HaikuOS Beta 5 Try Out - Browsers!

It's been a while since I've reviewed and talked about Haiku. I have been working with Haiku Beta 5 since around October 2025 soon after it was released. However, it wasn't until a few days ago that I picked it up again and searched through the available software--and found some new treasures. 

I had a 2TB 7200RPM hard disk that I had found laying around, so to speak, so I connected it, erased Linux Mint, and installed HaikuOS beta 5 onto it. At first I had trouble getting it to boot after installing the OS, but then realized that I had forgotten to Initialize the volume before partitioning and formatting it. Once I initialized the drive, then created the partition, and then formatted the partition and installed the OS, Haiku booted fine. 

I've been experimenting with Haiku for a long time. Since the BeOS days, really. BeOS was a great Operating System, and I was sad to see the Company fail. BeOS was a great invention and competition is good--I think. 

After installing beta 5, I started exploring HaikuDepot. I installed the normal apps such as LibreOffice, Calligra, glTron, KMahjongg, and some others. 

There were several apps that I was not expecting to see:  Falkon was the first I saw. I thought, wow, Falkon is not the best web browser, but it's probably better than WebPositive. Now to be fair, WebPositive has seen significant improvements over the course of the beta releases, but it didn't allow me to use Haiku on a more regular basis. Until I found the next few browsers.

The next browser I saw was LibreWolf, which is good. And NetSurf was the next one. Now I knew NetSurf from AmigaOS, and NetSurf is a fairly good web browser and probably, I think, better than WebPositive in some areas. I scrolled down the browser list and struck the gold nugget: Waterfox. 

I have Waterfox installed on my MacBook, and WaterFox runs really well. It's a branch of Firefox, of course. So I downloaded Waterfox, version 6.6, and tried it out. It works great for a browser on Haiku! In fact, I'm able to type this article on Blogger with Waterfox running on Haiku x64 Beta 5. I've previously used WebPositive to write an article on Blogger, but it's not quite there yet. Waterfox is able to render most pages that I browsed to. In fact, there wasn't a website I browsed to, although not too many yet, that it couldn't handle rendering. 

I think I may be hooked now. I like Linux Mint, MacOS, and some Amiga, but Haiku may have hooked me now that it has a great web browser that I can use daily. Time will tell.

So if you haven't tried out Haiku, then give it a try. Do be aware that it has no graphic hardware acceleration, but a modern computer should be able to render graphics fairly well on it's own--although you'll not experience fa nominal 3D rendering with Haiku. It's still worth a look, though.

Until next time, happy computing.

 

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