• From: California, USA
  • Registered: 2008-11-29
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Topic: Ubuntu To Pull In New Versions Of Firefox

Ubuntu's longstanding policy of not pulling in new major versions of packages into their stable repositories is facing a slight change. Canonical along with the Ubuntu development community have been making it easier to deploy Mozilla Firefox web-browser updates into existing Ubuntu releases.

Rather than dealing with back-porting security changes to previous branches of Firefox, new versions of Firefox will simply be pulled, which will provide the security fixes along with all of the new features too. This change has been in the works for a number of months and with the Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid" version of Firefox it's much easier to handle the transition to future versions of Firefox. This Firefox upgrade model is also similar to how Google's Chrome / Chromium will end up working too. All of the details about this new Firefox support model within Ubuntu can be found on the Ubuntu Wiki.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n … ;px=ODMwNw

This won't really matter for us as the new CrunchBang uses Debian, but I am very happy to know that future Ubuntu users will have an easier time upgrading their Firefox to the latest version.

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  • Registered: 2009-12-29
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Re: Ubuntu To Pull In New Versions Of Firefox

I see it will also update the jaunty packages - which still concerns the current stable release of crunchbang - 9.04 smile

  • jpope
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Re: Ubuntu To Pull In New Versions Of Firefox

Too bad I've already started using Chrome more now that it is out of beta... Still, it is quite a nice move on Canonical's part.

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  • From: Lincoln, UK
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Re: Ubuntu To Pull In New Versions Of Firefox

This is a good move by Canonical the Ubuntu developers. For a lot of people, the web browser is the key piece of software on their system and so it makes complete sense to make sure they are running the latest version; more so for LTS releases. smile

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  • Registered: 2009-12-29
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Re: Ubuntu To Pull In New Versions Of Firefox

Currently I do not have the 9.04 release installed, so can anyone tell me if this already happened (getting latest firefox in jaunty)? smile

  • From: California, USA
  • Registered: 2008-11-29
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Re: Ubuntu To Pull In New Versions Of Firefox

Looking at the Ubuntu package page, it hasn't happened yet.

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  • Registered: 2008-11-24
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Re: Ubuntu To Pull In New Versions Of Firefox

I don't think the new policy is "users automatically get the latest Firefox the same day it's released" but rather "sensible Firefox upgrades so users aren't stuck with an end-of-life browser" (for example Hardy users won't have to use FF3.0).

  • From: California, USA
  • Registered: 2008-11-29
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Re: Ubuntu To Pull In New Versions Of Firefox

johnraff has posted that the updates are now there. It almost brings a tear to my eye to see Ubuntu with such new packages:

http://omploader.org/vNTIzaA/screenshot-1280206797.png

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Re: Ubuntu To Pull In New Versions Of Firefox

Well, that does it, I'm getting back to 9.04.1 smile

  • benj1
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Re: Ubuntu To Pull In New Versions Of Firefox

when was firefox ever a "lightweight web browser" ???

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  • Registered: 2009-12-29
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Re: Ubuntu To Pull In New Versions Of Firefox

benj1 wrote:

when was firefox ever a "lightweight web browser" ???

Some 5-6 years ago, around the time it was version 1 it was really lightweight, compared to the competition, which was non existent. smile

  • pvsage
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Re: Ubuntu To Pull In New Versions Of Firefox

^ Firefox's original competition on Windows (face it, we were using Windows for years before the FOSS movement was even conceived) was Netscape and Internet Explorer.  On Mac its competition was Cello...and Internet Explorer.

Some 15 years ago, when the WWW was first learning to fetch, the first big name in browsers was Mosaic by NCSA.  Netscape was a lot heavier and slower than Mosaic; I have no idea how Netscape won that race on Pentium and 486 machines.

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  • benj1
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Re: Ubuntu To Pull In New Versions Of Firefox

bozhkov wrote:
benj1 wrote:

when was firefox ever a "lightweight web browser" ???

Some 5-6 years ago, around the time it was version 1 it was really lightweight, compared to the competition, which was non existent. smile

perhaps, it certainly wasn't lightweight at the tail end of 2007 when dapper came out.

pvsage wrote:

^ Firefox's original competition on Windows (face it, we were using Windows for years before the FOSS movement was even conceived) was Netscape and Internet Explorer.  On Mac its competition was Cello...and Internet Explorer.
Some 15 years ago, when the WWW was first learning to fetch, the first big name in browsers was Mosaic by NCSA.  Netscape was a lot heavier and slower than Mosaic; I have no idea how Netscape won that race on Pentium and 486 machines.

Windows 1.0 came out on 20/12/1985, it didn't become popular until version 3.0/3.1 came out in 1990,
the GNU project was started on 27/9/1983 (according to wikipedia).
So actually the foss movement was conceived before Windows, although there wasn't really a full foss system until linux came out in 1991.

I don't know why netscape won, although its probably for the same reason that IE did later on.

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  • Registered: 2009-12-29
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Re: Ubuntu To Pull In New Versions Of Firefox

pvsage wrote:

^ Firefox's original competition on Windows (face it, we were using Windows for years before the FOSS movement was even conceived) was Netscape and Internet Explorer.  On Mac its competition was Cello...and Internet Explorer.

Some 15 years ago, when the WWW was first learning to fetch, the first big name in browsers was Mosaic by NCSA.  Netscape was a lot heavier and slower than Mosaic; I have no idea how Netscape won that race on Pentium and 486 machines.

Firefox was "concieved" from Netscape code, so there wasn't much of a competition between them. It was all about IE smile