Opera Software drops support for Solaris
Guy
The setting Sun
By Ruari �degaard. Thursday, 29. April 2010, 13:37:08
In order to ensure a consistently high quality browser
across our most popular desktop platforms we have
reluctantly decided to drop support for Solaris. This will
allow our UNIX development team to focus all of their
attention on bringing Opera for Linux and FreeBSD up to
final release quality, meaning that a 10.5x release for
these platforms will happen as soon as feasibly possible.
Please be assured that we have no plans to drop support for
either Linux or FreeBSD. These are the preferred UNIX-like
environments of our development team and hence fully
supporting a browser on these Operating Systems is more
straightforward.
As always, the Desktop team will continue to consider
adding support for further environments and/or processor
architectures in the future.
"The setting Sun." Opera Desktop Team. 2010 Opera Software.
29 April 2010 <http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2010/04/29/the-setting-sun>
Richard L. Hamilton
browser on Solaris (although you folks do seem to have a problem
getting Flash to work on SPARC).
DoN. Nichols
>
> The setting Sun
>
>
> In order to ensure a consistently high quality browser
> across our most popular desktop platforms we have
> reluctantly decided to drop support for Solaris. This will
> allow our UNIX development team to focus all of their
> attention on bringing Opera for Linux and FreeBSD up to
> final release quality, meaning that a 10.5x release for
> these platforms will happen as soon as feasibly possible.
This is quite unfortunate. I've been wondering why I kept
getting notices about updates but when I clicked, I got only the one
which I was currently running.
It would have been nice to make this notice visible on the web
site, instead of forcing me to find out about the newsgroups, and
discover that my news server did carry the opera.* newsgroups to read
this notice.
Solaris is the *only* OS which I use for browsing, and the only
other which I allow to touch the outside net from my domain is OpenBSD,
which you also do not support.
I certainly will not allow Windows to touch the net from my
domain.
> Please be assured that we have no plans to drop support for
> either Linux or FreeBSD. These are the preferred UNIX-like
> environments of our development team and hence fully
> supporting a browser on these Operating Systems is more
> straightforward.
This would be better if I actually *used* either of these for
web browsing. I don't even run FreeBSD, and the only Linux box is being
used to run a weather station (and is accessed remotely most of the
time, not at the console), not as a browsing box.
O.K. It is downloaded for the linux box -- and works on remote
sites, but I need to do more configuring to get it to work on the local
sites. And it is slower (displaying over the net) than the last version
for Solaris 10 on a Sun Blade 2000 with dual 1.2 GHz CPUs.
> As always, the Desktop team will continue to consider
> adding support for further environments and/or processor
> architectures in the future.
I wish that you would reconsider continuing support for Solaris.
In the meanwhile I see that I might as well turn off
update notification on the Solaris systems.
> "The setting Sun." Opera Desktop Team. 2010 Opera Software.
> 29 April 2010 <http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2010/04/29/the-setting-sun>
So -- there *was* a web visible notice -- with lots of
followups.
I wonder whether anyone will follow this newsgroup any more --
and whether I perhaps need to do this again from the web entry?
Anyway -- in response to the very early comment "all three of
them" (referring to SPARC-based Solaris users of Opera), I can state
that there are three of us within a single residential block in a small
town in Virginia. (My wife, myself, and a friend across the street.)
I'm not sure whether his wife also uses Opera -- but she is on Windows,
so that does not apply to this discussion.
Thank you,
DoN.
--
Remove oil spill source from e-mail
Email: <BPdnic...@d-and-d.com> | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
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--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---
Eirik Byrkjeflot Anonsen
> On 2010-04-29, Guy <Use-Reply-To-Address-Header@[127.1]> wrote:
>>
>> The setting Sun
>>
>> By Ruari Ødegaard. Thursday, 29. April 2010, 13:37:08
>>
>> In order to ensure a consistently high quality browser
>> across our most popular desktop platforms we have
>> reluctantly decided to drop support for Solaris. This will
>> allow our UNIX development team to focus all of their
>> attention on bringing Opera for Linux and FreeBSD up to
>> final release quality, meaning that a 10.5x release for
>> these platforms will happen as soon as feasibly possible.
>
> This is quite unfortunate. I've been wondering why I kept
> getting notices about updates but when I clicked, I got only the one
> which I was currently running.
>
> It would have been nice to make this notice visible on the web
> site, instead of forcing me to find out about the newsgroups, and
> discover that my news server did carry the opera.* newsgroups to read
> this notice.
Yes, I can definitely see scope for improvement here. At the very
least, the download page should clearly say that support for Solaris has
been discontiued. And the update notice should probably also have
included a message to that effect.
> Solaris is the *only* OS which I use for browsing, and the only
> other which I allow to touch the outside net from my domain is OpenBSD,
> which you also do not support.
I don't know much about the differences between the BSDs, but I assume
our FreeBSD builds do not easily run on OpenBSD?
> I certainly will not allow Windows to touch the net from my
> domain.
:)
[...]
>> "The setting Sun." Opera Desktop Team. 2010 Opera Software.
>> 29 April 2010 <http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2010/04/29/the-setting-sun>
>
> So -- there *was* a web visible notice -- with lots of
> followups.
I don't think a blog post counts as an official notice, though.
Particularly not when the download pages make no mention of the fact.
That's clearly a failure on our part.
> I wonder whether anyone will follow this newsgroup any more --
> and whether I perhaps need to do this again from the web entry?
Well, I'll probably be subscribed as long as the list exists. There's
not enough posts here to force me to leave :)
But I haven't been involved in Solaris (or even desktop opera) for many
years now...
> Anyway -- in response to the very early comment "all three of
> them" (referring to SPARC-based Solaris users of Opera), I can state
> that there are three of us within a single residential block in a small
> town in Virginia. (My wife, myself, and a friend across the street.)
> I'm not sure whether his wife also uses Opera -- but she is on Windows,
> so that does not apply to this discussion.
I'm sure the people who made the decision have a fairly good idea about
how many Solaris users we have/had. I'm sure the number is way below
what makes business sense, and have been for a while. I think I have
heard remarks about that for many years already.
I remember when we first made Solaris support official. The main reason
it took as long as it did was because once we made it official we could
not easily drop it again. I assume this attitude is still true today.
eirik
DoN. Nichols
> "DoN. Nichols" <BPdnic...@d-and-d.com> writes:
>
>> On 2010-04-29, Guy <Use-Reply-To-Address-Header@[127.1]> wrote:
>>>
>>> The setting Sun
>>>
>>> By Ruari Ødegaard. Thursday, 29. April 2010, 13:37:08
>>>
>>> In order to ensure a consistently high quality browser
>>> across our most popular desktop platforms we have
>>> reluctantly decided to drop support for Solaris. This will
[ ... ]
>> It would have been nice to make this notice visible on the web
>> site, instead of forcing me to find out about the newsgroups, and
>> discover that my news server did carry the opera.* newsgroups to read
>> this notice.
>
> Yes, I can definitely see scope for improvement here. At the very
> least, the download page should clearly say that support for Solaris has
> been discontinued. And the update notice should probably also have
> included a message to that effect.
That would have helped. I seem to remember that there was some
way to turn off the update notice -- but I couldn't find it last night. :-)
Is there no way to make the notices platform dependent?
>> Solaris is the *only* OS which I use for browsing, and the only
>> other which I allow to touch the outside net from my domain is OpenBSD,
>> which you also do not support.
>
> I don't know much about the differences between the BSDs, but I assume
> our FreeBSD builds do not easily run on OpenBSD?
I don't know? Since it explicitly said "FreeBSD" rather than
just "BSD" I didn't think to download it and try it.
And -- of course -- most of the OpenBSD systems which I have
contacting the outside net are based on UltraSPARC systems instead of
Intel CPUs -- so your binaries for FreeBSD are almost certainly set up
for the Intel world.
I like having even a rather secure OS running on a less common
CPU -- decreases the chances that a security hole could be found and
exploited -- x86 code doesn't do much on a SPARC, even if pushed on the
stack and branched to. (Well -- it does crash. :-)
>> I certainly will not allow Windows to touch the net from my
>> domain.
>
>:)
>
> [...]
>>> "The setting Sun." Opera Desktop Team. 2010 Opera Software.
>>> 29 April 2010 <http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2010/04/29/the-setting-sun>
>>
>> So -- there *was* a web visible notice -- with lots of
>> followups.
>
> I don't think a blog post counts as an official notice, though.
> Particularly not when the download pages make no mention of the fact.
> That's clearly a failure on our part.
It was rather frustrating -- especially when I saw mention of
security holes being patched in the later versions (in the CERT
listings, among other places). The security aspect is why I use OpenBSD
and not Linux on the net, and I particularly like the granularity of
JavaScript and plugin control preference in Opera. (And, as far as the
problem with Flash -- I'm simply continuing to use an older Flash when I
have to use Flash at all.)
>> I wonder whether anyone will follow this newsgroup any more --
>> and whether I perhaps need to do this again from the web entry?
>
> Well, I'll probably be subscribed as long as the list exists. There's
> not enough posts here to force me to leave :)
Thank you! I'm glad to see that there is still someone here.
> But I haven't been involved in Solaris (or even desktop opera) for many
> years now...
O.K. I can understand that.
>> Anyway -- in response to the very early comment "all three of
>> them" (referring to SPARC-based Solaris users of Opera), I can state
>> that there are three of us within a single residential block in a small
>> town in Virginia. (My wife, myself, and a friend across the street.)
>> I'm not sure whether his wife also uses Opera -- but she is on Windows,
>> so that does not apply to this discussion.
>
> I'm sure the people who made the decision have a fairly good idea about
> how many Solaris users we have/had. I'm sure the number is way below
> what makes business sense, and have been for a while. I think I have
> heard remarks about that for many years already.
Of course when My wife and I updated our Operas, it was from the
same IP (a firewall) which dilutes the "unique user count" slightly. :-)
I should have suspected that there was less focus on the Solaris
branch -- I reported several times about a bug in the install from the
bzipped tar file -- and had to fix the install script the same way each
new release. (It was calling grep with an option which was not valid in
the /usr/bin/grep, but which was valid in /usr/xpg4/bin/grep.) Perhaps
some users had the /usr/xpg4/bin before /usr/bin in their paths, but I
did not.
The easy fix was to add this near the beginning of the install
script:
======================================================================
PATH=/usr/xpg4/bin:$PATH
export PATH
======================================================================
the slightly more difficult fix was to find this:
======================================================================
manifest_contains ()
{
grep -q "$1"'$' Manifest.md5
}
======================================================================
and add "/usr/xpg4/bin/" to the beginning of that one invocation of
"grep" The other four invocations did not use the "-q" option.
And yes -- I keep the last copy of the tree with the install
script as a template for fixing the next one -- or did.
> I remember when we first made Solaris support official. The main reason
> it took as long as it did was because once we made it official we could
> not easily drop it again. I assume this attitude is still true today.
To be honest, I had not even heard about Opera until someone
told me that it ran on Solaris and was a very good browser. (Then it
was popping up ads, which I happily lived with.)
Overall, I agree that it is very good -- and am saddened that
the "runs on Solaris" is no longer true (aside from the old version
still in the downloads tree.
Thanks,
DoN. Nichols
> DoN. Nichols wrote:
>
>> I seem to remember that there was some way to
>> turn off the update notice -- but I couldn't find it
>>
>
>
>
>
> Set to 0 to disable
Done by me, and now my wife.