Opera is dropping FreeBSD, it's (almost) official.

Well, for the time being, I'm still a self-compiled system and own-kernel-configuration guy, and this is all but supported/recommended (and for good reasons) on OpenBSD, but beside that I could use OpenBSD as well now. There is still e.g. the SMP thing though.

IMHO, there is only one most efficient path of choosing suitable tools/software for the task. The first thing narrows the selection of the next one.

Browser (most important running program/main task) > operating system > CPU architecture > rest of hardware
 
Perusing through the Internet, I accidentally stumbled upon the fact that Opera now uses WebKit in place of the old Presto engine. One could simply make their own browser.
 
sossego said:
Perusing through the internet, I accidentally stumbled upon the fact that Opera now uses Webkit in place of the old Presto engine. One could simply make their own browser.
Click to expand...

I've actually done this on the Mac using XCode. Sure it is still the safari WebKit engine, but the point is - it's not as difficult to get something up and running that can browse the net as some may suspect these days.

A basic window with forward/back buttons, a URL bar and the ability to print, etc (the services menu) is less than an hour worth of work (and no code :D).
 
Well its been real. Bye Opera.

cd /usr/ports/www/opera && make deinstall clean
 
Is anyone else planning to maybe keep a static v9/opera Vbox just to run Opera forever? Or someone knows why/why not it would be easy or too difficult? [ Or maybe even a port of such an install; semi-facetiously... ]
 
jb_fvwm2 said:
Is anyone else planning to maybe keep a static v9 / opera [cmd=]Vbox[/cmd] just to run Opera forever? Or someone knows why/why not it would be easy or too difficult? [ Or maybe even a port of such a install; semi-facetiously... ]
Click to expand...
Why not just back up the port and keep it installed on your primary setup if you want to keep Opera around? If Opera needs to be run in a virtual machine (most probably for security reasons), you can just run a Windows OS in that VM too and use a more recent and supported version of Opera, IMHO.
 
As its dependencies are upgraded, opera would have to be upgraded, and eventually may stop working (shared libraries either in ports or in base). You've given me an idea, though, maybe back up Opera and all its dependencies to another filesystem and install it "elsewhere"... another /usr/local, so to speak.
 
emulators/wine is likely to be around longer than Windows is capable of running desktop applications (thus Opera). So perhaps see if it runs well in it.

As I recall, when I tried, it also supported Flash too when run this way. Now you can keep two dying technologies alive for as long as possible :)
 
I quite literally had forgotten that Opera existed until I saw this thread. With things like Chromium or even Firefox available, I must officially declare "who cares" on this one.
 
I reckon you were also the one supporting dumbing down FreeBSD to cater more to the new users, at the expense of the advanced ones. So, yeah. There is chromium and firefox in ports.

I don't want to sound too abrasive, maybe if I wouldn't have the baggage of prior experience with Opera, I would be more partial to the other browsers.
 
morbit said:
I don't want to sound too abrasive, maybe if I wouldn't have the baggage of prior experience with Opera, I would be more partial to the other browsers.
Click to expand...
Good call. Opera has been around for over a decade (longer than Firefox and Chromium...) and surely there must have been reasons for that: it was pleasant, fast, reliable, configurable, lean, innovative and standards-compliant.

@Pushrod: Who cares? Several people, actually.

The first warning sign (when JSvT left) went largely unheeded, but the recent announcement that Opera would be dropping Presto and switching to WebKit was when I decided to jump ship after having used Opera for more than ten years. That they now stopped caring about FreeBSD doesn't come as much of a surprise to me. They are a leading player on the mobile market and presumably no longer care much about the desktop anyway. I regret the loss, but have accepted it and moved on.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
The main problem for me, is that either of other browsers (be it chromium, firefox or surf still) comes with literally tens of new dependencies (and most of them I don't like either- ALSA, DBUS etc.). This is heart-wrecking for me, and thus still haven't found suitable replacement yet. Built-in chromium callback doesn't help either.
 
morbit said:
The main problem for me, is that either of other browsers (be it chromium, firefox or surf still) comes with literally tens of new dependencies (and most of them I don't like either- ALSA, DBUS etc.). This is heart-wrecking for me, and thus I still haven't found suitable replacement yet.
Click to expand...
It's a known problem :) You know what they say:
All browsers suck, some just suck more (or less) than others.
Click to expand...
The one that at least the two of us hated the least is putting itself off the market, so unless you feel like coding your own browser you're just going to have to move on to the next-least-sucking alternative once the current version of Opera stops working on FreeBSD.
 
Sure, just for now it's such a huge leap for me, that I don't even know which one left is sucking less :). Maybe choices of fellow former users would help.

BTW, I like very much http://suckless.org/. Still, anything WebKit based is IMHO misplaced there.

Speaking of mobile, it would make sense from this point, only it doesn't. Lets say I have one of the most powerful "phone" devices currently produced. I have removed WebKit Opera from it due to abysmal performance. Until this time, I always contently used mobile Opera on phones with minuscule computing power. Go figure...
 
If someone with more expertise than I made a shareware version (or FreeBSD specific wrapper for) opera 12, and it worked noticeably better than newer chrome based version(s), and continued to work more or less as the present-day port does, I can see that paying for itself for decades to come, provided of course it does not abrogate a licensing issue or something. (At least the viewpoint from here.)
 
Opera (12.16) finaly made me so mad with its COPY/PASTE crashes/issues, that I abandoned it completly.

I currently use Firefox with these addons, to make it as close to Opera as possible:

For using keys [1] and [2] for previous and next tab:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/single-key-tab-switch/

To open new tabs at the end of tabs:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/new-tabs-at-the-end/

To have the possibility to open 40+ tabs without needing to scroll them:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/custom-tab-width/

This also seems useful:
Code: 
browser.tabs.animate;false

If you do not want to share your location (despite having Do Not Track enabled)
Code: 
geo.enabled;false

Other useful extensions:
  • Ghostery (was also available on Opera)
  • Adblock Plus (was also available on Opera)
  • NoScript (very handy)
  • Firebug (as Opera Dragonfly replacement)
 
fonz said:
Opera has been around for over a decade (longer than Firefox and Chromium...) and surely there must have been reasons for that: it was pleasant, fast, reliable, configurable, lean, innovative and standards-compliant.
Click to expand...

Opera's rendering engine was developed independently of any of the others by a company that did nothing else. Internet Explorer and Firefox use rendering engines developed by the same guy, both of which were left stagnant for many years at one time and insist on legacy support of things only kids and large corporations care about.

WebKit is open source but Presto (Opera) has company backing and was paid for its usage on mobile where speed and small size is crucial.

I don't understand the problem people say they have with WebKit. Opera contributed to it until they switched to Blink where a lot of legacy stuff is being trimmed away.

Of course, I'm only talking about usage and not compiling it. Firefox, too, is an excellent browser.
 
FWIW, firefox does not compile for me with gcc48, let's see how it is with base clang. It should be fine, as I don't reckon it was mentioned in the context of ports having problems with clang.
 
morbit said:
FWIW, firefox does not compile for me with gcc48, let's see how it is with base clang. It should be fine, as I don't reckon it was mentioned in the context of ports having problems with clang.
Click to expand...
It builds just fine here: Clang on FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE-p6/amd64. There might be one or two options that break the build, though.
 
Yes, I've just successfully finished building it with Clang. However, I must have messed up something, as I wanted to use the gstreamer backend, yet videos have no sound in Firefox. Opera is fine in this regard. I vaguely remember Firefox needing something more for it to work, but last time I've done it was in Opera 10.10 times I think.

Code: 
Information for firefox-24.0,1:

Depends on:
Dependency: xproto-7.0.24
Dependency: xineramaproto-1.2.1
Dependency: xf86vidmodeproto-2.3.1
Dependency: xextproto-7.2.1
Dependency: videoproto-2.3.2
Dependency: renderproto-0.11.1
Dependency: randrproto-1.4.0
Dependency: pixman-0.30.2
Dependency: libXau-1.0.8
Dependency: kbproto-1.0.6
Dependency: inputproto-2.3
Dependency: fixesproto-5.0
Dependency: dri2proto-2.8
Dependency: damageproto-1.2.1
Dependency: compositeproto-0.4.2
Dependency: libfontenc-1.1.2
Dependency: font-util-1.3.0
Dependency: encodings-1.0.4,1
Dependency: expat-2.1.0
Dependency: libvpx-1.1.0
Dependency: pciids-20130823
Dependency: hicolor-icon-theme-0.12
Dependency: gnomehier-3.0
Dependency: gmp-5.1.2
Dependency: mpfr-3.1.2
Dependency: mpc-0.9
Dependency: perl-threaded-5.18.1
Dependency: png-1.5.17
Dependency: freetype2-2.5.0.1
Dependency: fontconfig-2.10.95,1
Dependency: mkfontscale-1.1.1
Dependency: dejavu-2.34
Dependency: jpeg-8_4
Dependency: libv4l-0.8.8_1
Dependency: jbigkit-1.6
Dependency: tiff-4.0.3
Dependency: pkgconf-0.9.3
Dependency: mkfontdir-1.0.7
Dependency: font-misc-meltho-1.0.3
Dependency: font-misc-ethiopic-1.0.3
Dependency: font-bh-ttf-1.0.3
Dependency: xorg-fonts-truetype-7.7_1
Dependency: libXdmcp-1.1.1
Dependency: libICE-1.0.8,1
Dependency: libSM-1.2.2,1
Dependency: pcre-8.33
Dependency: orc-0.4.18
Dependency: nspr-4.10
Dependency: libpthread-stubs-0.3_3
Dependency: libpciaccess-0.13.2
Dependency: libdrm-2.4.46
Dependency: libffi-3.0.13
Dependency: libevent2-2.0.21
Dependency: icu-50.1.2
Dependency: binutils-2.23.2
Dependency: sqlite3-3.8.0.2
Dependency: nss-3.15.1
Dependency: libiconv-1.14_1
Dependency: libxml2-2.8.0_2
Dependency: libxcb-1.9.1
Dependency: xcb-util-0.3.9_1,1
Dependency: xcb-util-renderutil-0.3.8
Dependency: libX11-1.6.2,1
Dependency: libXt-1.1.4,1
Dependency: libXrender-0.9.8
Dependency: libXft-2.3.1
Dependency: libXfixes-5.0.1
Dependency: libXcursor-1.1.14
Dependency: libXext-1.3.2,1
Dependency: libXcomposite-0.4.4,1
Dependency: libXv-1.0.10,1
Dependency: libXrandr-1.4.2
Dependency: libXi-1.7.2,1
Dependency: libXxf86vm-1.1.3
Dependency: libXinerama-1.1.3,1
Dependency: libXdamage-1.1.4
Dependency: libGL-9.1.6
Dependency: hunspell-1.3.2_2
Dependency: graphite2-1.2.3
Dependency: gettext-0.18.3
Dependency: python27-2.7.5_3
Dependency: python2-2_1
Dependency: python-2.7_1,2
Dependency: glib-2.36.3
Dependency: gdk-pixbuf2-2.28.2
Dependency: libIDL-0.8.14_1
Dependency: gobject-introspection-1.36.0_2
Dependency: shared-mime-info-1.1
Dependency: gcc-4.8.2.s20130822
Dependency: gstreamer-0.10.36
Dependency: gstreamer-plugins-0.10.36_3,3
Dependency: gstreamer-ffmpeg-0.10.13_1
Dependency: gstreamer-plugins-good-0.10.31,3
Dependency: desktop-file-utils-0.22
Dependency: cairo-1.10.2_5,2
Dependency: harfbuzz-0.9.19
Dependency: pango-1.34.1_1
Dependency: alsa-lib-1.0.26
Dependency: alsa-plugins-1.0.26
Dependency: zip-3.0
Dependency: atk-2.8.0
Dependency: gtk-update-icon-cache-2.24.19
Dependency: gtk-2.24.19_2

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Ah, ok. It was just my local sound configuration thing (disabled vchans).

However, please DO read /usr/ports/UPDATING and do not check [ ] ARIFF_OSS FreeBSD-specific OSS plugin in audio/alsa-plugins. It will core dump.


Recommendations for RSS feeds readers which could mimic Opera one are greatly appreciated. Those extensions I've tried work poorly with lots of feeds.
 
I keep Opera because Firefox is not compatible with my custom xmodmap keyboard layout for easier one hand typing. Special characters like '{[`^@|\#~]}' cannot be entered in Firefox with non-US keyboards if the AltGr key is remapped somewhere else. What files have to be hacked in Firefox source in order to disable control- and alt- handlers?
 
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