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Installed Plugins: (11)
- Default Plugin
- DivX Browser Plug-In
- Helix DNA Plugin: RealPlayer G2 Plug-In Compatible
- Java(TM) Plug-in 1.6.0_17
- mplayerplug-in is now gecko-mediaplayer 0.9.8
- OpenOffice.org Plug-in
- QuickTime Plug-in 7.4.5
- RealPlayer 9
- Shockwave Flash
- Silverlight Plug-In
- Windows Media Player Plug-in
yes I know Debian has iceweasel, but no matter what anyone says iceweasel isn't Firefox. Iceweasel uses more ram/cpu, doesn't play as nice with things like flash and java.
Iceweasel is still at 3.5.6 in sid even though Firefox 3.5.7 was released over a month ago. Granted the Debian maintainers are volunteers, but a web browser is one thing you want at the current upstream version.
Its not, that's one of the many reasons I gave up on running Iceweasel.
Firefox 3.5.7 was released over a month ago, Iceweasel even in sid is still at 3.5.6. Granted the iceweasel maintainer has to build it for many more architectures, while Firefox is only i386. http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/i/iceweasel/
The main reason of not upgrading to the next major version of ff is the "stuff" it must have along. That is xulrunner, which is developed and updated in parallel with ff, libjpeg, libpng and so on.
And since version 3.0, ff and xulrunner are "sold seperately" for linux users, so there is double work to be done.
Updating from a minor version to another minor one, ie 3.5.6 to 3.5.7, usually includes bug fixes and nothing more, so why rebuild everything? I remember there was a time where ff changed minor versions every 2-3 days.
Have a look at the 3.5.7 changelog of ff and if you find something major that bugs you, ask the devs to move to that version.
The main reason of not upgrading to the next major version of ff is the "stuff" it must have along. That is xulrunner, which is developed and updated in parallel with ff, libjpeg, libpng and so on.
And since version 3.0, ff and xulrunner are "sold seperately" for linux users, so there is double work to be done.
Updating from a minor version to another minor one, ie 3.5.6 to 3.5.7, usually includes bug fixes and nothing more, so why rebuild everything? I remember there was a time where ff changed minor versions every 2-3 days.
Have a look at the 3.5.7 changelog of ff and if you find something major that bugs you, ask the devs to move to that version.
The main reason to upgrade to a newer version is more security fixes than simple "bug" fixes. But like i said in my first post I gave up on iceweasel when Firefox 3.5 came along.
Firefox is faster, loads quicker, uses less resources, doesn't crash on flash or java sites. All in all Firefox is 100% better than Iceweasel.
Quite a few people tested both, especially on laptops you can notice the difference running Firefox rather than iceweasel. Cpu temps are lowers, ram usage is less. Plus it autoupdates to the next releases rather than waiting for the iceweasel dev. Ask about firefox/iceweasel in #smxi on irc.oftc.net.
It literally takes less than 5 minutes to be using Firefox.
I truly feel sorry for people that believe Iceweasel=Firefox, nothing could be further from the truth.
There are only two maintainers of iceweasel and one has stated he was quitting on several occasions then changed his mind. Don't get me wrong I love Debian, it has been my distro of choice for close to 6 yrs, but why rely on 1 or 2 people for something as important as a web browser.
If you are tired of all the crashes and wondering why iceweasel is slow and uses so much ram/cpu try using Firefox instead you will be glad you did.
I gave up iceweasel 3.5 since I saw no improvement on the awesomebar removal (or option to do so) that 2/3 of ff users request since 3.0 came out. Instead, more junk like geolocation was introduced and even more research was needed to remove stuff like the + sign next to each tab. So I moved...
Opera may not do the fastest time on sunspider benchmark, nor be opensource, but it works for me.
I do not really care about the name of the app, neither for the version of it. Besides, the windows version of ff is way ahead of linux in every aspect, so why bother? I do use ff on windows though.
Regarding autoupdating...
Shouldn't any app update through the package manager instead of itself? Not that it is against some rule or something, but there are dependencies that must match.
Concluding, I think you should give swiftfox a chance. It's a pgo build* of ff, like the normal windows version of ff is. And yes, it updates more often to the latest version of ff.
The onliest problem I faced on this was flash not playing (streaming) on a (pron) site.
*PGO build of ff is the build that ff and xulrunner go together in one package, thus you get the libxul.so inside the app's installation dir plus some performance boost due to built-optimised-for-your-cpu feature.
Mepis does package ff as ff, but I dont know how fresh it can be.
How do I turn off Location-Aware Browsing permanently?
If you wish to disable the feature completely, please follow this set of steps:
* In the URL bar, type about:config
* Type geo.enabled
* Double click on the geo.enabled preference
* Location-Aware Browsing is now disabled
I prefer putting it in user.js that way there is no chance of the preference being overridden.
/* Disable geolocation */
user_pref("geo.enabled", false);
Along with the annoying prefetching crap
/* Disable network prefetching/search engine suggest */
user_pref("network.prefetch-next", false);
user_pref("browser.search.suggest.enabled", false);
As far as packages Firefox needs there really aren't many:
Firefox will not run at all without the following libraries or packages:
* GTK+ 2.10 or higher
* GLib 2.12 or higher
* Pango 1.14 or higher
* X.Org 1.0 or higher
My point on geolocation was that instead of fixing stuff that so many people want, the developers do their own and add more irrelevant and useless stuff.
Did you try swiftfox? If you package ff in a deb and make it install inside /opt and do all the work that has to be done, I will bow down to your genius and install it too.
In case anyone doesn't believe Iceweasel uses more ram than Firefox. The first one is right after opening Iceweasel, the second Firefox after being open for close to 24 hours. I would say a 40mb difference is quite a bit especially since that was just after opening Iceweasel, and Firefox had been running for hours.
If you use the Firefox browser in conjunction with the Google search engine, Google will (under various circumstances) prefetch the first page returned in the results. In other words, that page and any cookies associated will be downloaded to your computer even though you never clicked the link. Here's how to disable this Google / Firefox "feature".
Difficulty: Easy
Time Required: 1 minute
Here's How:
1. Open the Firefox browser
2. Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter
3. Scroll down the resulting preference list to network.prefetch-next
4. Double click network.prefetch-next so the value is set to false.
5. Close Firefox and restart it to enable the change.
I am running Squeeze 64bit and did everything thing that the site suggested but flash is not working in my Firefox 3.6 installation.
But flash is working in Opera.
Reinstalled Iceweasel and Flash is working.
Remove Iceweasel and install Firefox and flash is not working again.
Appreciate if someone can help
Rather than removing Iceweasel just put it on hold.
hold is a status flag that tells the package manager not to automatically upgrade a package. To hold a package: 'echo <package>
hold|dpkg --set-selections'. It is also possible to use aptitude: 'aptitude hold <package>'. Note that the hold flag set using aptitude
might be ignored by other package managers (i.e. Update Manager and Synaptic), but aptitude will respect the hold set in the dpkg database.
Or even just install iceweasel and render it useless. As in go into /usr/lib and change the firefox directory to firefox~. Then untar the firefox download from mozilla and copy it to /usr/lib and then redo the link to /usr/bin.
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