My experience

Posted Mar 17, 2010 21:03 UTC (Wed) by ikm (guest, #493)
Parent article: Applications and bundled libraries

I use the official binary tarball of Firefox under Linux (untarred to my home dir), pretty much the same way one would use the Windows version. It's fully branded, it updates itself automatically, and so on - I have exactly zero problems with it. Compared to the version which I have available in the distro (namely, iceweasel in debian sid), it looks vastly superior.

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My experience

Posted Mar 17, 2010 23:59 UTC (Wed) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (5 responses)

Doesn't debian update iceweasel as well?

It sounds like the only thing you're really getting from using the official binary is the branding.

My experience

Posted Mar 18, 2010 0:59 UTC (Thu) by ikm (guest, #493) [Link] (4 responses)

Updating your sid routinely isn't generally a good idea -- unless you want to spend time fixing your system every now and then. Mozilla's updates, on the other hand, are timely, small (supplied as deltas) and require no attention from me. I also like the fact that there's no middle man here. I get the original product without DFSG cuts, weird openssl patches, incorrectly backported Iceweasel fixes, and whatever else Debian faults I can remember ;) I also don't have to wait for a week or two to get all of this from the repository.

I understand the need for the distributor when the package is distributed upstream in source form only, without dependencies etc, but I really see no need for that in case of a self-contained self-updating Firefox -- the distributor here only adds latencies, complexities and quirks. Or so is my experience.

p.s. And yes, last and the least, I hate this idiotic 'iceweasel' name.

My experience

Posted Mar 18, 2010 1:26 UTC (Thu) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link] (3 responses)

The fine article does a good job of explaining downsides (and benefits) to having individual applications manage themselves. As a long-time Debian SID/Unstable user, I both update frequently (apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade) and use Iceweasel instead of Firefox.

Iceweasel has always worked well for me, and I like Debian's comittment to security. An added benefit of Iceweasel is how many architectures it runs on.

My experience

Posted Mar 18, 2010 19:23 UTC (Thu) by sytoka (guest, #38525) [Link] (2 responses)

Here the arch found for debian squeeze for icewaesel:

amd64 armel hppa i386 ia64 kfreebsd-amd64 kfreebsd-i386 mips mipsel powerpc s390 sparc

Let's go on mozilla fondation

Windows MacOSX Linux

Many upstream projects don't mind about their software on many arch...

Support for other arch improve sofware quality also.

My experience

Posted Mar 18, 2010 20:27 UTC (Thu) by ikm (guest, #493) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, that's true -- Mozilla only cares about the arches which are in actual widespread use. The fact that Debian provides support for others is great. But I don't use those (nor I know anyone who does) and I have merely provided my own experience (see the subject).

On a side note, I'd like to warn you that the fact of mere availability of a package in Debian for some rare arch doesn't really mean that the program in that package would actually work on that arch just fine. I am e.g. an author of an app which is present in Debian, and mind you, despite the fact that it currently just doesn't work on any big-endian architectures correctly, in Debian it is present for all arches, including the big-endian ones. Of course, there are no bugreports pertaining to those problems -- no one has ever actually tried to use those packages there.

Test suites can help

Posted Mar 20, 2010 1:00 UTC (Sat) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link]

Does your program have a test suite? Even basic tests can do a lot of good, both in making non-functional functionality more obvious and spurring people to fix it. You might be interested in Mike Hommeys recent work on Mozilla: before and after.