Another garbage article brought to you by Ars Technica. People seem to have this habit of complaining about projects that are gratis, have few developers and little to no funding. People should be grateful that these projects exist or work at all. All of these drive-by hit pieces are getting really pathetic and Ars Technica is not the only "tech news" tabloid doing this.
I personally support the work of the Haiku project and have not had as many issues as the writer of this article. Maybe if so many sites were not bloated with garbage, the web browser would not have fallen over. Sites should have a fallback mode in case of situations where js is not turned on or the browser is not HTML5 compliant. As for the email client falling over, I think there is more at play than the author is letting on.