Haiku OS rises / Beta 6 sails open web / Virtual winds fly fast

The sixth beta of the Haiku OS is here, now with more choice of web browsers and a working hardware-accelerated hypervisor.

Haiku OS beta 6 came out just a week after the project’s 25th birthday.

We have been trying it on several different machines around the Irish Sea wing of Vulture Towers, and enjoying the experience very much.

The release notes contain a lot of changes and some significant new features, although many of them are not immediately obvious.

The built-in WebPositive browser is now based on the WebKit rendering engine, which means it handles even demanding web apps such as Gmail perfectly.

On Windows and Linux, Google’s Blink dominates, but its ancestor WebKit is a major browser engine in its own right, with first-class support in almost all web apps – mainly thanks to a billion or so Apple iDevices.

If you want a big-name browser, though, there is a complete port of Firefox, with official Mozilla branding.

What’s more, the project isn’t sticking to the slower-moving ESR version – since we installed beta 6, Firefox has been updated to the latest Firefox 155.

You can also choose other Mozilla-family browsers, such as Waterfox, LibreWolf, or Floorp.

GNOME Web is still there as well, but now that WebPositive is so capable there’s less need for it.

We did notice a flickering mouse pointer with a square outline around it in Firefox, but this is just a cosmetic glitch.

While we’re on Mozilla tools, there’s also IceDove, which is Thunderbird 153 ESR without Mozilla branding (and its browser companion IceWeasel, plus IceWeasel ESR).

There are plenty of other email clients to choose from, including Balsa, Claws, and the terminal-based Mutt.

The other change that could make this a more viable option is significantly faster virtualization.