Comment by jjav
19 hours ago
> circa 2005
> I wasn't able to get Mozilla to build
You must be misremembering something. Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox had always tier one support on Solaris. You had nothing to build, just download and run, with perfect compatibility.
I only ever ran Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox browser (and still today in 2026). My desktops and servers were all Solaris from mid-90s to 2012 or so. Never a hiccup running the Netscape family browsers (and servers too).
There was Netscape support, but then there was that crisis when it seemed that IE would be the only viable web browser, the realization that the Netscape was too FUBAR to build on, and then Mozilla got rebranded as Firefox.
They probably had an official Solaris build of Mozilla later on but if one had been available at that point in time I would have installed it on the SPARC machine I had under my desk. The ship had sailed in terms of the organization's capital planning.
If you were happy running Netscape later than I was you might have felt supported.
This sounds right. There was a "dark ages" in the early 2000's, where Unix/Linux browser support was terrible. You were either stuck with old Netscape 4.x, which crashed every half hour, or you had to work with half baked, almost unusable beta builds of Mozilla (pre-Firefox). Because of this, I actually ran Windows on my desktop for a while!