Downgrading Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3.0

[Douglas E. Warner]

Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> On 05/11/2009 10:15 AM, David wrote:
>> On 5/11/2009 9:14 AM, Douglas E. Warner wrote:
>>> David wrote:
>>>> On 5/11/2009 8:07 AM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
>>>>> 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.
>>>> Depending on exactly what extensions that you have if you *download*
>>>> them you can change this. Open the .xpi, or .jar, with the archive tool.
>>>> Open the file named  'install.rdf'  with your text editor and look for
>>>> the line that says "<em:maxVersion>". Change that number to the version
>>>> that you are using. Or even a little higher if you like. Save and update
>>>> the  'install.rdf', close the archive tool, and install your new extension.
>>>>
>>>> This works for most themes too.
>>> The point is that most extension developers haven't felt the need to try to
>>> update their extensions for Thunderbird 3 as the API hasn't stabilized yet.
>>> Thunderbird extensions are much more finicky than Firefox extensions I would
>>> wager, especially given this major feature update.  I would offer that Firefox
>>> 3.5b4 is a lot closer to RC than Thunderbird 3.0b2 is, and I still expect
>>> there to be problems with extensions for Firefox before release (this was very
>>> common for Firefox 3.0 as well where changes broke extensions even in the RC
>>> series).
>>
>> I use nine extensions with Thunderbird 3.0b2. Most of them I 'modified'
>> as I described above. I use eleven extensions with Firefox 3.5b4. Most
>> of which I 'modified'. I have not had any problems with any of them.
> 
> Ok, just so I make sure I understand your argument completely. "It's
> fine to include a pre-release copy of Thunderbird and Firefox because
> you can bludgeon unsupported extensions into being supported by
> following an undocumented and potentially dangerous hack."
> 
> Seriously, people. This is exactly the sort of elitist bullshit that
> puts people off of using Fedora. Furthermore, it's damned hypocritical.
> 
> With everything else on the desktop, we're all about simplifying and
> making usage easier. But for the two most-used features, we're going to
> require that our users learn to hack .xpi files?
> 
> I call bullshit.
> 
> 

I agree; extension developers are in a similar situation to package
maintainers here; they need to test their product against a moving upstream
and re-release when working.  The fact that they haven't done this yet is just
a clue that it's not time to update Firefox/Thunderbird.

-Doug

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