OK, I just submitted the ESR version of mozilla-firefox to SlackBuilds.org. Now let's wait and see.

1 members found this post helpful.

Probably this is a bit off topic. Yesterday I visited my parents, both have a computer and both have problems with Firefox and Thunderbird. But they're not running Linux. On my Father's Win XP computer (AMD-Athlon and 1GB of RAM) Thunderbird needs up to half a minute to start. On my mother's Laptop (Win 7, 2GB of RAM) I had upgraded Firefox to 17.0 and when she opened Firefox it came with a message which she didn't understand and asked me if it was important. I told her to close the message but it took her quite some time to close it.

My opinion is that mozilla's development is on a poor way. Once I've used the mozilla software on Windows as an alternative (a very good alternative) to ie and outlook express and similar crap. These days are gone.

I'm on my way from Thunderbird to mutt and the day will come when I uninstall Firefox and Thunderbird from my Slackware-computers.

Markus

markush, I don't agree. We have FF 17 on a MSI atom netbook, WinXP. No significant performance issues. Sure, its not as fast as my Slackware AMD64 X2 4800+ (2.4GHz) with 4GB RAM, but then I don't expect it to be.

I have found that TB and FF are good "canaries in a coal mine:" if they slow down, then your Windows box has serious issues; anywhere from malware, crapware, leftover services, uneeded utilities in the taskbar, bloated registry. The registy is important. There is no such thing as a "clean" uninstall of apps in windows.

kingbeowulf, thanks for the advice, actually you're right. But I've already used a registry-cleaner on my father's Win XP box and my experience (I'm sysadmin in the "M$ world") is that Win XP is somewhat bloated nowadays and no longer as much supported by M$ as the newer systems (Win 7/8).

Markus

I'm not too happy with Firefox lately, it's sluggish and, whilst I didn't experience it, people are telling me it is crashing a lot on their PCs. Seems that Chrome's process-per-tab design was the better choice. Also, the discontinuation of the 64bit port is pure madness since due to Firefox's monolithic architecture 64bit was the one place where they should have taken the lead.

Well, in any case, I vote for ESR.

They only discontinued the Window$ 64-bit port. It is still madness.

Here you can see how good the marketing for the "Windows Tuning and Cleaning" software companies work out.
The number of entries in the registry is simply irrelevant. The German computer magazine c't has made the test and has randomly written 10,000s of entries to the registry. The performance impact after that action was zero percent. Registry cleaners, as most of the other tuning programs, are nothing more than a fraud to get your money and not necessary at all.

I use a free tool. The problem of most applications which promise to make Windows faster is that the are only wrappers for functions which are already included in Windows, for example TuneUp-Utilities.

Regestrycleaners in Windows make sense if one has uninstalled a lot of software, then it helps to keep the registry clean from unused links, dlls and others. I think it is true what kingbeowulf wrote there is no clean uninstall, it is not Slackware

Markus

Of course there is a clean uninstall. but other as with Linux packages it is up to the software developer and not to the package manager to do that task. unfortunately, most Windows developers seem not to count in the possibility that there may be people that uninstall their software.

But this getting off-topic, let's go back to that.
My opinion on that: I rarely use Firefox, so I couldn't care less which version is installed by default, but I think that the ESR versions would fit better to Slackware's stable image. But I think having a package or even only a SlackBuild in /extra will be sufficient if you really want to use ESR.

I've heard that Firefox crashes constantly for years, but it hasn't crashed once for me in the last 2-3 years...and my Firefox profile is certainly not vanilla (I have 19 extensions installed and my profile has been hanging around for years, through all of the Firefox upgrades, without any problems). I often wonder what other people are doing that I am not...

I think making FF ESR available is great, but I would rather see the latest FF releases included by default with Slackware. They are the most supported, and most people using Firefox would expect to have the latest version available. Those who have specific reasons for wanting to use the ESR releases should be able to grab it for themselves. This would allow newbies to have the latest version of Firefox, which they would probably expect to have, and more advanced users would be able to install ESR if they want.

My druthers are "No".

I saw the post on the SBo list that an ESR SlackBuild was submitted, and I think that's a good way to make the option to choose available.

.

You can speed up Thunderbird quite a bit at startup if you regularly empty the Trash mail folder and move the Inbox contents to a archival storage folder rather than leaving them all in the Inbox. TB loads the indexes if not the contents of the main folders (In/Sent/Trash) into memory at startup.

1 members found this post helpful.

"I would like " fits what you describe since it does not imply a demand but instead a like/wish. "I would like" is considered couth, while "I want" is considered immature and unprofessional. (Imagine a little kid stomping his foot and declaring, "I want...".)

As a side note, a professional way of demanding (for example, a boss to an employee), would be to say "I request", or to be austere, "I would like to request"

I am happy with slackware as is.

The pros and cons seem fairly balanced for one release or the other... so doing nothing is likely the best thing to do.

I voted no; but I believe it doesn't matter now. People who know a bit about browsers have started looking for alternatives. Firefox ESR and newer versions simply don't cut the mustard the way they used to. FF has become a bloated OS of it's own with so much of resource requirement.
I'm on FF 8.0.1 right now which may be outdated but for some reason it is the last version which is not dying on me with multiple tabs open for long time.
In short, 'don't know don't care'.
Regards.