Mozilla Firefox, Disconnected Installer

Posted in Hat Talk, Ubuntu on September 30th, 2009 by doctormo

When looking at the front page of my Mozilla Firefox web browser today I notice a curious thing:

Teach your old fox new tricks by upgrading to Firefox 3.5 today.

With a nice link to downloading Firefox, the only problem with that is that when I clicked on this download for Firefox 3.5 it downloaded a tar ball. My first response what “what the hell” and my second “A common user is not going to have a bloody clue what to do with that”.

There are a couple of things that are on my wishlist for Mozilla Firefox in Ubuntu, getting it so that upgrade links from mozilla themselves are not tar balls is a new one for the list:

  • Not using the gnome or kde keyrings for password management.
  • Not using XDG directories (freedesktop.org) for cache or configs.
  • Not using a user wide cookies system.
  • Not using the apt packager for plugin management.
  • Hiding user data (bookmarks, tags, history) in a config directory.
  • New! Advertising new version of Firefox and expecting “Linux” users to download tar balls
  • From Comments Profile-Guided-Optimization, so Firefox is faster
  • From Comments 64bit TraceMonkey and more time spent on 64bit FDO release.

Purely my own thoughts though, your thoughts are welcome.

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