Comments on: Mozilla Firefox, Disconnected Installer

By: Gen2ly

Gen2ly — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:25:02 +0000

I have to agree. There are a lot of distro’s out there (even prominent ones). Gearing to one distro would be unfortunate, plus there would be no easy way to do it without re-writing a good amount of code (both on mozilla’s and the distro’s end). It’s a good point though, alot of new users would be thrown off by getting the source code. A note to, “See your specific package distribution…”

“Not using the gnome or kde keyrings for password management.”

I believe this is a compile-time option. I remember it when using Ubuntu but since using Gentoo and Arch, I don’t see it anymore. Personally, I’m no a big fan of a grand-unified password system. It adds unnecessary overhead and usually the implementations are clunky and just gets in the way.

By: jef

jef — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:18:58 +0000

It’s Mozilla’s website not Ubuntu’s, I really don’t think its Mozilla’s job to worry about what is in the best interests of Ubuntu.

I can turn the question around. If Mozilla as a project would like every single user to upgrade to 3.5.3… why is Ubuntu not making 3.5.3 available as an update already through standard update mechanisms?

What you are seeing here is a difference of opinion in the importance of updating to 3.5.3. Your distribution’s management does not agree with the upstream’s perspective on the importance of upgrading. It’s your decision as to which party to listen to.

-jef

By: Martin Owens

Martin Owens — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:21:17 +0000

Is it in Ubuntu’s best interest to have users directed to download updates to core software through one of the most difficult and user unfriendly methods?

Better that they should just not offer the download at all.

By: Martin Owens

Martin Owens — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:19:36 +0000

Then perhaps detect that its “Linux” and not advertise a new version at our users?

By: jef spaleta

jef spaleta — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:34:33 +0000

Is Mozilla responsible for understanding which versions of Firefox your distributor makes available?

Assuming Mozilla’s website could figure out that you were using Ubuntu and could figure out which version of Ubuntu you were using… exactly which firefox 3.5 binary would it point you to? An unofficial PPA which is meant primarily for testing? Is that really in Mozilla’s best interest or in the best interest of the user? I’m not sure it is.

-jef

By: tomasz

tomasz — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:28:35 +0000

yeah. you can’t expect the developers of every single app to make packages for all the distros out there. on the other hand, letting volunteers make packages and publishing them on the site would probably not be as burdensome.
i too am not sure about user-wide cookies, especially considering i have separate firefox profiles that i have specifically engineered to serve different purposes and wouldn’t like to have them mixed up (like my regular browsing profile and banking profile).

By: John M

John M — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:27:30 +0000

I agree with Matt that it probably wouldn’t be too much to ask for them to make .deb packages available, as Ubuntu/Debian based distros are quite prolific these days. As small as Opera is, they still offer distro specific packages so I really see no reason why an organization as large as Mozilla would find it so difficult. Perhaps you could ask Luis Villa (former GNOME dev and all around nice guy, soon to be starting a new position with Mozilla) to drop a bug in the appropriate ear?
Ubuntuzilla is always an option, albeit a bit of an ugly one IMO. As it stands at the moment, I’ve simply chosen to fix the branding on my existing FF 3.5 install that Ubuntu offers in the Jaunty repos to make it the default and get rid of the annoying “Shiretoko” label and ID that come with it.

By: Vadim P.

Vadim P. — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:25:11 +0000

Support for input methods

By: WindPower

WindPower — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:04:22 +0000

All true, but there’s also lots of other technical stuff that need addressing: Making Linux x86_64 a tier-1 platform, 64-bit TraceMonkey, and fixing the Profile-Guided-Optimization version of Firefox rather than the non-optimized one. Without this, Firefox for Windows in Wine is way faster than native Firefox.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:37:40 +0000

No, no, no – it is terrible to see Mozilla growing into a massive, independent beast of an operating system lurking both on and under my desktop. I want a browser application, not a browser operating system within my operating system. Mozilla should behave nice and use the existing operating system package manager, not replicate, undermine and security breach what is there.