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Native Version Of Opera browser for FreeBSD

Posted by Hemos on from the get-it-working dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Norway based Opera Software finally released a native FreeBSD version of its fast, standard based browser yesterday. The browser has been available in the ports tree as an app running in Linux binary environment. Opera 6.1 is the first version released for FreeBSD, it has the same set of features as the Linux version."

3 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. This along with Pheonix... by questionlp · · Score: 5, Informative

    I think a native release of Opera 6.x for FreeBSD and the recent announcement of Pheonix would add two nice lighter weight [graphical] web browsers to FreeBSD. I've been using Mozilla 1.0 and 1.1 under FreeBSD (along with the Java 1.3.1 JDK, using both the regular and the Linux ports of JDK 1.3.1) and it runs fine... with the exception that it can get quite sluggish.

    Running the Linux version of Opera 6 on FreeBSD is faster than the native build of Mozilla, but getting the plug-ins to work has been a bit of a hit and miss.

    Now what would be great would be a native version of the Macromedia Flash plug-in for FreeBSD :)

    1. Re:This along with Pheonix... by LizardKing · · Score: 3, Informative

      If you're finding Mozilla sluggish, and haven't compiled it from source, then perhaps you want to look into rolling your own distribution. I've just built the latest nightly release on my NetBSD box, using "-O2 -march=i686" as the optimisation flags. It runs *very* snappily on my 1.2Ghz Celeron laptop, and is still usable on my 233Mhz desktop machine.

      Chris

    2. Re:This along with Pheonix... by evilviper · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Pheonix isn't nearly ready yet... but if you want lightweight, go for Dillo!

      Personally, I could care less about Opera plugins, what I hate is how often it's crashing. If it wasn't for the fact that it saves all URLs, I'd be too concerned about crases to use it at all.

      As for Flash, I won't take it even if was available. And by the way, the GPLed Flash player works natively with Mozilla (check the ports), although there's a lot of instability there. I suppose a decent browser like Opera might fare better than Mozilla.

      My qualms with Opera:
      * Lowsy printing (often garbled and overlaping text)
      and
      * It's based on QT, so interoperability with my GTK programs has been a strugle (Copy and paste into Abiword doesn't work)
      * Terribly lowsy interface. Even with it's billions of options, Mozilla's preferences are easier to work with than Opera's.
      * Unfortunate method for handling tabs. When closing a tab, instead of going to the tab left or right, it jumps through them in the most recently used order. Bah!

      That said, if it proves to be stable, I'll be quickly handing over the cash to register it. I really hope they distribute a version for OpenBSD as well (it should only need a recompile).

      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant