There was some fuss, but it was about feature creep like webrtc and pocket, and forced australis interface, and webextensions to some extent.
For me it was the pulse requirement that was one drop too many, an officiall recommended platform became GNOME at some point, and additionally it was the removal of status bar and preferences gui.
Less features in noscript webextension compared to XUL extension, and compile time skyrocket was the final nail, luckily no other software depends on it, yet.

I haven't been following all of that. When you lay it out like that, it does sound pretty bad. Still, there is a real paucity of free software browsers capable of displaying modern web pages. To me, Palemoon and Konqueror seem to be two of the best alternatives.

I've been using Firefox since it's inception, it was called Phoenix back then. I like Firefox. It HAS tested me on many occasion (currently with Firefox mobile), many of those things you mentioned. I overcame and adapted to these changes. The ones that almost got me to switch was the web extensions and maybe the loss of the status bar. Eventually I adapted found replacement addons, some even better than the older ones. I got used to no status icons, etc. I've tried many other browsers, it only take a few minutes to decide, I like Firefox better. I hope it's not dropped.

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It was also Firebird for a while, if I recall correctly.

To be honest, Slackware completely dropping Firefox seems very drastic. I seriously doubt that would happen in the immediate future.

Even so, it is trivial to install from the binaries available on the Firefox website.

Yes it was called Firebird for a while. Oh I'm not really worried it will be dropped from Slackware in the foreseeable future and you are correct, easy as pie to build from binaries.

Yes, installing Firefox to a new directory triggers the creation of a new profile on every upgrade. ruario's script was doing this (the install directory included $VERSION), a working fix is here, most likely it will be merged at some point.

Thanks for getting a fix done. Hopefully it will be merged during his next update of it.

ah I knew it! That's why I stopped using the script. That's great news. Thanks guys (and of course ruario)

Yeah I started using the script recently and it was driving me nuts! It's unfortunate that some people were blaming Firefox for it too, but once the script is set to install in a directory named by channel rather than version, the multi-profile thing becomes a genuinely useful feature. E.g., one could easily use ruario's script to have ESR, latest, beta, all installed concurrently and each with their own profile automatically (without one messing up the other's profile).

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I made a default profile and named it so it can be easily identified. Next I edited a launcher for me to use for Firefox. The launcher sits on my desktop.

Launcher Command now reads .

This works for me anyway. No extra profiles surprise me now

I don't have this problem, using the Firefox included with Slackware64-current. I figure this is because I start Firefox with Profile Manager and choose a profile to use.

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The Firefox included in -current (ESR) installs to /usr/lib64/firefox, so upgrades don't trigger the creation of a new profile (i.e., you don't need to manually select profiles on -current).

The problem I was referring to relates to ruario's script, which is presently installing to /usr/lib64/firefox-$VERSION, and therefore after each upgrade Firefox sees a new hard drive location and creates a new profile automatically (steps here if you want to test it). The fix I proposed is to install to /usr/lib64/firefox-$CHANNEL (where $CHANNEL will be 'ESR', 'latest', 'beta', etc), so upgrades will not trigger new profile creation.

Long story short, there's nothing wrong with Firefox, it's how it's being packaged/installed that is the problem.

Btw, nothing against ruario, his script is awesome and I'm currently using it (with the modification I posted above). But installing Firefox to a versioned directory name is a major bug, and it's not at all the fault of Firefox devs.

Did you email ruario about that? as the saying goes "Not reported bugs won't be fixed"

Yep!

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I not doing this to avoid this issue. It's my preference. I've been doing this for years. In fact I used to used Mozilla's Profile Manager until it went obsolete. I was a bit worried for while because of discussions by the developers that profile management might be removed from Firefox. So glad that when the other way and kept it in.

So with ruario's build will your profile still be overwritten even when starting up with a specific profile? Guess I could install it and find out my self. I tried it awhile ago, there was something I didn't like, can't remember what it was though. I think it has something to do with location of files compare to slackware's.

Edit: Read the post from https://gist.github.com/ruario/9672798

It answered my question. Thanks!