[OpenIndiana-discuss] Newer versions of Firefox -- What About Chrome?

[jay at m5.chicago.il.us]

ken mays <maybird1776 at yahoo.com> wrote on Thu, 13 Aug 2015 11:14:15 +0000 (UTC):

>
> Also, after what Peter said, here are the current porting efforts of
> the newer Firefox releases to OI-hipster:
>
> 1. Firefox 40.0 - Reviewed yesterday for porting. Passed all
>    dependency checks. In progress. Porting efforts based on pkgsrc
>    (ryo). See:?http://pkgsrc.se/www/firefox
> 2. Firefox 38.2.0esr - porting to OI-hipster. In progress. Main
>    production workflow effort.
> 3. Firefox 37 - ported and tested by Martin Bochnig, OpenSXCE.
>    See: http://openindiana.org/pipermail/openindiana-discuss/2015-March/017390.html
> 4. Firefox 31.8.0esr - ported and tested by Oracle. OI-hipster
>    specific test builds are still in oi-dev testing phase.
>
> Thanks for asking, Ken
> 

I am running Solaris 11.2 on one of my computers, the latest version
of Solaris available for download from Oracle (at least, as of a month
ago, when I downloaded and installed it).  It comes with Firefox ESR
17.0.11.  As far as I can tell, it works fine, I am completely
satisfied with it.  Why is it important to get Firefox 40.0 (this is
not a rhetorical question, I want to know)?  What I would really like
to get -- not as a replacement for Firefox, but to supplement it -- is
Chrome.  How come I never see anyone discussing porting Chrome?  It
is, after all, an open-source product.  Hasn't anyone else been
interested in getting Chrome working on OpenSolaris-derived systems?

And, speaking of OpenSXCE (from which one can apparently obtain a
working version of Firefox 37) -- there was a huge amount of
discussion on this mailing list a while back about OpenSXCE.  I do not
want to re-awaken those sleeping threads, I truly do not want to read
any more postings about whether the man who gave us OpenSXCE is
irredeemably and irretrievably antisocial, or whether it is moral to
donate money to someone whose political sympathies lie with people who
blow up schoolbuses.  I just have one question, which is, why do
people care so much?  As far as I can tell, OpenSXCE is a
closed-source OS, is it not?  I recall seeing a whole lot of postings
where people were pleading with the man who gave us OpenSXCE to open
up the source, and he was refusing, and please let us not reopen the
debate about whether his reasons were intelligible, but am I right
that OpenSXCE is currently closed-source?  If so, why would anyone
want it?  Just because it has Firefox version 37?  Is Firefox version
37 really so much better than Firefox 17.0.11?  It seems to me, that
if I'm going to run a closed-source OpenSolaris-derived OS, it may as
well be Solaris.  I'm running Solaris 11.2, as I said before, and
"zpool upgrade -v" goes up to 35, including things like encryption and
sharing with inheritance, and "zfs upgrade -v" goes up to 6, which is
multilevel file system support, I have no idea what that is but it
must be wonderful.  I understand not wanting to run a closed-source
OS, but if you're going to, shouldn't one prefer Solaris?  What am I
missing?


                        Jay F. Shachter
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