OpenBSD Journal

OpenBSD needs a Mozilla vote

Contributed by jose on from the working-web-browsers dept.

Another Anonymous Coward writes:
"an "Anonymous Coward" posted this message in the "OpenBSD Gazetteer" thread. I think it deserves front page attention.

"This isn't really pertinent, but always useful:

Can we get some more people to vote on the mozilla/openbsd bug here: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=124958

There are only 40 votes at present, which is pretty sad. You *do* have to register to vote, but it takes about 20 seconds, and the more votes we get the greater the chances of getting some support from the Mozilla coders."

A couple of years ago I spoke to a Mozilla developer about OpenBSD. They knew of problems but didn't have any hardware or people helping out. Looks like things are still pretty much the same. I think that a combination of votes, hardware, and people within Mozilla would make a dent, but that's a pretty steep request. Start with a vote, testing, patches, and such. Reportedly the current version of Mozilla works as well as the previous version did, which means some patches and some lingering problems. No reason we can't fix this.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By jolan () on

    If you can read between the lines of Theo's hinting at a "big change to i386 coming after 3.3 that will cause it to not be upgrade-able", and are familiar with the Mozilla situation, this means Mozilla won't work much longer.

    It should be noted that the Mozilla guys still haven't committed the patches OpenBSD needs. These patches have been floating around for awhile.

    Even though I would love to have Mozilla *really* working on OpenBSD, I have no more effort left in me to play around.

    BTW, people have asked why it isn't in ports if it works. It's a fluke that it works. You have to statically link it. Look:

    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 16846848 Mar 13 23:13 mozilla-bin

    Almost 17mb!@ This is unacceptable. It should be noted that something weird happens in the ports packaging so installing it via ports makes it unusable.

    Even if Mozilla did work, it doesn't support IPV6 on OpenBSD, which is a big minus for it imho.

    Konqueror 3.1 is great and we might see a new version of konq-e soon. Of course, someone could write their own KHTML-based browser like Apple did...

    Comments

    1. By schubert () on

      yup. yup. I have this small feeling in the back of my head that eventually, someone, somewhere is going to get fed up and write a safari-ish like browser based off of KHTML. But not me :-) I've got enough monkeys to tend to currently.

      And to anyone else reading this thread. If anyone knows about how problematic mozilla is on openbsd, its jolan.

    2. By _azure () on

      I have shitloads of RAM and compiled with static libs. Works okay and is pretty stable. Beats the dogshit out of crash-o-matic Opera under Linux emulation -- at least for now.

      As graphical browsers go, it beats Netscape 4.x on this platform hands down.

      All criticisms noted.

      Comments

      1. By ViPER () viper@dmrt.net on http://www.dmrt.net

        > I have shitloads of RAM and compiled with static libs.

        Everybody has these days (wakeup bit nickers)
        That doesn't change the fact that it takes
        his time on a 3.06 xeon on a 15 lvd disk.
        Did you ever considerd using konq-e ?
        The stripped down konqueror, ninja fast, forum
        friendly and without all bulsh*t you prob.
        don't want in a browser

        [Note for it's needy deps, but then again, ]
        [We are talking about a workstation right ? ]

        > As graphical browsers go, it beats Netscape 4.x

        Lynx beats netscape v4 ;)

        Comments

        1. By _azure () on

          Yes, all noted. I've looked at Konqueror but haven't spent a lot of time using it yet. Probably next on the list.

    3. By Anonymous Coward () on

      jolan has been doing execellent work on trying to get mozilla working *correctly* on OpenBSD, but it is very hard to find out what is wrong. Our only hope is that mozilla developers will notice the votes and try to fix things. Maybe on day, mozilla will run on ELF and without being statically linked.

  2. By mike () http://www.nedyah.org/feedback.asp?rel=deadly on http://www.nedyah.org

    I think I've heard of that. Its like lynx only slower, right?

    If you need to use Mozilla on OpenBSD, I wish you the best of luck. Never was an issue for me, though.

    M

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward () on

      Nobody was talking about you.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward () on

        Damn girl, you went all flame on his ass!

  3. By Anonymous Coward () on

    Fuck mozilla; it is a piece of crap.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward () on

      you kiss your mother with that mouth? WTF would Miss Manners say?

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward () on

        you so crazy

    2. By Anonymous Coward () on

      compared to your replacement? nice. hand over the URL. :)

  4. By Anonymous Coward () on

    ELF will make it easier

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward () on

      it won't work on ELF

  5. By jtorin () smpkll@NO.myrealbox.SPAM.com on mailto:smpkll@NO.myrealbox.SPAM.com

    According to the list Bugzilla gives me (which I presume is listed sorted accordingly to how many votes a bug has recieved) this bug is ranked number 11. So I guess voting really makes a difference... maybe. While I don't think this bug will be fixed magically tomorrow, we can atleast make our voices heard.

    For those people complaining about the bloat of Mozilla, I can't do more than agree. However, having a "mainstream" browser available can come handy, for example if you want to view or run some very specialized page/site (as my Internetbank ).

    I took time to search through the list for "OpenBSD" and voted for two other bugs.

  6. By Anonymous Coward () on

    anyone else played around with phoenix recently? it is considerably more lightweight than mozilla (no mail, no ldap, no whatnot) and IMHO the best browser currently.

    since it has less features/dependencies perhaps it would be easier to fix?

    Comments

    1. By stephan () on

      i'm using dillo on openbsd 3.2
      some pages dont look nice, but it's really lightweight, fast and also small (i think)....
      :) yes, i like it.

    2. By Anonymous Coward () on

      phoenix is a god send, period.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward () on

        It maybe a god send, but it crashes the same way mozilla does :(

  7. By Morsello () morsello@tecno21.com.br on mailto:morsello@tecno21.com.br

    Run Opera 6 for Linux on OpenBSD.

    It's more stable on OpenBSD than FreeBSD native version, and have less then 5 Mbytes.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward () on

      Yeah and it works great on macppc and alpha arches too!

    2. By Anonymous Coward () on

      And always remember to type capital "B" to crash it as needed

    3. By _azure () on

      My experience with using Opera over the last year has been spotty. The state-saving feature is handy after frequent crashes -- but then there is the issue of the frequent crashes.

      And it's not just capital B that crashes it. On my installation, any key pressed while the cursor isn't in a webform or address box will crash the browser.

      It would be perfectly sufficient for my needs if it was more stable.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward () morsello@tecno21.com.br on mailto:morsello@tecno21.com.br

        Well, I'm an old Opera user, since the times that it fits on a single floppy, and have no sponsored
        version.

        Version 6 was the worse version they have ever made.

        This version crashes frequently on Windows too, and have a horrendous memory leak that fills
        all available memory after long usage.
        And if you enable Java support, it crashes
        frequently.

        I presume that this version was released by too soon by maketing pressures, since this problems
        wasn't common on Opera's history.

        But, if you need a browser to look sites outside
        your disk or OpenBSD FAQ, almost you have an option.

        And I hope that the new version 7 as so good
        and stable as Windows version, that seems a
        return to the speed and compatibility track
        that Opera's used to.

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward () on

          Well I'm an old netscape user (since 2.x)...
          every new version came out as real pain - slower and much less stable than previous (so i'd stick with 4.8 for now), builtin java support on OpenBSD does not work (netscape whether linux or bsd/os freezes while loading applet), so i think emulators are not the way to go, so i am a proud konqueror user when it comes to java(1.3), and use netscape(4) to view flash only...

          Comments

          1. By Anonymous Coward () on

            Me too!

            I changed to Opera on Windows after Netscape
            changes to 4.x versions: fat, slow and buggy
            ones.

            Konqueror is promissing, but until I can use
            it on my Home-Banking or on MS-IE oriented portals, I will tolerate crash and restarts
            of Opera.

            I don't consider Java support the real issue
            on today web browsers, applets are became rare.

            But a good JavaScript engine and plugin support are fundamental to have essential functionality
            on many sites.

            Looking to delay that MS-IE have to support to Netscape's Javascript and Opera on follow MS-IE
            JScript behavior, Konkeror may require a couple
            of years to acchive this stage.

            Comments

            1. By Previous Coward () on

              There is no netscape nor netscape plugins on OpenBSD, except those for some emulation, usable by other apps in that emulation mode (dlopen works this way)

  8. By Anonymous Coward () on http://www.muhri.net/skipstone/

    naddy@ mentioned this a while ago, as did some anonymous coward (not me) for another topic. It needs mozilla headers and libs, but other than that it's supposed to be fast, small, and render well.

    So: anyone get it to work? I tried, and thanks to Jolan's efforts got mozilla to build but couldn't get skipstone to build also.

  9. By Anonymous Coward () on

    20 more votes gets this bug in the top 6. It currently has 148 votes. Number 6 has 167.

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