# Having Vivaldi browser in FreeBSD ? why not ?



## Phillipe Knopp (Jan 24, 2017)

Hey guys, first of all I am pretty novice here so feel free to warn me I am talking shit, I just want to "get involved" with FreeBSD.

Look, I've been having some (serious) trouble w/ Chromium, it crashes its ass off, it's impossible having Chromium for workstation, as I have already discussed that issue (in google plus communities) and some guys warned this buggy chromium "feature" has no guarantee to have an end I bumped into a (maybe) workaroud for this few-options-when-it-comes-to-webbrowsers headache.

In G+ official Vivaldi page I wrote the following to the guys:

*"Guys from Vivaldi, does Vivaldi support its use on BSD systems ? 
I run GhostBSD (which is made on top of FreeBSD) and want to run Vivaldi also, is it possible ?"*

And got the reply:

Vivaldi Browser
*Not at the moment, we've chatting with some FreeBSD users if they are interested in supporting Vivaldi for that distro. If you are please drop us a line via support@vivaldi.com *

So guys, I float that idea, wouldn't it be nice having a modern and fully-featured web browser like Vivaldi in our userland ?

Feel free to speak out.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jan 24, 2017)

Well, sure. Why not? Chromium would be my browser of choice but it's gotten too big for our maintainer to stay on top of but I like its integration with Google services. Firefox is great but doesn't integrate as well with Google services. Vivaldi won't integrate as well either but maybe it can gain by being smaller and faster.

I wouldn't want to discourage someone from doing this but, even as a web developer, we had little reason to test for Opera cause it saw no usage (for our clients).

So my perspective is only as one who likes integration to the services I use and, right now, that's Google stuff and that's the competition Vivaldi would face.


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## Phillipe Knopp (Jan 24, 2017)

drhowarddrfine said:


> Well, sure. Why not? Chromium would be my browser of choice but it's gotten too big for our maintainer to stay on top of but I like it's integration with Google services. Firefox is great but doesn't integrate as well with Google services. Vivaldi won't integrate as well either but maybe it can gain by being smaller and faster.
> 
> I wouldn't want to discourage someone from doing this but, even as a web developer, we had little reason to test for Opera cause it saw no usage (for our clients).
> 
> So my perspective is only as one who likes integration to the services I use and, right now, that's Google stuff and that's the competition Vivaldi would face.


Look, I discussed the Chromium issue in depth w/ guys in G+, it seems we have a wall preventing us from having chrome/chromium(properly working) in FreeBSD (I even suggested implore Chromium devs for some support in FreeBSD) IDK the relationship between top FreeBSD developers and Google so I cannot give opinion in this matter.

As for "integration with Google services" it's the key factor, I also use Chrome in Linux because this integration, I got a bit frustrated when I found out Chromium is a headache in FreeBSD, like you Chrome is the browser of choice for me too.

Sometimes we have to focus our eyes in a different option, Vivaldi is great, I've been testing it on Linux, having Vivaldi in FreeBSD would only add to us and to FreeBSD project in general.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jan 25, 2017)

Phillipe Knopp said:


> it seems we have a wall preventing us from having chrome/chromium(properly working)


That wall might only be a hardware issue. Recently, the maintainer talked about the build for Chromium extended beyond the 32GB of his machine making it difficult or impossible for him to fix some major, recent problems. I am surprised no one has offered to buy or lend him a new machine but it's greatly disturbing to me that a single piece of software is so large.


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## roddierod (Jan 25, 2017)

I use Vivaldi daily at work on my Windows machine and would welcome it on FreeBSD. But the fact that the Vivaldi people replies "that distro" doesn't look promising...but I'll them and email anyway.


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## Phillipe Knopp (Jan 25, 2017)

drhowarddrfine said:


> ...it's greatly disturbing to me that a single piece of software is so large.


I quite agree, even though I do like Chrome a lot it makes me wonder the monopoly Google is taking in its hands; as for Chrome being really big, I don't
know whether you have noticed, Google is turning Chrome into a O.S., it's no more simply a web browser, and there's a trend of Chrome to become even bigger, it won't decrease only increase.

So we have one more reason to adopt/support a new, modern and fully-featured web browser like Vivaldi, we get out from that Google services monopoly.


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## Phillipe Knopp (Jan 25, 2017)

roddierod said:


> But the fact that the Vivaldi people replies "that distro" doesn't look promising...but I'll them and email anyway.


Sometimes we get wrong in our words, everyone know FreeBSD is no Linux, maybe because he's talking about a FOSS O.S. he is used to using that word (distro) since 95% of the talk about FOSS O.S.'s is about Linux.


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## xmj (Jun 6, 2017)

By now this is actively being worked upon


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## Beastie (Jun 6, 2017)

Like many others for the better part of the last decade, I trusted one company to provide us with a great browser. And they did, first as an adware then as a freeware. Despite what many of its detractors used to say, it was actually the best, for me and many others.
But business being business (and we all know how nice the browser business always was/is), this was bound to end (badly). They ended up not caring much what users thought about the annoying bugs that accumulated over time, or about moving to another layout engine, and redesigning the entire interface, and removing many pioneering features that made it what it was, and promising these would be reintroduced in due time, and breaking these promises time and again, etc.

I don't blame them. Really. A corporation gotta be profitable one way or another and apparently it wasn't, so change was necessary. Things just didn't really go the way we wanted them to, confusion ensued and the rest is history.

While I'm aware of Mr. von Tetzchner's opinion on all this, it's not enough for me, I'm not convinced, and none of this makes Vivaldi Tech the "good guys". I don't trust them any more than I trust Opera ASA today.

There are tons of open-source browsers based on WebKit or Chromium/Blink or both. For me, their status as open-source is a guarantee that history won't repeat itself because there will always be someone who can carry on from where it was left.

If Vivaldi ever gets ported to FreeBSD (which I doubt), yay! Good for <anyone who wants to use it>! Congrats! Yada yada yada... Personally, I don't care and I don't care that they don't care that I don't care.

</rant>


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## Naumi (Jul 29, 2017)

I have asked Yandex to provide their Yandex.Browser (which is based on Chromium and Opera browser technologies) also for FreeBSD.

Yandex does support and uses FreeBSD:

https://events.yandex.com/events/ruBSD/2013/
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/nutshell.html

There's hope.


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## Menelkir (Mar 16, 2021)

Sorry to necro this, but if anyone is interested: https://vivaldi.com/source/
It'll probably needs lots of chimichangas to build, but hey!


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## astyle (May 5, 2021)

www/chromium is in ports these days, and reasonably up to date. A bit of a heads up: Last I checked, Chrome had no cache management, and it was VERY difficult to even find a setting to tune it. That was a dealbreaker for me.


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