Hi,

I'm overall quite happy with Slackware, and I have a tiny suggestion to make here: why not replace the "general public" versions of Firefox and Thunderbird by their ESR counterparts ? In my humble opinion, this would "fit" the spirit of Slackware more, in the sense that the approach is more conservative, support for each release is about a year and a half, updates are simpler to manage (10.0.7 to 10.0.8, then to 10.0.9, and so on) while keeping all the add-ons compatible.

Here, I'm using FF and TB ESR since 13.37 and 14.0, built from slightly altered official SlackBuilds. Both work without any problems, and maintenance is a breeze.

So, I'm curious about your opinion. I've added a public poll to this post.

Cheers,

Niki

I guess it all boils down to how well the mozilla devs maintain the ESR. The general release may be subject to a bunch of new bugs, but it'll also get all the latest fixes too. How much effort will be put into backporting them to the ESR? My gut feeling is that I'm better off following the general releases, but I'm not a heavy plugin/extension user so the api breakages don't really have much of an impact on me.

I would have clicked "Don't know" if the option had been there.

1 members found this post helpful.

I vote for ESR. I've tried Firefox ESR for a few months and haven't found any issues. I'd say it is safer to use ESR than the regular releases, especially because mozilla likes to shove these general releases out the door as quickly as possible even with major bugs.

2 members found this post helpful.

Personally, I like the rapid releases of Firefox. Also as GazL pointed out, I'm not sure how well bugfixes get backported to the ESR releases.

That's just my couple of pennies, though. Really, it's not a deal breaker for me either way. I've been gravitating towards Chrome lately anyway.

1 members found this post helpful.

I'd like to see Chrome replace Firefox as the default browser. I use Chromium personally, but that's probably too bleeding-edge for Slackware's taste. Chrome would be perfect. But if it's a choice between Firefox's latest release and ESR, I'd definitely say ESR.

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Slackware cannot legally distribute a Chrome binary package. There is a slackbuild for Chrome in /extra. I would like to see Chromium as the default browser, Firefox ESR in /extra and the standard Firefox dropped altogether.

1 members found this post helpful.

Ok, so to put an end to fears and assumptions:

http://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/01...pport-release/

1 members found this post helpful.

Could you upload your slackbuild,for mozilla esr

• http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/1...zilla-firefox/
• http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/1...-firefox-l10n/
• http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/1...a-thunderbird/
• http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/1...nderbird-l10n/

The SlackBuilds for the l10n packages only build french and german language packs, but they can easily be edited for other languages.

I'm lagging behind one or two minor versions, but then again, just change the version number in the script for the latest and safest.

3 members found this post helpful.

I'm fed up as well with the quick release cycle of both FF and TB lately. I've nothing against them releasing daily versions if they want - but keep them on minor version numbers. There has always been a very good reason why we had major and minor version numbers. This madness with changing major version numbers faster than socks (the wooly types - not the others ) and breaking all sorts of things in the process is just a senseless industry fad. I hope some reason is restored sooner rather than later. Open Source / Free Software didn't use to suffer so much from the smokes, mirrors, trickery and self servitude of marketing departments - and instead concentrated on the real needs of users. That, unfortunately, seems to be changing.

I am not quite fond of the security fixes, if you meant this. I simply don't like things be broken every now and then.

Had to switch to esr after upgrading to Slackware-14.0 because nothing could prevent Firefox 15 from crashing on my machine. (Of course I tried creating new profiles.)

I think it would be nice to include ESR SlackBuild-scripts in /extra. That way users have a choice.

5 members found this post helpful.

I know the guys from SlackBuilds.org don't generally accept builds that replace existing Slackware packages in another version. I wonder if they would make an exception for these two.

Just ask

I wouldn't mind seeing them in /extra.