Firefox on Fedora: No longer funny

[Conan Kudo (ニール・ゴンパ)]

On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 4:56 PM, Kevin Fenzi <kevin at scrye.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 08 Oct 2011 23:43:58 +0200
> Christoph Wickert <christoph.wickert at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> ...snip...
>
> > So what can we do to improve the situation?
> >      1. Can we bring back the language packs as part of the packages?
> >      2. Can the FF maintainers make sure that all maintainers of
> >         extensions get notified of changes *before* release of a new
> >         package?
> >      3. Can someone (I'm looking at you, QA) make sure all extensions
> >         are still compatible?
> >
> > More ideas or suggestions?
>
> Sadly, upstream is being pretty distro hostile these days I fear.
>
> We can try and put our efforts behind
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal
> and hope there's a extended support version? Possibly we could ship
> both that and the latest Firefox-999 version.
>
> kevin
>
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I've heard that Mozilla will be making some massive changes to their
handling of Extensions for Firefox 8 to fix a lot of these issues. Since
Firefox 4, there actually have not been a lot of changes to the Extensions
API, but because Fedora doesn't have the rebuilding mechanism that Mozilla
Addons has, the extensions have not been automatically updated with new
compatibility information.

One major change I know of is that Extensions will be assumed compatible by
default instead of incompatible. That means that while Firefox will warn
users about extensions that say they only support older versions, they will
not be disabled.

Not all the blame lies on Mozilla though. Fedora could do better on handling
Firefox updates too. Unlike the upgrade from Firefox 3.6 to Firefox 4,
Firefoxes 5, 6, and 7 are not actually really that major. Firefox 8 will
make some radical changes, but functionally it isn't a major upgrade. We
need to start treating Firefox releases as safe, minor upgrades beginning
with Firefox 8.
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