![]() ![]() Still, I was able to use the site without any problems.Įnlarge / I made a Google Spreadsheet using the Googles. There were also curious black rectangles lurking around the thumbnails for images. When I went to Dropbox’s Web-based interface, some of the buttons (such as the “Browse” button when uploading files) were missing text. Ars Technica’s front page rendered correctly and worked well, but a few sites had some minor issues. While WebPositive won’t win any speed contests, it functioned with pretty much every website I threw at it. It handles browsing even advanced websites with ease. However, the Haiku team included a browser called WebPositive that appears to have a recent build of WebKit at its core. Fortunately, there was a port of Firefox 2 called BeZilla that worked fairly well with the Web at that time.įlash forward seven years, and the positions have been curiously reversed: BeZilla is still a port of Firefox 2, and many websites (including Ars Technica) look terrible and buggy when rendered in this browser. Back then, this was horrendously outdated and basically unusable for Web browsing (it didn’t understand a single line of CSS, that’s how bad it was!). When I reviewed Zeta in 2005, it came with BeOS’s built-in Web browser, NetPositive. AdvertisementĮnlarge / Most websites look perfectly fine in WebPositive. But even I don’t have a copy of Zeta lying around anymore, and I reviewed it! As GoBe Productive was (and is) a closed-source application, it’s not always so easy to fix such things. According to the Haiku forums, if you copy over the installed files from an old copy of Zeta, it will work. And the shining star of BeOS applications, an office suite called GoBe Productive, failed halfway through the installation. I found a port of AbiWord that wouldn’t load at all. I was able to download, install, and run it with no problems.īut even if you can download them, not all BeOS applications work without issue. I managed to find one application that still existed, a spreadsheet program called Sum-It. Unfortunately, most of the download links on BeBits point back to the authors’ personal webpages, and most of those no longer exist. ![]() Haiku is supposed to support native x86-compiled BeOS applications directly, so I went to, where most BeOS authors listed their applications back in the day. Most of these applications are on the same level as Notepad and Calculator found in Windows-small utilities that are helpful to get started, but not what you would want to use for day-to-day work. It simply displays a test pattern.Įnlarge / The PDF viewer works reasonably well, although it is not embeddable in the browser. There is also an application called “TV” that is supposed to be a viewer for analog TV, a style of television that doesn't really exist anymore. There are the usual desk accessories like calculators, an icon editor, text editors, a sound recorder, a contact manager called People, an e-mail program called Mail, various media players, and a PDF viewer called BePDF. Haiku comes with a number of applications and demos pre-installed. ![]() Clicking on any application’s tab brings up a list of windows associated with that application. ApplicationsĪpplications and Preferences are accessed by clicking the big blue feather icon at the top of the Tracker, which also serves as a vertical task bar. This allows users to, for example, add data about music files such as artist and album and sort by these terms without using a third-party application such as iTunes. It is a modern, 64-bit capable, journaling file system with support for extensible metadata built right into the Tracker user interface. The file system, as mentioned earlier, is BFS, which stands for the Be File System. Here are three directories with the tabs moved around. As with the classic MacOS, Haiku remembers the size, position, and state of each window even after a reboot. Unlike Zeta, this ability still exists to slide the yellow title tab back and forth on the top of the window using the Shift key, allowing a sort of ad-hoc tabbed browsing of multiple directories. It opens up a new window for each folder, and each window can be viewed in either icon or list formats. The Tracker file manager hasn't been updated much since the days of BeOS. With both the heart and the face of the operating system running code with origins in BeOS, Haiku can truly be called a successor to that operating system. released as open source prior to the company dissolving. In fact, it uses the OpenTracker file manager and application launcher that Be, Inc. ![]() The user interface is a direct clone of BeOS. The kernel is based on the open-source NewOS, which is a 32-bit preemptive multitasking, modular kernel written by former BeOS engineer Travis Geiselbrecht. The Haiku operating system is fast and responsive, just as BeOS was back in the day. ![]()
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