Firefox is in current!!!
 

..downloading it right now.


edit: and thunderbird..:)

Mmm, thats an interesting move. At least in the future, I won't have to manually install Firefox and Thunderbird. :)

What I find even more interesting is that Mozilla has been removed. Wonder what the reasoning is to remove it instead of moving it into extra?

I don't think Mozilla will be in Fedora Core either, its been deprecated in favour of Firefox. It would have been a good idea to have it in extras for those that prefer using the entire Mozilla suite.

I wonder how one would be able to use gaim's msn now that mozilla is removed.

How does gaim depend on mozilla ? Is it for the open url in browser functions ?

Losing Mozilla is very sad. I personally like to be able to change settings on my browser. Firefox forces you to about:config for almost everything.

I also use Mozilla for my email. Nice to have one program to install, run, configure, etc. Simpler for my wife too. Bother.

Will have to do what I did before Slack's Mozilla had nice font support. Go get it from somewhere else.

Firefox + Gaim (without Mozilla) Mini HowTo
 

I've been mucking about with Gaim, and it's actually quite easy to get it to work without Mozilla. Firefox has the necessary libraries, so it just needs to use those.

As root, add
to /etc/ld.so.conf, run ldconfig and you're sorted.

(You can also muck about with symlinks if you want to, this page has the files you'll need to symlink from /usr/lib/firefox-1.0.1 that need to be in /usr/lib: http://mariner.cs.ucdavis.edu/slackw...ut-mozilla.txt

Be aware that Gaim doesn't like you symlinking to /usr/lib/firefox, as the linking depth is too deep for it's liking)

I've emailed Pat with these solutions, so it's up to him to decide which the best one is.

Edit

To answer Keefaz, Gaim needs the SSL libraries from Mozilla to connect to MSN (unless you build the SSL with various other libraries instead). As I say in the post, Firefox has these, you just need to point the library linker in the right direction

I've been using Mozilla since version 1.0. I use it in almost all its features. It will be an irreparable loss if the next version of Slack became "Mozilla-less". I think Firefox is an excellent browser, but Mozilla has more features, and usually you don't need to dive in those complicated settings of about:config if you need some particular tuning.

I probably won't change my Mozilla in favour of FFox, but I recommend the FFox for all my blind friends who still live in the Internet Explorer's world.

I think it's a logical move to replace Mozilla with the individual applications. However, I wish, that Pat will add the missing individual apps, too: Composer, Calendar (Sunbird), DOM inspector and the debugging tools.

Yes, I use the Calendar and Composer!

But I agree that the configuration of the Mozilla suite was easier.

With one exception, though: In recent versions I was unable to configure Mozilla to look for mail in my local mail queue fed by fetchmail. In Thunderbird there's a strange wording for this: They call it a "movemail" account. But it's there, at least. It used to be possible in older Mozilla suite versions, but not in 1.7.5.


gargamel

For my part, I use mozilla for 2 year or so, I could not leave it for another browser.
I tried Opera, Konqueror, Firefox ...all seem toys to me compared to mozilla, I mean
doing serious stuff like get some docs, login to a business account.

What I like with mozilla is the focus is in web page content, not in the eye candy toolbars.

I knew this was coming but it's still a little shocking to have it actually come to pass. I've been using mozilla from 1.0, also, and I'm not going to stop 'til they pry it from my cold dead hands. If they do take it away, I'm switching to w3m. Screw it.

But, while I expected it, he definitely dismissed without any ceremony - not even a so long and thanks for all the fish in the changelog, and no /extra or /pasture or anything.

No offense to firefox fanatics, but I really *loathe* that browser.

Find it interesting Pat's slapping in the official binaries too - I guess that *would* make maintenance easier. But why not slap in the moz binaries if that's all you're going to do? And why get excited when you could slap in Firefox binaries before? The only difference is an entry in /var/log/packages.

Somehow, even apart from Slackware specifically, with OOo and Firefox and the like, I ain't really feeling the wide open spaces of the promised land of open source 'choice' these days.

Ah well - it's all a pipe dream anyway, and nice while it lasts. When my choice is Microsoft, Sun, Apple, and Red Hat, I'm dropping off the net and going back to DOS 6.22. :p

I think it is great that firefox is now here, but I am wondering
why Pat chose to use the official mozilla build (i686), and
not build his own?

As for mozilla being remove or put to /pasture or, /extra
it is a little early to speculate, but I have never been
partial to mozilla, it always took to long. In every aspect,
startup, web page to web page.

-tank

This also blows away the Galeon/Ephiphany Browsers in the current Gnome build. Pat seems to be in a ¨remove"mode so I suspect gnome is on the block.

This makes me very happy! I use firefox and prefer it to Mozilla. Don't fret Moz fans you can always just install the binaries (that is what firefox fans have been doing). Sometimes I wonder if it would be better if Slack just included a solid foundation (gcc, glibc, kernel, and X) everything else was user installed and not part of Slack. Maybe user packages could be provided at Linuxpackages.net this would make Pat's life easier and people could install what they wanted easily.

I don't even have Mozilla installed on either my laptop or my desktop. When I installed it, I turned that, and Netscape off. First thing I did was go to mozilla.org/firefox in Lynx, and download the installer. :)

Can't say I'm all that hurt about this.


BTW, you do know that the Firefox installer, at least, is only 10mb, versus something like 40mb for the Mozilla package and about the same for Netscape? That could have been a factor....



On a side note about Netscape, I've noticed that the 8.0 beta for Win has the option of rendering using Gecko or the Internet Exploder rendering engine. From a technical standpoint, I'd be interested in seeing if they manage to get that working on non-Win platforms, but from a linux-geek perspective, I think Microsoft should be spelled with a dollar sign and cursed for all eternity. In all seriousness, Microsoft's "standards" are a bad thing, and I *don't* like Netscape 8 using their rendering engine at all.

The official package seems to work better than the package on linuxpackages. I had to modify the plugin links for java as I have the JDK and too add flash player.
I miss the calendar

GNOME isn't really being well supported in Slack, Pat mentioned that he would not be providing GNOME in the near future. Most GNOME packages in Slack at the moment are from 2.6, so if you want the latest GNOME you have to use dropline or other GNOME builds for Slack.

There is another way to use MSN via gaim where you don't need mozilla. I didn't have installed mozilla on my Box 'cause I don't like it and tried this out.

GnuTLS depends on libgpg-error, libgcrypt and libtasn1, which you have to install first. For detailed instructions, look here
I did this, and it's working fine :-)

I don't know whether Pat will include GnuTLS and its dependencies into -current to provide gaim+msn working out-of-the-box, but since there are apparently only two ways, I'll drop an e-Mail :-)

As an explanation why MSN and Gaim is that complicated, this is also taken from the SSL-FAQ and will hopefully explain it:
I'll post this as a several thread, maybe I can help anybody who used mozilla and wants to stick with -current in all cases.

Greetings, Seppel

Edit: Whoops! I didn't see that cathectic already put a mini-howto doing the job without mozilla - sorry for that, bash me :-)
Anyways, this could still be helpful for anybody neither using mozilla nor firefox.

Or, rather, it would if they hadn't already been dropped between 10.0 and 10.1.

They don't. NS8 Beta is Windows only, and I suspect the relese will be the same.

Personally, I think it's a shame to see Seamonkey go, but I'm not that bothered. I switched to using Firefox more than a year and a half ago (back when it had just stopped being called Phoenix), and have never looked back, so it's nice to have it in a package.

I hear you, but the one good thing of MSIE is indeed the rendering engine.
The rendering of Gecko is excellent, but there are still some pages that only work with MSIE (mostly due to JScript instead of ECMAscript). Netscape 8 combines the configurability, the popup blocker and other nice features of Firefox with the option to use web pages made for MSIE only. Well, those pages *shouldn't* exist, but they do, especially in corporate intranets. Netscape allows a smooth migration.

But if you don't like it, don't use it.

gargamel

No it isn't. IE's rendering engine is awful. The fact that some lazy web-desgners wrote their pages based around the stuff that IE got wrong might make it an unwelcome necessity (although it's been some time since I came across a site that wouldn't work in either Gecko or Khtml), but it certainly isn't a good thing about it.