Haiku Inc. announced it will be hiring Stephan Aßmus (stippi) to work on a Haiku native web browser. Extending the original Haikuware Bounty's port of WebKit done by Ryan Leavengood, and the more recent work done by Maxime Simon (bringing the port up to date and maintaining it), Stephan will now be working on a WebKit based browser (WebPositive) for 160 paid full-time development hours.

A welcome addition to Haiku, as Haiku really does need an up to date browser. Fredrik Holmqvist (a BeZilla/FireFox maintainer) commented:

'If any one wonders I didn't really promote Firefox. There is a lot of work to do to get it back into shape, not having any work done since January 2007. So I'm very happy that stippi chose to work on WebKit, IMO it is a much better fit than Firefox.'

Stephan has already released a binary for testing, and describes and explains the release here. I've tested it, and so far, it renders webpages quite well and seems relatively stable. Excellent work! We look forward to what lays ahead at the end of the 160 hours :)



To test the browser, you'll need a recent GCC4 or GCC2 hybrid build. If you're using a nightly, you'll also need libcurl. Curl is now included.