Firefox: Switching to ESR?

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kraileth
Posts: 312
Joined: Sun Sep 04, 2016 12:30 pm

Firefox: Switching to ESR?

Post by kraileth »

We've had a discussion about which browser to install by default before. Obviously there are quite some lighter alternatives to the big ones but people need one of the major players for a variety of reasons. And since Chromium has had horrible issues on FreeBSD for a long time now, we don't really have much choice since more or less only Firefox remains.

However now the Firefox maintainer seems to follow the idea to bring in new development releases! I'm writing this from Firefox 53 which is currently a beta release. This is questionable for an operating system that aims for stability, to say the least. But there's more to it: For me at least I'm experiencing terribly looking fonts with the version of Firefox currently in ports. This is happening for me on three independent PCs: 2x FreeBSD, 1x GhostBSD.

I'm not so much an "optical" guy and have no problem with ugly motif applications and stuff like that. But there are quite some people out there who think about things like that very differently. And together with the beta branch thing, I'm asking myself if it would make sense to consider switching to firefox-esr instead? If the maintainer stops offering beta software, we can always migrate back. With our own pkg repo we will of course also have other possibilities, too.

This is just something to start a discussion. What does everybody think about it?
ASX
Posts: 988
Joined: Wed May 06, 2015 12:46 pm

Re: Firefox: Switching to ESR?

Post by ASX »

By providing (nearly) the full freebsd ports tree, we will provide alternatives, and I agree there is the need for some of the major browsers:
- firefox
- firefox ESR
- chromium

I'm also of the idea to include "iridium": (chromium based): https://iridiumbrowser.de/index.html#about
a port for freebsd is available on github, courtesy of cpm@

jmaloney also pointed me at this one: http://dooble.sourceforge.net/
apparently BSD licensed and aimed at privacy too.

Qupzilla remain one of my preferred light alternative.

now, about to make firefox-ESR the default ... may be ... I just didn't tried it, but will do in the next days.
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