Hi, Mayuresh wrote:
Periodically, the topic of alternatives to firefox, particularly lightweight ones but with JS support, keeps coming. E.g. threads [1] of 2016 and [2] of 2018 and this of 2020.
I think these "voices" will come up over and over, given the "trends" of the mozilla foundation with Firefox after FF 52 ESR, rustc, interface changes, giving up of seamonkey and thunderbird, etc etc.
A path to explore are various Firefox forks, tried any of them? there are many, unfortunately it is a bit of a diaspora, some kept better than others.
My current favourite is ArcticFox [1] on which I contribute vastly myself too. It is actually a fork of PaleMoon 27 (another browser which you can pursue, it is nice, especially the new 28 version, but the packaging poses issues, so e.g. it was removed from OpenBSD and other distros) and I do not pose any limitations on redistribution.
It works and compiles on NetBSD x86 and amd64 because [2] I do test it.It is lighter and more pleasant to use with the old interface, I'm addicted to it. As compatibility expect something between FF40 and FF45 which is acceptable for many sites and better than "alternative browsers". You can watch you tube, browse wikipedia.... even with care use Facebook.
Progress compared to PM27 is immense and a big thing is that it compiles with any gcc up to 10 on NetBSD and Linux! no more fiddling with gcc 4.8 (last release comes up to gcc 6.5 though, dev branch is gcc restriction free)
Known broken things are github (well, it is broken almost anywhere if you don't have latest FF or Chrome... so), videoconferencing (WebRTC needs to be disabled like in PaleMoon [3]
Let me know if you want to play, help, try to compile it yourself or need a binary. Or maybe it could even go in pkgsrc I just tried *today* to compile on NetBSD/9.1 on my ThinkPad T30 (Pentium4M) and it comes up fine...
Riccardo[1] Official site: https://github.com/wicknix/Arctic-Fox while my working repository is (where 99% of development is done) : https://github.com/rmottola/Arctic-Fox [2] with quite some work I got it to "compile" on SPARC64 but it crashes on startup, help appreciated [3] I actually tried to put support back in, optional, but it fails yet to compile, help appreciated