Other Web Browsers for Bell Labs' Plan 9?

SeanIBaby asks: "I was wondering if anyone used Plan 9, and Inferno/Charon for a web browser. Are there any other web browsers for Plan 9, or do you have to code your own? I've noticed that Inferno's company sells Plan 9 boxed sets for $150US. I guess this is because they include the Inferno/Charon binaries with the image, even though they let you download Inferno for free from their website. Plan 9 is free from Bell Labs."

Comments

Grammatical Eye For The Dumb Guy

[Farley Mullet]

While we're on the topic of IQ, let's try to rewrite your post with an eye to things like verb tense, sentence structure and the spelling of words like "its":

The Original:

I look at a system with plan9 on my desk (currently turned off), I read your answer, and I remember this quote: "The IQ of a crowd is inversely proportional to it's size".

This was not meant to be an offense, Farley Mullet, but I do know a couple of people who currently try out the OS, and your comment neglected to reflect that - that was not a safe assumption, but a rather centric one.

In English:

Looking at the Plan 9 system on my desk, your comment makes me think of the quote: "The IQ of a crowd is inversely proportional to its size."

No offense intended, Farley Mullet, but I know a couple of people who currently use Plan 9, and this wasn't reflected in your comment. So your assumption wasn't safe, but reflected a certain (limited) viewpoint.

People are often struck by lightning. Sometimes even when it isn't raining. Heck, it could even happen to me tomorrow. But it's still safe to assume that it won't.

yes, driver support is a problem

[DrSkwid]

plan9 is less forgiving with hardware

Since the downturn at Lucent no-one is being paid full time to work on plan9 and many in Bell Labs have been made redundant.

Getting a set of hardware together is a barrier to entry but if you look at the supported hardware list you may notice that much of the equipment is old and therefore cheap to get second hand and is often the sort of stuff people will just ditch, S3 Virge's and that kind of thing.

I can honestly say I don't know anyone that uses it

Yes, we are a small minority but growing steadily. We have 13 people in our little irc channel.

But we don't mind, more users would be nice but world domination isn't on the to-do list.
It is a specialised OS with some interesting ideas, many of which are being backported to the stinking corpse that is unix.

Re:yes, driver support is a problem

[DrSkwid]

private namespaces - *BSD's chroot
user level file systems - Hurd
programmable debugger (debug programs running on a different machine with a differnt CPU)
it isn't POSIX compliant
no root
backups built in
UTF-8 throughout (source code included)
all services should be implemented using a common protocol - 9p
Only 17 system calls

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/index.html

Re:Plan9 vs Unix

[multi io]

[Plan9] Major differences good and bad over unix?

• filesystem namespace, mount tables etc. are per-process, not global
• (really) everything-is-a-file, including
  • network interfaces, sockets
  • display server backend, i.e. one {/dev/bitblt, /dev/mouse, /dev/cons} set; the server re-exports one disjunct such set to each client (which means that the server may be run as a client of itself)
• a single generic protocol (9P) for exporting files over the network. Network transparency of all kinds of services (e.g. the display server) is achieved by exporting the relevant files over the net via 9P