When Haiku hits 1.0 -- or 'R1' -- it will have "tons of new features" compared to BeOS R5, despite being a drop-in replacement for the older system, Aßmus says. "Internationalisation, cool new APIs like powerful layout management. End users see this as all apps being scalable and adopting to different strings when switching languages.

"All the drawing in the interface is anti-aliased. All the icons are now 32-bit vector icons. BeOS had 16x16 and 32x32 256 colour icons with a system wide, fixed palette. Haiku also offers a WebKit-based browser with support for modern Web standards. [The] NetPositive [Web browser] on BeOS didn't even support CSS, let alone JavaScript.

"Haiku has support for modern hardware, like wireless networking. BeOS R5 didn't even support USB 2.0 or mass storage devices out of the box. And actually, BeOS doesn't even run on most computers made in the last eight to 10 years. It would not even boot when your computer had more than one gigabyte of RAM installed."

There's no release date for R1 yet, but the project is making a lot of progress, particularly thanks to being part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC). However, a decision by the development team means the features being worked on by GSoC participants are not critical for R1's release.