Downgrading Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3.0

[Stephen Gallagher]

OK, first off, why in $DEITY's name are we including Firefox 3.5b4 and
Thunderbird 3.0b2 in Fedora 11? These are unstable branches of the
browser and email client, and as such are supported by almost none of
the myriad of extensions available for the 3.0 and 2.0 versions,
respectively.

I was more than a little disappointed when I upgraded my laptop to the
F11 Preview to discover that only two out of seven of my Thunderbird
extensions and three of my thirteen Firefox extensions remained functional.

I understand that Fedora is a development OS, and I think it's a great
idea to have a firefox35 package and a thunderbird30 package, but these
SHOULD NOT be the defaults.

Taking away the full functionality of a developer's web browser and
email client is an incredible step backwards for Fedora 11. The default
install of Fedora 11 should include the latest STABLE versions of
Firefox and Thunderbird, and then provide an OPTION to replace them with
the unstable development branch.

I would understand if Firefox and Thunderbird were in their release
candidate phase, and we could reasonably expect that within three months
that they would hit final release. Firefox has no definitive (or even
approximate) release date scheduled, and Thunderbird is only in its
second beta. There is little-to-no guarantee that either of these
products will be deemed stable before Fedora 12, and I think it is a
severe mistake to make them the default before then.

If nothing else, consider this an open request to the Firefox,
Thunderbird and Lightning maintainers to provide a compatibility package
that can downgrade and replace the unstable and non-extensible versions
currently in the distribution.

-- 
Stephen Gallagher
RHCE 804006346421761

Looking to carve out IT costs?
www.redhat.com/carveoutcosts/

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 3258 bytes
Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20090511/da07726c/attachment.bin