HaikuOS Gets Firefox Port, with a Look into Its History and Design
TapTechNews August 13th news, according to the Haiku forum, currently, developer X512 has brought a ported version of the Firefox web browser to HaikuOS, with the series version number being v128, one version behind the latest stable version v129.
It is known that the native browser WebPositive that comes with HaikuOS performs poorly, so there are developers continuously porting other mainstream browsers. However, currently, this ported version of the Firefox web browser is still in the early stage and there is no downloadable software package. Interested users need to compile it themselves.
TapTechNews note: Haiku is a very legendary operating system. The predecessor of this system, BeOS, was almost selected by Steve Jobs to become the macOS system that we are familiar with now.
In 1990, Jean-Louse Gassee, the former head of Apple, founded Be Inc. After 4 years of hard work, a brand-new BeOS operating system (BeOS Wiki, Chinese Wikipedia, encyclopedia) was developed. From the very beginning of its design, BeOS was optimized for multi-processors, multi-threading, and multimedia processing, with extremely superior performance. Many technologies and concepts were far ahead of the operating systems of the same period.
In 1996, Apple gave up developing a new operating system by itself and thought that BeOS met its requirements for an operating system and offered $200 million to acquire Be Inc., but was rejected. Therefore, Apple finally welcomed back the ousted Apple founder Steve Jobs and his NeXTSTEP operating system at a cost of $429 million. Steve Jobs became the head of Apple again, and NeXTSTEP became the basis of the new MacOS X system.
However, the advanced technology of Be Inc. could not make up for the weakness in the market. In 2001, the company was acquired by Palm Inc., and the multimedia operating system BeOS, which was ahead of the times but also had a tragic fate, came to an end.
In the same year, a group of loyal enthusiasts started the OpenBeOS open source project, with the goal of rebuilding a free operating system similar to BeOS and compatible with it. In 2003, they established the non-profit organization Haiku, Inc. in New York State, USA to support this project. In 2004, due to copyright reasons, the project name was changed to Haiku (the pronunciation of a kind of Japanese classical short poem - haiku), that is, the current HaikuOS.
The design concept of HaikuOS is inherited from BeOS, focusing on a fully graphical multimedia operating system for personal PCs. The design goal is to minimize the kernel latency as much as possible, so as to process a large amount of multimedia data in real time, such as audio and video data streams, which has certain daily use value.