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 set up 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:
Mozilla is a modern, stable browser that is 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 the Communicator suite, as both browsers share some development
history.
On slow machines, with a CPU speed less than 233MHz or with less than 64MB of RAM, Mozilla can be too resource-demanding 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
whatever 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
Firefox is the next-generation browser based on the Mozilla codebase. Mozilla is a
complete suite of applications, such as a browser, a mail client, a chat client and much
more. Firefox is just a browser, which makes it smaller and
faster.
Install the package by typing:
# pkg_add -r firefox
You can also use the Ports Collection if you prefer to compile from source code:
# cd /usr/ports/www/firefox
# make install clean
Note: In this section and in the next one, we assume you have already installed
Firefox or Mozilla.
The FreeBSD Foundation has a license with Sun Microsystems to distribute FreeBSD
binaries for the Java Runtime Environment (JRE™) and
Java Development Kit (JDK™). Binary packages for
FreeBSD are available on the FreeBSD
Foundation web site.
To add Java™ support to Firefox or Mozilla, you first have to
install the java/javavmwrapper port. Then, download the Diablo JRE package from https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/downloads/java.shtml, and install it
with pkg_add(1).
Start your browser, enter about:plugins in the location bar
and press Enter. A page listing the installed plugins will be
displayed; the Java plugin
should be listed there now. If it is not, as root, run the
following command:
# ln -s /usr/local/diablo-jre1.5.0/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so \
/usr/local/lib/browser_plugins/
then relaunch your browser.
Macromedia® Flash™ plugin is not available for FreeBSD. However, a
software layer (wrapper) for running the Linux version of the plugin exists. This wrapper
also supports Adobe® Acrobat® plugin, RealPlayer® plugin and more.
Install the www/nspluginwrapper port. This port requires emulators/linux_base which is a large port.
The next step is to install the www/linux-flashplugin7 port. Once this port is installed, the
plugin must be installed by each user with nspluginwrapper:
% nspluginwrapper -v -a -i
Then, start your browser, enter about:plugins in the location
bar and press Enter. A list should appear with all the currently
available plugins.
Opera is a full-featured and standards-compliant browser.
It also comes with a built-in mail and news reader, an IRC client, an RSS/Atom feeds
reader and much more. Despite this, Opera is relatively
lightweight and very fast. It comes in two flavors: a “native” FreeBSD
version and a version that runs under Linux emulation.
To browse the Web with the FreeBSD version of Opera,
install the package:
# pkg_add -r opera
Some FTP sites do not have all the packages, but Opera can
still be obtained through the Ports Collection by typing:
# cd /usr/ports/www/opera
# make install clean
To install the Linux version of Opera, substitute linux-opera in place of opera in the
examples above. The Linux version is useful in situations requiring the use of plug-ins
that are only available for Linux, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader®. In all other respects, the FreeBSD
and Linux versions should be functionally identical.
Konqueror is part of KDE but it
can also be used outside of KDE by installing x11/kdebase3. Konqueror is much more
than a browser, it is also a file manager and a multimedia viewer.
There is also a set of plugins available for Konqueror,
available in misc/konq-plugins.
Konqueror also supports Flash; a “How To” guide for getting Flash support on Konqueror is available at https://freebsd.kde.org/howto.php.
