The problem of Firefox in Ubuntu Breezy [LWN.net]

The problem of Firefox in Ubuntu Breezy

Posted Jun 8, 2006 15:10 UTC (Thu) by tseaver (subscriber, #1544)
Parent article: The problem of Firefox in Ubuntu Breezy

One issue even for the "enterprise" case (and particularly given
Dapper's 5 year support commitment) is that the browser itself
is a *platform* for other enterprise applications; the typical
"version freeze" / stability requirement is in very sharp tension
with those applications' needs.

Who today could rely on only what was in Netscape 4, for instance,
which was the "stable" browser 5 years ago? As a Breezy user, I was
running an on-the-side Firefox 1.5 version, for instance, because I
needed support for newer Web standards, etc. not present in 1.0.8.

Ubunut *does* bundle many of the "major" extensions as .deb files,
which presumably means that the decision to backport the browser
would include backporting the packaged extensions. Users with non-packaged
extensions in their profiles will get those extensions disabled,
typically, until a compatible upgrade is found.

Ergo, +1 for backporting 1.5.0.4 to Breezy.

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Backporting

Posted Jun 8, 2006 19:55 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

Agreed.

If a later version is incompatible with extensions meant for the older, it means they need to make the version number part of the package name. This is totally familiar usage as applied to libraries, and most Debian installations have several versions of many libraries installed.

The problem is that the older versions will be increasingly buggy and increasingly insecure. For many uses -- particularly corporate uses -- these don't matter at all. However, there should be a way to default to keeping the older versions from trying to connect outside the local domain; the proxy configuration might serve. Also, it should be possible to run both the old version and the new version simultaneously.

The problem of Firefox in Ubuntu Breezy

Posted Jun 16, 2006 15:23 UTC (Fri) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]

Actually, interestingly, we hung onto Netscape 4.7 at work for a very, very long time. Long after Mozilla 1.0 released. Considering that 4.6 and 4.7 were just bugfix releases on 4.5, and 4.5 came out in 1998, that's a pretty long window, and I'd guess pretty typical of corporate environments.

I think it was around 2002 we finally started officially supporting Mozilla for internal web applications in a limited capacity.