[OLPC-AU] [Dextrose] Support for Firefox 3.5 is ending

Peter Robinson pbrobinson at gmail.com
Sun Jun 5 04:37:25 EDT 2011


On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 9:07 AM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 2011-06-05 at 17:42 +1000, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
>> On 5 June 2011 17:02, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
>> > Fedora 14 is still shipping xulrunner 1.9.2, which is roughly equivalent
>> > to the version used by Firefox 3.6. Backporting things from Fedora 15 is
>> > going to be a royal pain in the ass, since they have switched everything
>> > to Gnome 3.
>>
>> Does that mean that with FF4 installed, Browse is still working
>> because it is (equivalently) using FF3.6 as the backend?
>>
>> Would that mean that if we were to upgrade to FF4, we would have a
>> disparity in rendering between GNOME and Sugar?
>
> Yes. Since version 3.5 (iirc), Firefox comes with its own forked version
> of xulrunner. The system-wide copy of xulrunner is distinct from the one
> bundled with the Firefox package. Same for nspr (the Netscape portable
> runtime) and nss (the netscape SSL implementation). And if you happen to
> use Thunderbird, you've even got a third copy of all these libraries in
> your system.

No, xulrunner wasn't forked and the firefox package in Fedora uses the
system xulrunner. In the case of the repo with FF4 there's a
xulrunner2 package and all the libraries and names of the package when
built have been changed. To use it you have to change the way the
xulrunner app links to which version/name of the underlying xulrunner.

> Following the best traditions of Windows applications, Firefox and
> Thunderbird will store passwords, proxy settings and file associations
> in two different locations.

No idea about windows nor thunderbird but firefox 3.x and 4 will both
use the same profile (I was switching between the two for a while when
FF4 had issues even restoring the sessions) and use system proxies.

Peter


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