Haiku Beta 5 / In tests it's (Fire)foxier / It pleases us well
Haiku still hasn't quite reached that magic Version One Point Zero line in the sand, in part because its developers are setting the bar much higher than that of any other FOSS OS.
Haiku beta 5 arrived in September, but a significant box for this experimental OS was ticked in December, with an unofficial but working and usable port of the Firefox browser – which is called Iceweasel in the Haiku Depot.
The Reg FOSS desk is very fond of Haiku, as he was of BeOS itself – as his BeOS 5 review from 2000 shows. Almost exactly three years ago, we reported when Haiku gained support for Windows programs, and then a year later when Haiku beta 4 appeared.
The latest beta has a lot of new features and improvements, as detailed in the release notes. The new features are relatively modest, rather than game-changers, indicating that the OS is very close to daily-driver status, and the slow progress reflects the small team size.
Some of the changes are relatively visible. For instance, the handling of color in the UI has been dramatically simplified, and the OS now automatically chooses contrasting colors for UI elements based on the three main colors you set. This means that if you set dark background colors, it automatically switches into dark mode. The terminal emulator and icon editor have both received significant improvements. The Tracker file manager, based on original BeOS code, now shows read-only drives with a different background. Write-related functions are grayed out.
