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

For all those who intend to use Opera 12.x indefinitely, may I ask how do you intend to do so? Unless you use Opera for basic low/no JavaScript browsing only, it's highly unlikely to be working properly a year or two into the future. Support for all those (buggy) JavaScript-heavy websites (most of which are constantly being modified/rewritten) depends on an up-to-date browser.jsFILE] exception file. It will simply be getting more and more broken over time.

taz said:
for some time now I have been watching over one project that I have always had a plan switching to. It's not not ready yet for nowadays internet but, in time, it will be. It has the ability to run on frame buffers and this is why I'm so interested in it. NetSurf is the name.
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Yes, NetSurf looks promising, but just like Dillo, it is far from perfect and lacks even the most basic JavaScript support (even your router's control panel won't work). Also, development is painfully slow.

You're basically left with Chromium and Firefox, which are way too heavy on resources and not as customizable as even the earliest Opera versions. Midori, Xombrero, Vimprobable, etc. are just like Chromium. When it comes to resource usage, the interface is peanuts compared to the layout and JavaScript engines. It's Webkit that makes them all heavy.

drhowarddrfine said:
taz said:
But now I'm definitely dropping Opera
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Why?
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Probably because it won't be working fine or at all on 95% of the Internet in the near future.

Unless you want us to use the Windows version under WINE (not going to happen in a million years). There's not even a Linux version to run through the Linuxulator (only a half decent idea).

Besides, it's not like the latest NEXT version is any better/more useful than Chrome 1.0.
 
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vermaden said:
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)
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I was a long time Opera user before I figured out they don't really care about *nix users with regards to their new browser. Given that the 12 branch has basically been abandoned sans security fixes (for now), I decided it was time to switch to Firefox. I'm not completely happy with it versus my experience with Opera (tabs on the side w/ with preview was a killer UI piece for me w/ with Opera, among others), but I use a Oxygen/KDE4 theme so it integrates nicely with my desktop. I like that Firefox lets you customize the UI a lot (w/ in comparison to chromium), but still lags behind Opera in that regard.

You should add "Secure Login" to your plugins list, which adds a "wand"-like button for logins. I also use "Tab Mix Plus" for tab options that handle a lot of what you mentioned, as well as "Fire Gestures" for mouse gestures. Check out my UI here.
 
vermaden said:
If OpenBSD will get ZFS and VirtualBox then I may consider using it instead of FreeBSD as Opera is dead anyway ;)
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I'm inclined to try DragonFly BSD with it's adoption of DPorts (FreeBSD ports rather than NetBSD). I'm not a huge fan of OpenBSD, NetBSD seems interesting but I can never get my arrow keys, etc. working on the console in netbsd NetBSD.
 
zspider said:
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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How reliable is the JavaScript engine on it? Does it render Flash-based sites well? Their site mentions that HTTPS support is in alpha state and thus, very buggy. I think it's a deal-breaker for me.
 
Whattteva said:
How reliable is the JavaScript engine on it? Does it render Flash-based sites well?
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Haha, you're kidding, right? Browsers like these have no support for any of this. They were talking about basic JavaScript support years ago, but you know, these projects are very small (fewer than 10 developers) and things tend to take a very long time.

Whattteva said:
Their site mentions that HTTPS support is in alpha state and thus, very buggy.
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I've built the latest version with HTTPS support on and I can at least log into my webmail account so it's not that bad.
 
fonz said:
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.
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Firefox and Chromium do the job for me. I've learned to live without Opera on the BSDs.
 
Surprising! Almost as surprising as Oracle dropping OpenSolaris! (</sarcasm>).

The alternatives rather suck, but then again, Opera (12) also sucks, just slightly less so. I've found I can beat Firefox into a decent browser after some amount of effort, strange `about:config' mucking about, and installing a bunch of extensions (I've really gotten used to having my tab bar on the side rather than top). Projects such as Xombrero or uzbl look pretty damn awesome, but are incomplete, and not suitable for day-to-day `it just works' browsing (yet).

In any case, my main gripe with $the_alternative is the lack of what I consider to be a good web debugger, in the end, there are three: Firebug, Firefox native tools and WebKit.
  • Firebug lacks a number of features I frequently use (e.g., filtering CSS, easily align stuff) and the UI/user-friendliness leaves much to be desired (e.g., I find the net tab just plain awkward).
  • WebKit just has a funky UI. It throws all the conventions out the window. It also has a very small font size (too small to read comfortably) which can't be enlarged as far as I can figure out. It also lacks features I use, and some of the spiffy advanced features (such as source maps, which are really useful) is something I've never been able to get working (the only docs I could find seem to be outdated, which is hardly surprising, since Chrome seems to change every two months).
  • The `native' Firefox debugger is sort of okay, and I prefer it over Firebug and Webkit. It may end up anywhere from halfway decent to pretty good, but a this point it's still a a fairly new project and as such incomplete.
I'm not claiming Dragonfly is perfect, hardly, but it seems to offer a number of what seem to be unique (and useful!) features in a simple, unobtrusive GUI.
 
Carpetsmoker said:
- Firebug lacks a number of features I frequently use (eg, filtering CSS, easily align stuff) and the UI/user-friendlyness leaves much to be desired (eg, I find the net tab just plain awkward).
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I agree that Firebug and Firefox's native developer tool are different. Even though I grew up as a web developer using Firebug, I haven't used it much in years and have trouble getting used to both after using Chrome's developer tool for so long. I do know people who are very comfortable with Firefox's tools and that's why I think it's just a matter of what you're used to. Most everyone I know uses Chrome's.
- Webkit just has a funky UI.
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So people aren't confused, WebKit is the rendering engine and nothing else. Developer tools in Chrome and Safari are not part of WebKit. However, every WebKit port includes developer tools but that version is different from browser to browser.
It throws all the conventions out the window. It also has a very small font size (too small to read comfortably) which can't be enlarged as far as I can figure out.
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You can but only if you edit the CSS file.
It also lacks features I use, and some of the spiffy advanced features (such as source maps, which are really useful)
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Source maps

I'm not claiming Dragonfly is perfect, hardly, but it seems to offer a number of what seem to be unique (& useful!) features in a simple, unobtrusive GUI.
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I really liked Dragonfly, too.
 
No more 'My Opera'

Yeah, it seems they've completely lost it!

The explosion of these sites [social media and blogging sites] and the amount of resources we need to maintain our own service has changed our outlook on My Opera. We have made decision to shutdown My Opera as of March 1, 2014.
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(source)
 
Opera

vanessa said:
The world has dropped Opera, so no wonder they must cut support. Really, Chromium or Firefox can't do the job well enough?
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Opera has dropped the traditional platform, and gone almost entirely to mobile. That's why they've been reallocating priorities, IMO. Just my opinion - but Wiki has listed Opera Software with $200 million revenue in 2012, a bunch of it coming from (apparently) an installed base of over 100 million mobile browsers and the app-store that the browsers can link to. Maybe Google ads give them some revenue. Their revenue has increased for 2012.

But - on the desktop, it's fading from the realm of niche OSes that take more resources than the provided revenue. I remember when Opera was a very nice alternative browser on the desktop, in the alternative OS genre. I paid for the Opera browser when it was sold (Personal copy I believe was about $40). Then they stopped charging for the browser, and went to an ad-revenue basis (and other things). Oh well. I like Chromium, although by default it lets you step out into the cold - goosepimple naked. All the browsers are doing that now.

I've been using Chromium, but will miss the big "O" Opera red banner on the screen.
 
taz said:
Well this is just great...the reason why I use Opera is because it has no GTK nor Qt dependencies. I could have lived (and I did) with the fact that it works purely on heavy Javascript pages, has/had some kind of copy/paste bug and crashes when I try to upload a file (new version fixed this) etc. But now I'm definitely dropping Opera and the question is what to replace it with?

For now I think I'm going to go with xombrero but for some time now I have been watching over one project that I have always had a plan switching to. It's not not ready yet for nowadays internet but, in time, it will be. It has the ability to run on frame buffers and this is why I'm so interested in it. NetSurf is the name.
Click to expand...

Yes - I looked at Netsurf too. I comb the world, looking for things that cost nothing and do everything. Jeeez, why can't it be? Something that will run with (as you say - few dependencies) and (perfect current web compliance). Ha!

Actually, the reason Opera was self contained is that it used a build of Qt statically linked into the executable. The statically built package was optional. You could get one with dependencies if you wanted.

You could get back some lost ground (with the unfortunate exit of Opera) by creating your own Qt/Webkit, statically built browser. I'd guess that it would take about a hundred lines of code to build a simple browser that could load this forum page fairly well.

Maybe.

Personally, I find that I do most casual browsing of the net, using WebPositive. It's a browser that works (only) on the Haiku OS. The rest of the time I'm on FreeBSD, Minix3, or something even more obscure. Minix3? Don't laugh - it has Xorg now, and a port to ARM! :)
 
ronaldlees said:
Opera has dropped the traditional platform, and gone almost entirely to mobile.
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You know I will agree with that, they have dropped the non mobile market like a hot potato with a burning fuse. And I think that might be a good thing for them if not us, they have always been a 3rd or 4th place in the browser wars and only really had any penetration in the mobile and other market.

While I wish them luck I do wish they would show some love to the traditional browser market.
 
Whattteva said:
How reliable is the JavaScript engine on it? Does it render Flash-based sites well? Their site mentions that HTTPS support is in alpha state and thus, very buggy. I think it's a deal-breaker for me.
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I dumped it, it was light, but it was too light. A lot of stuff did not render properly and/or just looked horrid.
 
In a way, I'm kind of glad. I used Opera on and off and it always had a few quirks with regards to rendering - not necessarily variance from the official specification, but real world applications that I need to use, weird behaviour with proxies occasionally, etc. But, the thing is, is that now there are only three rendering engines. All that needs to happen now is for the Mozilla guys to admit they screwed the pooch on Gecko, and then we're left with Webkit/Blink/KHTML (same original source) and whatever IE uses these days (Trident?). We're not quite pared down to a single unified de-facto standard rendering engine, but we're getting closer. IMHO, this is a good thing.
 
vermaden said:
For those missing Opera 12.x series (like me) there is an open source project to recreate the Opera 12.x feeling with Webkit: http://otter-browser.org/
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It seems they are Polish and Opera has Polish offices. Could they be former Opera employees?

The project looks very interesting. They've implemented an "advanced configuration page" similar to opera:config, which is a good thing. It also provides some improvements over Opera (e.g. private mode options).

However the choice of both Qt and WebKit doesn't appeal much to me. Yes, Opera was Qt-based in the past, and yes, Otter does have the potential to support other backends, but still.

We'll just have to wait and see...
 
Re:

Beastie said:
However the choice of both Qt and WebKit doesn't appeal much to me. Yes, Opera was Qt-based in the past, and yes, Otter does have the potential to support other backends, but still.
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It generally does not matter if it's QT4/QT5 or GTK2/GTK3, You would not use Opera if it would not be QT?

As for the WebKit choice, what else is left? Presto was not open-sourced by Opera.

For me it's not important if it's Gecko, Webkit or even Trident, I care about features/UI more.
 
A couple things of note. Opera now uses Blink which is, now, the same rendering engine for Chrome and neither use webkit anymore. The rendering engine is not the UI but handles how things are displayed in the viewport contained within the surround "chrome".
 
Re: Re:

vermaden said:
It generally does not matter if it's QT4/QT5 or GTK2/GTK3, You would not use Opera if it would not be QT?
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The very same day they started to support multiple toolkits, I set the DialogToolkit option to "4" (i.e. X11). That was/is the best: simplest, cleanest and lightest on resources.

vermaden said:
As for the WebKit choice, what else is left? Presto was not open-sourced by Opera.
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I'm very well aware of all that. Those browsers that rely on their own layout engines (e.g. NetSurf, Dillo, etc.) are most of the time too primitive for the modern Interwebs.
It's very unfortunate the biggest layout engines are also the hungriest.

vermaden said:
For me it's not important if it's Gecko, Webkit or even Trident, I care about features/UI more.
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Of course features and the UI are crucial, but the choice of layout engine is as important for me as it is for all those working on older hardware.
 
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