Mageia forum

Howdy guys,

I know Mozilla is partly to blame for this, but version 57 of Firefox is not backwards compatible with anything, besides, it is a quite desireable update for many people. I myself have used Firefox 57 on Mageia for about a week now, and I am quite satisfied with it.

When will Mageia include Firefox 57 in the packages or as an update? This seems to be more urgent than one would think. Let's say you are a new Mageia user or reinstalled you distro, or your Firefox browser, or deleted the addons, then you are stuck with version 52 of Firefox where most addons are now incompatible with any versions lower than version 57.

Is there a timetable or a discussion anywhere?

Ooh, and I noticed that Mageia now finally ships with the Nano editor as well. Bless you guys, thanks for that.

Well you would have to look at the Mozilla timetable when they actually release the next ESR version, which would be 59, which will be released next year: https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar
So the Mageia updates to that would probably come after March 2018 but probably not before May as we usually wait for the next minor ESR version to be released to have more extensive testing and a longer cutover phase.

Ok! Thanks for clarifying.
Do you have some more info on Mageia policy? Why do Mageia only use ESR versions? (if they do, as it seems)

I guess for anyone else who wants to use Firefox 57 meanwhile, they'll have to do like me and install and run their own version locally

zeebra wrote:Do you have some more info on Mageia policy? Why do Mageia only use ESR versions? (if they do, as it seems)

Because we opted to go with the ESR builds. See e.g. https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Archive:_Mag ... il_clients and maybe viewtopic.php?p=27347#p27347

Please do not roll forward to FF 57 until enough time has elapsed that the plugins (or extensions, or whatever they call them) are matured.

My Linux Mint VM rolled to FF 57 and now things are broken to the point where it is almost useless. I depend on NoScript rather heavily, for both security and for peace of mind (I don't see how anyone can stand to browse with a browser that lets those obnoxious flashing, screaming ads through), and on FF57 it is badly broken. The result is that FF simply no longer works for me in many cases on that VM and I have therefore had to sideline that VM pending improvements.

I do not wish to block updates of FF in Mageia because I do want to keep up with security fixes. But a heads-up when Mageia goes to 57 would be helpful; I will block it then if I must.

jiml8 wrote:Please do not roll forward to FF 57 until enough time has elapsed that the plugins (or extensions, or whatever they call them) are matured.

Well, as mentioned that probably won't happen until the second minor release for FF 59 is out, so probably not before May 2018.