FreeBSD Handbook
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15.2 Browsers

FreeBSD does not come with a particular browser pre-installed. Instead, the www directory of the ports collection contains a lot of browsers ready to be installed. If you do not have time to compile everything (this can take a very long time in some cases) many of them are available as packages.

KDE and GNOME already provide HTML browsers. Please refer to Section 5.7 for more information on how to setup these complete desktops.

If you are looking for light-weight browsers, you should investigate the ports collection for www/dillo, www/links, or www/w3m.

This section covers these applications:

Application Name	Resources Needed	Installation from Ports	Major Dependencies
Mozilla	heavy	heavy	Gtk+
Netscape	heavy	light	Linux Binary Compatibility
Opera	light	light	Linux Binary Compatibility and linux-openmotif

15.2.1 Mozilla

Mozilla is perhaps the most suitable browser for your FreeBSD Desktop. It is modern, stable, and fully ported to FreeBSD. It features a very standards-compliant HTML display engine. It provides a mail and news reader. It even has a HTML composer if you plan to write some web pages yourself. Users of Netscape will recognize the similarities with Communicator suite, as both browsers shared the same basis.

On slow machines, with a CPU speed less than 233MHz or with less than 64MB of RAM, Mozilla can be too resource-consuming to be fully usable. You may want to look at the Opera browser instead, described a little later in this chapter.

If you cannot or do not want to compile Mozilla for any reason, the FreeBSD GNOME team has already done this for you. Just install the package from the network by:

    # pkg_add -r mozilla

If the package is not available, and you have enough time and disk space, you can get the source for Mozilla, compile it and install it on your system. This is accomplished by:

    # cd /usr/ports/www/mozilla
    # make install clean

The Mozilla port ensures a correct initialization by running the chrome registry setup with root privileges. However, if you want to fetch some add-ons like mouse gestures, you must run Mozilla as root to get them properly installed.

Once you have completed the installation of Mozilla, you do not need to be root any longer. You can start Mozilla as a browser by typing:

    % mozilla

You can start it directly as a mail and news reader as shown below:

    % mozilla -mail

15.2.2 Netscape

The ports collection contains several versions of the Netscape browser. Since the native FreeBSD ones contain a serious security bug, installing them is strongly discouraged. Instead, use a more recent Linux or DIGITAL UNIX version.

The latest stable release of the Netscape browser is Netscape 6. It can be installed from the ports collection:

    # cd /usr/ports/www/linux-netscape6
    # make install clean

There are localized versions in the French, German, and Japanese categories.

Caution: Netscape 4.x versions are not recommended because they are not compliant with today's standards. However, Netscape 6.x and newer versions are only available for the i386 platform.

15.2.3 Opera

Opera is a very fast, full-featured, and standards-compliant browser. It comes in two versions: one which displays advertising and one which costs money. You can buy an ad-free version on the Opera web site. It is released for Linux but runs flawlessly on FreeBSD.

To browse the Web with Opera, install the package:

    # pkg_add -r linux-opera

Some FTP sites do not have all the packages, but the same result can be obtained with the ports collection by typing:

    # cd /usr/port/www/linux-opera
    # make install clean