Firefox ESR 24.x support dropped?
 

Looks like Mozilla stopped supporting the 24.x line of Firefox. I get warnings from Gmail and at the Mozilla site.

https://www.mozilla.org

Will we see the 31.x line hit the 14.1 stable release?

Member Response
 

Hi,

Mozilla just released Official Firefox 33.02 for update. So for the new Official Firefox release I use ruario's 'latest-firefox Version 1.0RC9' script to get the binary & create a Slackware package. On my machines I do not use ESR;The new ESR from PV will be available when Mozilla releases a update.

If you want PV's ESR release then look in the http://slackware.oregonstate.edu/sla...ches/packages/ directory for the new ESR Mozilla patch package; Please note the date for this package.
Hope this helps.
Have fun & enjoy.
:hattip:

Hi onebuck.

Thanks for your howto on re-packaging official Mozilla binaries.

Regarding kfritz's comment about ESR, I believe he's noting Firefox ESR 24 has EOLd and has been replaced by Firefox ESR 31 (first
released in July 2014). Mozilla intentionally sets up overlap between ESR majors to afford organizations time to transition before the
previous ESR branch EOLs. In the case of ESR 24 and ESR 31, the overlap period was July 22 - October 14.

Slackware 14.1 currently ships an EOLd ESR that is vulnerable to many of the security issues Mozilla reported on October 14th. I've
written up a post about this.

--mancha

PS You also might be able to use Slackware-current's build files to build Firefox 33.0.2 on Slackware 14.1. I've recently started a build
to check this but it's still churning (no snafus so far though).

As far as I can tell, a good policy would be for Slackware to jump from ESR to ESR, even for older releases, like RHEL does. RHEL 5 is currently shipping Firefox 31 ESR.

Member Response
 

Hi,
That is why I included Mozilla's ESR definition above. I should have included for 31.x ESR;Personally, I prefer Mozilla's Official release. I do understand PV's reason for change to ESR. My reasoning is that I do want to experience the changes, enhancements by using the official release.

Hope this helps.
Have fun & enjoy!
:hattip:

I've been installing the firefox and thunderbird packages from current and have not had any problems with them upgrading.

I'm switching to Chrome on Slackware 14.1 until 14.2 is released. I'll use FF on 14.1 again if it is updated to a more secure version.

FF 33 from current works just fine on 14.1. Just save the package and install it via upgradepkg.

Yup. You can do that. As a rule I don't like to run -current packages on 14.1.

I agree with that as well. Firefox and thunderbird are the only exceptions I make as long as they work.

I would advise to switch for Pale Moon instead. It is really awesome build of Firefox. Crazy version numbers, memory leaks, performance issues, interface nonsenses, buggy sync issues are all solved perfectly by pale moon. It's quick, very stable, secure and quite dependable. Excellent browser for excellent system I dare to say. Now if there was a SlackBuild... Anyway, they have Windows and Linux (both 32 and 64bit), portable, atom (special for netbooks) versions available. For the time being it is possible to install it on Slackware with pminstaller, however there is source.tar.bz2 available for clever persons who can write SlackBuilds ;)

I use it myself extensively for about half a year already an I blame myself for not finding it earlier. It's just that great! And in the face of chrome-madness it's one nice alternative browser which stands for itself.

Better yet, there is a build of sane Thunderbird too, it's called FossaMail (but I have not tried it, for I am Claws Mail user).

In a way, this project is to Firefox, what Mate is to Gnome.

I'm using Pale Moon on some of my Windows machines and it's perfect. Everything I love about Firefox in the past is still included there - the old download manager, the old design (no Australis), a full status bar etc.

But the Linux build system is outdated. Last time I tried to build Pale Moon from source it needed a really old version of automake. I don't want to run their binaries.

Also, they haven't ported HTML5 video features. I understand that this fits into their lightweight perspective, but Youtube with Flash is horrible. Even with Pepperflash.

Thanks for posting the link to ruario's script. Got it, ran it, upgraded 24.8.1ESR to 33.0.2, works just fine. Like the look and feel of 33.x.

Also changed the user.js file (in .mozilla/firfox/blah.default) so gmail and other things don't yammer at me about obsolete version (and the Slackware logo will appear in posts, eh?).

Nice job, ruario.

You are welcome

Firefox security issues, do they tend to be within code you'd get from mozilla's source control (hg clone https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/ firefox) or are they often in dependencies as well? Does bleeding edge firefox tend to shuffle along to higher and higher version number requirements for required libraries or can you generally get away with building new firefox with vanilla base slackware libraries?