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

respite said:
Sad. I assumed this was on the way after Opera announced it was moving to Webkit.
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Well, that's not a good reason. Not a good reason at all. Not only is (GTK-)WebKit open-source and available on FreeBSD for several browsers - Midori, Chromium, Xombrero, etc. - but having both the layout and ECMAScript engines as separate projects means Opera's developers would have more time to tackle other tasks (that's actually what they were pretending just a few months ago), such as improving the interface... or perhaps, improving the different ports like the one for FreeBSD.

But no, they dropped the FreeBSD port just like they did for Solaris a few years back. I remember when that happened, they said they wouldn't drop the FreeBSD and Linux ports. One down, another to go. Meh!
 
Beastie said:
But no, they dropped the FreeBSD port just like they did for Solaris a few years back. I remember when that happened, they said they wouldn't drop the FreeBSD and Linux ports. One down, another to go. Meh!
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Linux is a lot healthier on the desktop than FreeBSD is, it has a number of common desktop distributions. But even Linux doesn't have a huge share of the browsing market.

Like it or not, it's an unfortunate fact of life that:
  • FreeBSD makes up a small percentage of the desktop market
  • Out of the entire desktop market, Opera has a small percentage of the browser share

The most recent stats I can find for FreeBSD browsing on any browser (including Chromium(?) and Firefox on FreeBSD) account for less than 0.01% of traffic. I.e., it was listed as 0.00%. A rounding error.

In terms of effort vs. growing share, Opera being supported on FreeBSD is a non-starter for developers being paid to work on it. The best they can hope for, assuming they capture 100% of the FreeBSD market is less than 0.01% market share increase.

Is that worth allocating say, 1/8th of their development time to?
 
Beastie said:
Well, that's not a good reason. Not a good reason at all.
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Well, actually it's a good reason. A good reason indeed. Presto was both lean and very standards-compliant. WebKit is neither. What's more, parties such as Apple and Google are involved with it, which also creeps a lot of people out (how much of that is actually justified is another matter, though).
 
I have read, some months ago, a request about open sources for the Presto engine. Do you believe that the community would take advantage of this? (If this request is attended, of course.)
 
ColdfireMC said:
I have read, some months ago, a request about open sources for the Presto engine. Do you believe that the community would take advantage of this? (If this request is attended, of course.)
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If Opera Software SAS release(s) Presto as open source I'm sure it will be used. But they (Opera) probably won't do that.

There is indeed an online petition somewhere out there, but few believe it will have any effect.
 
Presto, being only the rendering engine, is already behind the times and would need a lot of work just to catch up to where things are today. Having Presto would mean nothing as far as the user interface goes and that would have to be developed, too, cause a rendering engine without an interface is worthless.
 
Whattteva said:
So I'm a little curious. Since Opera is dropping support, what do folks here plan to use instead?
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I use Firefox, even though it's rather bloated.
 
Whattteva said:
So I'm a little curious. Since Opera is dropping support, what do folks here plan to use instead?
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In an earlier post in this thread I was postulating about running Opera forever in a Virtualbox or jail or separate install location; still very uninformed about which would be the best methodology.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Firefox is bloated? Since when? Compared to Opera? Yes. Compared to Chrome or IE (on Windows)? No.
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With a few plugins and a few tabs open to "busy" pages, the Firefox process can have a larger memory footprint than all other processes combined (with a simple window manager and nothing else running). Yes, memory footprint might not be the sole or best measure of bloat, the plugins aren't really part of the browser, memory usage seems complex with Firefox and browsers are complex beasts. Xulrunner is still my runtime environment of choice with Conkeror on top. It's snappy and simple. The downside is the learning curve and the work required to get some Firefox plugins working.
 
Chromium is heavier than Firefox; especially as you add tabs, but Firefox is known for its excellent handling of available memory and its release. That's why they call it "available memory". Plugins also create heavier usage in any browser.
 
Interesting. I actually was expecting some alternative mentions like Midori or Arora.

I myself use Firefox mainly for two things, Firefox sync and vimperator (vi-like key bindings).
 
I would like to see Opera's code open sourced. Still, I would not hold my breath... Albeit this mailing list post gives some hope.

Regardless, now that I'm using Firefox, I see that Opera would have some miles to catch up with its speed. Firefox is more or less on par with Chromium on FreeBSD here, lagging insignificantly in the tests made by Google, but faster in the others. You could say that tests are synthetic, but I wouldn't check them if I didn't saw difference in some heavy websites- "Hmm... That was quite snappy, I wonder what numbers would Firefox pull..." Then I saw the numbers- usually over two times those achieved by Opera (JS).

Regarding memory usage, it's not that simple. Firefox initially reserves more, but with number of tabs growing 20+ Opera easily uses more of it. Still, nothing compares to tab switching in Opera and Opera's feed reader- Firefox and NewsFox is clearly inferior here, not mentioning additional dependencies. However, H.264 and MP3 playback in HTML5 actually works in Firefox, which really surprised me. It's a nice thing to have.

Firefox required some tweaking and playing with about:config but overall it's surprisingly usable here. A lot better than it was in 2008... It's not 100% stable, but neither was Opera. It's pretty annoying that Firefox can hang in uwait state after closing a long session, needing to be killed though, but besides that, it's nothing major.
 
Using opera as I type this. pixman unexpectedly broke a slew of ports epiphany, firefox, seamonkey, epdfview, alarm-clock, roxterm, vte ... so they are rebuilt except the browsers [done by tomorrow with any luck.] Howsoever, I suppose the switch from presto may mean that Opera will break also with such upgrades?
/edit/
sunday ) [cmd=] cp -iv /usr/local/lib/libpixman-1.so.30 /usr/local/lib/compat/libpixman-1.so.9 [/cmd], and one can use seamonkey also during its rebuild, probably removing it the next day if/when seamonkey has been rebuilt. So that is a workaround. Only posting it to make the original post more complete, not so much to advocate doing the same unless it is expedient.
/end edit/
 
kpedersen said:
Would be pretty darn bloated by that point though ;)
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Well, given that my current machine has more CPU L2 cache than my first three computers had in total RAM put together (including my first Linux machine), future bloat isn't quite as much of a problem as some people fear.

In terms of performance, at least.
 
throAU said:
Well, given that my current machine has more CPU L2 cache than my first 3 computers had in total RAM put together (including my first Linux machine), future bloat isn't quite as much of a problem as some people fear.

In terms of performance, at least.
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Those machines must be really REALLY ancient to have less total RAM than a mere L2 cache, lol.
 
My first three machines, for reference:

  • Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer 2: 16 KB RAM (1984?)
  • Commodore Amiga 500: 1 MB RAM (1989)
  • PC Clone 486 DX 33: 4 MB RAM, 256 KB L2 cache (1992)

Total RAM above: 5.25 MB and change (including the 486's L2 cache - not on chip but SRAM chips on the motherboard).

Total CPU L2 cache in my Core i5-4430: 6 MB. Times change.

The 486 ran Slackware 3.1. It barely ran X11 or Windows 95. It ran Windows 3.1, along with Doom and Doom 2 just fine. It could browse the Internet.

The Amiga had full multitasking, GUI, 4 channel sound, plug and play, drag and drop, etc. The GUI was actually nicer to use than many X11 desktops. That 1 MB wasn't pushed way too hard either, the OS ran in 128 KB of RAM (256 KB in ROM).

It does still occasionally amaze me that we now have smartphones with a few hundred megabytes of RAM, multi-megabit internet connectivity and stuff like Google Maps in your pocket. And also that people whine that last year's phone spec is useless, etc. People these days just don't realise just how much power current machines have, and what you can actually do in software with so much less, if you have to write everything in assembly language :)

Not meaning to go off on a tangent, but to illustrate the "bloat" point.
 
Yeah, those are some ancient machines indeed, lol. I get what you say with bloat. Surprisingly, out of all the mobile OS's, I'd have to say Microsoft is the most streamlined one. My old Windows phone, which was only 1 GHz single core ran everything buttery smooth. My 1.3 GHz single core tablet, however, runs Jellybean and it is really sluggish and crashes a lot. It's still substantially better compared to when it was running Gingerbread though.
 
igorino said:
Well, that's really sad, time to go back to www/lynx.
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I just did a refit of my system and I'm trying to keep the amount of stuff down, so I'm using www/dillo2, it's kind of ghetto looking, but it's quite fast. :)
 
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