I upgraded Netscape on a Solaris 2.7 system only to find that I then would receive a "bus error" message every time I started Netscape. I was unable to find a solution to the problem, so I looked for alternative GUI browsers, but, unfortunately, almost every one I found required version 8 or higher of the Solaris operating system. I thought it might be able to use Mozilla, but the requirements listed for it indicated Solaris 8 or higher is needed.
I tried Opera, but that didn't work. I thought I might even be able to use Internet Explorer on the system. From some websites I visited, it appeared that Microsoft went up to a 5.0 version of Internet Explorer for Unix, but Microsoft is no longer making any Unix version of Internet Explorer available for download.
The system had Sun's HotJava browser on it. But that was version 1.0.2 and it didn't work very well for most websites I visited. Fortunately, Sun does make available a much later version, version 3.0, which will run on the Solaris 2.7 operating system. That version is available from Sun at http://java.sun.com/products/archive/hotjava/3.0/index.html.
To install the software, make the file executable and then run the program from the command line, which will open an InstallAnywhere window.
chmod +x hjb3_0-solsparc-jre.bin
hjb3_0-solsparc-jre.bin
When I first attempted to install the software, I had logged into the system under a user account and then used su to become root from a terminal console window. I would see "InstallAnywhere is preparing to install..." appear and then the installation would appear to hang. When I logged out and back in as root and ran the program again, I saw the window appear that allowed me to proceed with the installation.
If you accept the default installation directory, the program will be installed in /HotJava. Sun reports there is a bug that may affect you if you choose an alternate installation directory:
(Solaris systems) If you run the install program as root, and the default
install location (/HotJava) does not already exist, the "Select a Folder"
dialog box for choosing a different install folder does not come up when you
click the Choose button. At this point, the Choose button becomes permanently
disabled.
You can continue the installation in either the default /HotJava directory or
in an alternate directory you type in the text field containing the default
installation directory. (bug id 4229644)
If you chose the default installation directory, you can run the program by typing /HotJava/hotjava. If you just type hotjava, you will still get the older version, which is in /usr/dt/bin/hotjava, unless you set up a symbolic link or alias to point to the new version.
One serious limitation of the browser is that it does not support secure connections using the https protocol. So you will not be able to use it to access any webpages requiring secure transmission of data between a browser and a web server. I installed a fairly old version of Netscape Communicator, version 4.05, which Sun provided with Solaris 7, to be able to access secure webpages. The browser also can't display png images.
