Firefox for BSDs? reddit / BSD ---------------------------------------------------------------------- koavf · 2019-09-21 09:04 I am considering switching to a BSD release but it looks like the support for Firefox on the various distributions is spotty and unofficial. What is the experience like using Firefox on BSD? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kyleW_ne · 2019-09-21 09:30 Switched to FreeBSD earlier this year. Firefox is supported as a binary package. Sometimes I get a core file and it crashes but it is infrequent. I would say 3 crashes in 2 months so far. I've also got chromium installed and have had no core files from it. Both work well. Video playback on my Nvidia card is smooth as butter all the way up to 720p if I really wanted to push my slow Internet connection. I'm an online student so have to watch videos for my classes frequently and am able to in Firefox ok every week. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-09-21 10:02 I get Firefox releases on freebsd faster than I did on arch. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gnemmi · 2019-09-21 10:07 No. Firefox doesn't care about BSD. If it works better or worse in a BSD or the other, it's just because the BSD in case has the man power to patch it all up ... https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/ch6gk0/firefox_on_dragonfly_ and_16_yo_open_bugzilla/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share ---------------------------------------------------------------------- icantthinkofone · 2019-09-21 12:02 I haven't a clue what you, or any of the commentors, are talking about. I am always up-to-date to the current Firefox version as soon as they come out and have no issues with it whatsoever as my daily browser on FreeBSD. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-09-21 12:35 I never had any issues with Firefox on FreeBSD. My only major headache was gpu-based video acceleration which doesn't exist, even on Chromium. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-09-21 13:57 69.0.1 (32-bit) runs like Firefox, smells like Firefox and is Firefox. -freebsd ---------------------------------------------------------------------- qci · 2019-09-21 17:09 Did you read the pkg-message for Firefox? It could help you. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- qci · 2019-09-21 17:11 This is about DragonFly BSD. One of the smallest distributions. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- qci · 2019-09-21 17:13 I changed to Iridium browser a while ago, but I haven't had technical problems with Firefox on FreeBSD. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- koavf · 2019-09-21 17:55 > I haven't a clue what you, or any of the commentors, are talking about. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Firefox&oldid=916877291#Uno fficial_ports ---------------------------------------------------------------------- icantthinkofone · 2019-09-21 18:00 I still have no clue what you are talking about. Your wikipedia link even states FreeBSD supports the current version of Firefox. The version I have is the current version as shown on the Mozilla site. Instead of looking at wikipedia, you should look at the official FreeBSD ports collection: [https://www.freshports.org/www/firefox/](ht tps://www.freshports.org/www/firefox/) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gnemmi · 2019-09-21 19:39 Still the same thing. Firefox doesn't support BSDs. Is the other way around: BSDs support Firefox. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- koavf · 2019-09-21 19:48 > I still have no clue what you are talking about. What I wrote was "support for Firefox on the various distributions is spotty and unofficial." The fact that the headline here is "unofficial ports" should clarify the second claim I made: these are unofficial. The first part is that the support is spotty: OpenBSD has an older version, still supported that is nine revs back; Free/DragonFly BSD is up-to-date; NetBSD isn't listed at all. I'm confused as to what is confusing. As I said, I am not looking solely at FreeBSD, so knowing what the support situation is for Open and Net is useful. It's also good to know if the support is personality-dependent for some unofficial port that could get unmaintained for a couple of years because the one guy doing it gets a new job and gets busy. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- koavf · 2019-09-21 19:50 > BSDs support Firefox This seems to be what I see. What do BSD users have as web browsers if not Firefox? What is most common? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gnemmi · 2019-09-21 19:55 Chromium is the go to browser. You still have many others to choose from like Seamonkey, Palemoon, Falkon ... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gnemmi · 2019-09-21 20:04 >if the support is personality-dependent for some unofficial port that could get unmaintained Yes. That's the case. And that one guy (or team) does get tired of working on something that Firefox doesn't care about at all ... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- koavf · 2019-09-21 20:04 Hm. That's unfortunate. I would definitely end up with SeaMonkey or Palemoon but I'm concerned about their ability to keep up with Web standards. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gnemmi · 2019-09-21 20:08 Indeed .. but it seems the Mozilla Foundation likes it that way. You can safely use Chromium though. It is heavily patched for security and stability. Falkon is another viable alternative. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- VENTDEV · 2019-09-21 21:37 I have used Firefox on FreeBSD since quantum was released. I have never had any problems with it. The only thing it lacks is widevine for DRM video playback. Beyond that, you get updates as frequently as any other OS, it is as unstable as running on any Linux distribution. As is the case with most FOSS software running on BSD. Before that, I used Seamonkey. I been using Seamonkey (Gecko) on FreeBSD desktops for almost a decade. Also a small nit-pick, there are very few "Distributions" in BSD. BSD is not Linux. All the major BSDs are entirely different operating systems with no common development like GNU/Linux. (There are a couple of FreeBSD distros, but you're most likely not referring to them.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- koavf · 2019-09-21 22:40 > The only thing it lacks is widevine for DRM video playback. Excellent. >very few "Distributions" Thanks. How would I rename this? "Varieties", "versions"? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- koavf · 2019-09-21 22:41 I'm Firefox, ride or die. Not interested in using Google (minus my contact info :/) but I appreciate the feedback. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gnemmi · 2019-09-21 22:52 So am I, and have been ever since Firefox saw its first release. But the thing is: they don't care about BSD, you nor me .. so we have to do the best that we can with what we have .. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- icantthinkofone · 2019-09-21 23:38 "Unofficial port" means Firefox does not provide a port for FreeBSD. The maintainer on FreeBSD is "gecko" which has its own mailing list because it's considered an important port. There is no one person who does this. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- VENTDEV · 2019-09-21 23:51 > > The only thing it lacks is widevine for DRM video playback. > Excellent. That's actually a bad thing if you want to legally watch video content online through certain streaming providers. > > very few "Distributions" > Thanks. How would I rename this? "Varieties", "versions"? "BSDs" is how I would phrase it. Or "OS's" would work. But yeah, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD... they're all separate operating systems. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- koavf · 2019-09-22 02:04 > That's actually a bad thing if you want to legally watch video content online through certain streaming providers. I'm fine with not using DRM. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- laffer1 · 2019-09-22 05:19 FreeBSD and OpenBSD are partially "blessed" by mozilla in that they can call it firefox and they have dedicated people who keep it ported/updated. No OS can ship anything called "firefox" or using their artwork without a lot of hoops. Further, in order to actually port a modern firefox using quantum, you must have support for recent versions of Rust. Since the rust programming language is tightly coupled with specific LLVM/clang versions, it is quite difficult to keep going. The FreeBSD devs have some fans in the LLVM community so they get the magic support. If you're a small project, even getting an LLVM patchset upstreamed is nearly impossible. That's a dependency to even try to build rust. In turn, it's needed for firefox. Similarly, the mozilla devs require a ton of hoops. Small projects don't have the resources to re-port firefox manually for every release. That's why you don't see Firefox builds for smaller projects. Why this sucks is that it's a justification not to use something. it's a chicken and egg situation. You can't get upstreamed so you can't get firefox. Users demand firefox. Thus you get stuck. The easiest thing to port is webkit. It has a semi standard build system. It's not dependent on anything too crazy or challenging to port. It's also possible to get some things upstreamed. You'll note that the projects had to pull linux binaries for firefox in the last few years too due to compatibility issues and system calls that aren't supported by linux emulation. Tracking browsers is a full time job. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gnemmi · 2019-09-22 07:53 Thank you for explaining clearly what goes on behind the scenes in order to get Firefox releases to run on BSD .. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- laffer1 · 2019-09-22 14:39 I understand if you're into firefox. As I mentioned previously, webkit based browsers like midori and epiphany (gnome web) are an option. I've managed to get Epiphany to play youtube videos and do most things on the web. Sites tend to detect it as safari since it's the same engine. In some versions, it can also do bookmark sync. You just install gstreamer1 plugins to get all the video stuff working and you can check it with [html5test.com](https://html5test.com) or just by going to youtube. You do have to restart the browser if you need to add more for it to detect though. I'd assume it would work on dragonfly as I've got both webkit frontends working on MidnightBSD. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PaperChromatogram · 2019-09-22 16:12 hi, current arch user here, thinking of switching to freeBSD. Anything you think I should know, good or bad? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-09-22 18:14 Not offhand, feel free to PM me though if you're stuck on something happy to help. Use the handbook for sure. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PaperChromatogram · 2019-09-23 17:37 alright, I was going to use the handbook (although it does seem a little out-of-date in some places...) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Kernigh · 2019-09-24 22:14 I am writing this comment in Firefox for OpenBSD. This is my main browser for desktop. Here are 3 problems with Firefox on OpenBSD: 1. As of OpenBSD 6.5, Firefox only runs on i386 and amd64. Other platforms don't have Firefox. Years ago, I used Firefox on OpenBSD/macppc. Now I can't, because Firefox needs Rust, and Rust doesn't work on macppc. Some other platforms have Rust, so I wonder why they don't have Firefox. 2. Firefox on OpenBSD is sometimes an old version with security vulnerabilities. The volunteers don't always backport the newest Firefox from OpenBSD-current to the last release of OpenBSD. I might switch to Firefox ESR, because ESR might have a better chance of backported fixes. 3. Firefox can use too much RAM. Websites break when Firefox reaches 1536M, the default datasize-cur for staff in OpenBSD. I needed to edit /etc/login.conf and raise my datasize-cur to 3G. I test with [asm.js chess](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft- edge/testdrive/demos/chess/): if it can't play chess, then my limit is too low. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- koavf · 2019-09-24 22:47 Thanks—this is very helpful. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- illumosguy · 2019-09-25 08:57 I've been using Seamonkey on *BSD as my primary browser for more than decade ;) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 0x3639 · 2019-09-25 13:37 There's some good info in this comment I didn't know. Thanks for that. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- koavf · 2019-09-25 17:01 Are you not concerned about Gecko becoming outdated and unsafe? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mgladiethor · 2019-09-28 15:36 Don't ---------------------------------------------------------------------- illumosguy · 2019-09-30 11:28 yes, but in the eventuality this factually became a major concern and a serioous threat one day, I'd rather switch to either Goanna on Palemoon or currently maintaned browsers based on webkit-gtk+ (midori, luakit, epiphany)