[Dextrose] Support for Firefox 3.5 is ending

[Bernie Innocenti]

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.

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

Seeing this, the Chromium developers promptly reacted by bundling a
dozen of large system libraries into their codebase, including ffmpeg,
libicu, openssl and sqlite. Some of these have been diligently forked to
ensure that packagers wouldn't accidentally try to use the system
copies!

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