Firefox 17.0.7esr?
 

I just ran slackpkg... which I do weekly... and found that the Firefox package being offered now is version 17.0.7esr. I'm confused because I was just upgraded to version 21.0 during my last update. I've tried multiple times to subscribe to the mailing lists but I've been unsuccessful so I'm kinda out of the loop here. If somebody could please just quickly explain this to me I would be very grateful. Thank you very much.

Slackware 14.0 Changelog:

We still don't know why the crash is happening on Slackware 14.0, but not on -current (even where KDE and oxygen-gtk2 is used on both), and a bug report to KDE hasn't provided any answers: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=321679

But if anyone has a fix for this, let me know and I'd possibly consider upgrading the version in Slackware 14.0's /patches. Maybe... perhaps following ESR would still be a better plan for security patches to avoid breakage caused by new features.

Until the mystery is resolved for 14.0, how about offering ESR in /extra and 22.0 in patches?

Thanks so much for the info but should I downgrade from 21.0 even if it seems to be working fine for me?

There's no need to really, as long as you're OK with whatever "security hole" exists in FF 21.
The "upgrade" to the ESR branch fixes that.
Have a look at "/etc/slackpkg/blacklist" so you can avoid slackpkg trying to upgrade you to the
ESR branch should you choose to stick with FF 21.

FWIW, I would vote to stay with ESR branches for Slackware releases. What I love about Slackware is sanity and stability and if the ESR branch provides the same for FF/Thunderbird then I say stick with that. Just my $0.02.

Thanks, @volkerdi!

I was at first surprised too, but yeah, @volkerdi's explanation nails it. +1 also for keeping it ESR (14.0 is close to a year old now, so it does make sense for it to move to ESR.)

Hmmm, I wonder why it's 22.0 in -current. Is the KDE in -current compatible or something?

If I have input to the decision, I vote for some method of keeping the two: Firefox-2x.0 and Firefox-xx-ESR. Perhaps put vanilla Firefox in extras and put Firefox-ESR in the main tree.

The reason is that vanilla Firefox is (presumably) OK for those of us who do not use KDE. I am reluctant to downgrade Firefox to a lesser version and give up the new features. I never use KDE so the conflict with oxygen-gtk2 does not arise for me.

I've just upgraded from 21 to 17esr, but realized that some extensions I use are incompatible.
Is there any right/easy way to down-upgrade from 17esr back to 21?

Amen to that. Even if "current" (that is, non-ESR) releases of Firefox run well, maintaining a collection of add-ons (Adblock, Downtube, Web Developer Toolbar, etc.) is like herding cats.

I vote for ESR, as I have been using it for quite a while now and there are no problems or breakages.

in firefox 21 the folder layout changed
before it was /firefox/plugins
BUT in 21 it moved to /firefox/browser/plugins

the ff17 esr that you installed to the ff21 folder is using different folders that 21

If you're on Slackware 14.0, you can grab the packages from my dropbox folder (give them a few minutes to upload).

This probably isn't much help, but I just finished building Firefox 22.0 on Slackware 14.0 using the build script from current, Running KDE 4.10.4 (thx AlienBob) and I get the same crash.

i currently have slack 14 on a vm (virtualbox), firefox22 from current runs fine.

edit: as i now looked at the bug link ive seen "x86_64".. so ff21 crashes on slack 14 64bit?! i run 32bit on my vm and plan to run 32bit if i get slack installed on my routerbox. could be a 64bit compile problem?

ff17esr
 

I've updated my system from ff21 to ff17esr, however, FireFox seems to now be running slower. Any one else with the same problem?

Going with the ESR branch for -stable is a sane choice and fully support that. Although this decision should have been made as Firefox 17 was the most current version.

I also don't know if this will help, but when I saw the changelog I did download Firefox 22 directly from the Firefox site. I am running a stock Slackware 14 system on my laptop and I am using KDE. I removed the mozilla-firefox package and extracted the Firefox download. It is running just fine, no crashes (at least not yet).

Regardless of that, I do see that the ESR version probably more closely aligns with Slackware's philosophy. I have a need/desire to stay on the latest versions, but I can easily deal with that myself.

Thank you, but I would prefer a methodic way :p

The only solution I found was to compile Firefox 21.0 using Slackware 14's SlackBuild and generate a slackware package.

If anyone is interested to "down-upgrade" from 17.0esr to 21.0, you can download the slackbuilds from here (if you don't have it in your slackware tree):

32 bits: http://mirrors.slackware.com/slackwa...zilla-firefox/
64 bits: http://mirrors.slackware.com/slackwa...zilla-firefox/

Be sure to download everything but the source of 15.0. Then you download the source of 21.0 from here:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.or...s/21.0/source/

Now you only have to run the mozilla-firefox.SlackBuild script and "upgradepkg" the generated package file.

I heard that building Firefox is long and complicated. It has scared me off trying to do it myself. How long did your build take (machine specs too, if poss.)?

Building Firefox is long but NOT complicated, however, there are binaries:
http://download.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/...efox/releases/

Suit yourself. These packages were taken from one of Slackware's mirrors.
seems pretty methodic to me ;-)

that way i could also build my own 22,23 etc version as this is whats done by volkerdi/the slackteam?? just in case esr come to current too.

Pat,

I use Slackware 14.0. I don't use KDE often but I have 4.10.1 installed. I made a 22.0 package using the old build script and premade Firefox binary package. 22.0 runs fine for me.

I realize 14.0 came with 4.8.5. :(

It also came with Firefox-15.0.1.

I'm already using Firefox and Thunderbird ESR since January.
There is no big difference, just some interface improvements.
I like the new "Downloads" window from Main Release, in ESR we have the old one,
but the main release number version is amazing, at Christmas it must be 30 or more :doh:

You are right!

I compiled in a Intel Core 2 Quad 2.40GHz, 4GB RAM. The first time I tried it was taking more than 2 hours with full ram + 1GB of swap! I aborted it, and modified the slackbuild script to use "make -j 4" to compile in parallel. It took "only" 54 minutes using ~ 3GB ram.

(BTW, is there a better way to make a slackbuild compile in parallel?)

Add your preferred options to the environment variable MAKEFLAGS.

with SlackBuilds.org scripts generally passing MAKEFLAGS (like MAKEFLAGS=" -j8 ") works, but the official slackbuilds in Slackware use NUMJOBS in the same way.
BTW, in some of them it's explicitly disabled (because not supported).

extra
 

Please add the latest version to testing or extra.

Yeah I noticed that also. It's just not as peppy as FF21.

FWIW, ff16.0.2 is the best, most-stable firefox I've yet encountered.

The ff17 that comes with Scientific Linux is crap (crashes twice a week, exhibits weird bugs), as was the ff17 that Ubuntu12 was using for a while.

The ff18, ff20, and ff21 I've tried have been more stable and less buggy than ff17, but still can't reach ff16.0.2's level of excellence (about 45 days between restarts, with five to eight windows open and hundreds of tabs, and very few problems until about the 40th day).

I'm not trying to say what Slackware should or shouldn't package, but if stability is your priority, you might want to "downgrade" to 16.0.<something>.

The ESR version seems like a significant step backwards as I've used it. I'm going to watch and see if it's chewing up a lot of memory. When I've been running it all day it seems to get progressively slower.

The problem is oxygen-gtk is a theme that is inherently bug prone. The bug is not in Firefox but oxygen-gtk.

Oxygen-gtk causes many other subtle issues and I personally think it shouldn't be included in Slackware, or shouldn't be considered more important than key pieces of software when it has a bug, which it will almost certainly have plenty of.

Oxygen-gtk is not conformant to gtk theme standards, it uses various methods that are not really supported to try to get closer in appearance to oxygen than a conformant theme could.

For example this bug report might be related to this problem

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318891

Notice the developer doesn't want to try and figure out if there is a bug in glib which his theme is dependent on, and which a good upstream would try. He then says

"Oxygen-GTK, unfortunately, has many such invalid assumptions (but we might not know of their invalidity), which it has to do in order to implement the features we need. It's just a matter of complexity of features we put into it."

This is the politic way of saying, we use undocumented and unsupported "features" to create our theme, if we report this "bug" in glib, it will go nowhere because we aren't using gtk themes properly.

I used oxygen-gtk in xfce in Slackware14 initially because I like some aspects of oxygen, and this theme I liked even better than Oxygen, this was my first time to use it, I never bothered with it when I used KDE or xfce in Arch. I had some weird an not very reproducible glitches that I blamed on Slackware, but then I changed my theme because I got bored, and had no such problems, then went back to oxygen-gtk and again had subtle issues.

I personally think oxygen-gtk shouldn't be included in Slackware, and should be in extras or a simple Slackbuild. I think it is very bad idea to downgrade one of the more popular and important pieces of software to a version older than Slackware 14 shipped with because we don't want to delete a stupid theme, especially a theme that is inherently buggy because it is non-conformant to the themeing rules.

Some people want the ESR version of Firefox, that seems a separate issue, as I'm sure just as many of us want the latest release. I think it would be nice for both to somehow be available.

17.0.7 > 15.0.1

Again, I think that the "rapid release" model just doesn't fit with Slackware. It would fit with Fedora or Ubuntu. Updating versions so often pretty much guarantees breakage and not only in add-ons. I couldn't handle it, so I will continue to use ESR no matter what Slackware uses.

Running Firefox ESR on all my machines as well as on my client's desktops and workstations. So far, not a single crash report. Works perfectly.

I've had FF 22 crash several times on Slackware-current (32 bit) while using XFce. I'm going to evaluate a few other browsers for the time being. Opera is running well so far.

ESR has been working ok for me, apart from a few add ons not working correctly with this version. I would prefer to be running 22.0, but can survive with ESR until SW 14.1 comes out.

I tried to make the jump over to seamonkey again, because that has been updated to the latest version correctly, but the Lightning plugin doesn't work with seamonkey-mail for some reason. Bloody plugin version numbering..

Lightning version 2.2b1 works with SeaMonkey 2.17:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/sea...ning/versions/

Thanks for the link :)

No problems on my machine either and I do like the idea of sticking with the ESR as it seems more in line with the Slackware philosophy. Like I said earlier it seems a tad slower than FF21 but stability is more important to me anyway.

I've moved over to ESR as well. Just had another crash on 22.

No problems with 22 at all. For me it wouldn't matter if Slackware comes with the current version or ESR, since one or the other will always be available from SBo.

I'm not the most observant person in the world, but I notice no change in behaviour since yesterday going from 21 to ESR 17. I've just installed the five add-ons on the following page and see no compatibility problems:
https://prism-break.org/

I'm running FF 22.0 (the binary package provided by Mozilla) on Slackware 14.0 with KDE 4.10.4 and oxygen-gtk2-1.3.3. I think the crashes should occur only when FF is running under KDE 4.8.x.

nope.. as i wrote.. ff 22 from current here, runs fine on kde 4.8.5. i installed slackware 14 x32 fully and only updated kernel and firefox. but should say that im still in a testing env. on vbox maybe that makes a diff.

sry for sometimes bad english.