[Dextrose] Support for Firefox 3.5 is ending

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Sun, 2011-06-05 at 15:50 +1000, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
> (sorry - sending again because I had the wrong address for the olpc devel list)
> 
> 
> Firefox 3.5 is being EOLed by Mozilla[0] and Google is dropping
> support for it[1]. In 10.1.3 this is default Web browser in GNOME and
> the backend of the Browse activity, so we should be thinking of what
> that means for us.
> 
> The plan for Australia is to have a Fedora 14 build (based on DX12)
> ready by January. F14 comes with Firefox 3.6, which is the oldest
> version supported by Mozilla and Google.
> 
> What would be even better is to have Firefox 4 available. By January,
> Firefox 3.6 will be quite old and close to EOL. Firefox 4 is a fair
> bit faster than 3.6, allowing us to squeeze extra performance out of
> our XOs. There is a yum repository for F14[2].
> 
> I use this on my F14 work machine (albeit in x86_64), and I've had no
> problem. Browse continues to work in Sugar.
> 
> Are there any thoughts/plans about including Firefox 4 in the OLPC/DX OS?

There was some discussion at EduJam. Browse is currently unmaintained,
but Simon Schampijer and Gonzalo Odiard expressed interest in working on
it. There was the question of missing support for the Python bindings of
GtkMozEmbed, but the problem appears to be solved now.

In the longer term, there's also the option of switching to Surf, an
alternative browser based on WebKit which promises to be faster and less
memory hungry than Browse. This depends on Lucian Branescu (or someone
else) resuming the work on it. Migrating to Surf wasn't feasible with
Fedora 11 because too many of WebKitGtk's dependencies were missing.

-- 
Bernie Innocenti
Sugar Labs Infrastructure Team
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Infrastructure_Team