[Dextrose] Support for Firefox 3.5 is ending

[David Farning]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sridhar Dhanapalan [mailto:sridhar at laptop.org.au]
> Sent: Sunday, June 05, 2011 3:42 AM
> To: Bernie Innocenti
> Cc: David Farning; OLPC Devel; OLPC Australia list; Dextrose
> Subject: Re: [Dextrose] Support for Firefox 3.5 is ending
> 
> 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?

FF3.6 and xulrunner 1.9.2 are based on the same code base
FF4 and xulrunner 2.0 are based on the same code base

When you install FF4 on Fedora14 there will be two versions of xulrunner
installed.
 
> Would that mean that if we were to upgrade to FF4, we would have a disparity
in
> rendering between GNOME and Sugar?

The issues becomes one of cost benefit. What is the cost of OLPC, AC, or
individual deployments supporting a version of xulrunner which is not supported
or QAed by fedora vs. the benefit of having ff4 in the os.

My guess is that the cost will exceed the benefit.  So AC will not back port,
QA, or support ff4 on DX12 unless someone else takes the lead. But the beauty of
a community project is that if anyone else thinks that benefit is greater than
the cost they are welcome and encouraged to 'make it happen.'

>From AC's point of view. The biggest request is for stability and predictable
over features and performance.

david