Haiku OS beta 6 has been released, bringing a more capable built-in browser and hardware-accelerated virtualisation. The update came just a week after the project's 25th anniversary.
The WebPositive browser is now based on the WebKit rendering engine, allowing it to handle demanding web apps such as Gmail. A complete port of Firefox with official Mozilla branding is also available, and the project has already updated it to Firefox 155. Other Mozilla-family browsers, including Waterfox and LibreWolf, can also be installed.
Virtualisation is significantly faster thanks to a port of the NVMM hypervisor, originally written for NetBSD. It allows QEMU virtual machines to use native virtualisation features of Intel and AMD CPUs. Both NVMM and Firefox are only available on the x86-64 version of Haiku.
The 32-bit x86 release retains binary compatibility with the original BeOS. Active ports exist for RISC-V 64, Arm64, and an experimental PowerPC version, but recent progress on Arm64 and PowerPC has relied on AI coding assistants, meaning those versions are unlikely to be merged upstream. One Arm64 developer halted work because the project would not accept AI-generated contributions.
Beta 6 is smaller, faster in some areas, and uses less memory than before. It ran well on older ThinkPad laptops with 8 GB of RAM and should be usable with less, making it a candidate for reviving very old, low-end PCs.