Positively Critical: WebPositive and Haiku

Few components of Haiku are as important to the operating system and its functionality as the preferred web browser and internal project: WebPositive.

In recent days, some users have expressed concern about a “disappearing text” bug, where some text on web pages will disappear for undetermined reasons. This issue is now fixed, but highlights the reason why WebPositive is so important.

The history of WebPositive is as intricately woven into Haiku as BeOS was, and has served as a major effort for all the programmers and users of the operating system even as other web browsers are successfully ported, work for a little while, then, unfortunately, lose functionality and are abandoned.

Developer PulkoMandy, whose real name is Adrien Destugues, lives in France and has been a key developer for Haiku and WebPositive since joining the team in 2009.

WebPositive, sometimes called “Web+,” uses the WebKit1 engine. This engine was originally ported from KDE’s KHTML by Apple for their Safari browser and later brought into Google’s Chrome, Samsung’s phone browsers and more.

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