The BeOS ports of Mozilla's Seamonkey and Firefox are now coming closer and closer to full native integration with BeOS.

While something similar could be acheived in early 2004, shortly after I started with the then-TBJ, the implementation had many bugs and could easily lead to issues with SSL encrypted sites. The method (known as "reordering" in Bezilla parlance) used to make it work became impossible with Firefox in late 2005, with other changes causing issues too. And notably, it was then impossible to open a webpage from a link without your browser running.

However, work by the Bezilla team has continued towards this goal, with similarly semi-native builds of Seamonkey and later Firefox appearing recently, with close to fully native builds having been released to BeBits. Firefox builds should follow.

An edit to your UserSetupEnviroment is required, followed by a reboot, but after that, you can set Seamonkey (or Firefox when the builds land) as the handler for files on your hard disk and links in applications. It will start and load pages first time, respond to attempts by the OS to close it safely (on shutdown or from the Deskbar), and does not need library reordering or the start script. Dropping files on the browser window or browser icon also works.

Additionally, a long-standing bug where pages would not always redraw after loading has been fixed. This also heavily affected the Mail&News client in Seamonkey, and Mozilla Thunderbird.