonts” category, because there were only a handful of font packages, mainly the ones coming with Haiku. We expected that people would just get their zipped fonts, unpack and use them. Instead more and more font packages arrived, and they sure are convenient.
Therefore we added a “Fonts” category a while ago. I already adjusted all their categories, the CSV has yet to be uploaded at HDS by the admin team. See #18953 (Category "Fonts" is empty in Raktár (aka HaikuDepot) - despite I installed some dozens with pkgman) – Haiku
I didn’t want to shanghai you into it, but if you’re interested, subscribe to the extremely low-traffic HDS mailing list at FreeLists / HaikuDepot Web App Development and announce your willingness to maintain the featured-package/category lists. Then hope the admin team sees it…
Maybe the Show menu could also switch off all 
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