NetPositive (often called Net+) is the default

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

for the discontinued Be Operating System (BeOS). It includes partial support for

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

, but no

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

support. It was originally developed as a stop-gap measure because no browsers had been ported to BeOS.

Error messages in Haiku

The browser's

haiku is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a ''kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a ''kigo'', or se ...

error messages were noted among BeOS users, which led to the name of

Haiku is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a ''kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a ''kigo'', or se ...

, an open-source operating system inspired by BeOS. A late 1990s email joke which claimed that Microsoft was moving to Haiku error messages in Japanese versions of Windows was almost entirely made up of NetPositive error messages. For instance, a user might see the following error message if they try to access a website that is unavailable:

Cables have been cut
Southwest of Northeast somewhere
We are not amused.

If the user tried unsuccessfully to authenticate against a website, they might see:

Server's poor response
Not quick enough for browser.
Timed out, plum blossom.

References

External links

NetPositive 2.2 PNG screenshotsThemis home pageList of NetPositive haiku error messages
{{Web browsers, desktop BeOS software Discontinued web browsers