446337 - Firefox 3 doesn't work on Linux, except for very new distributions

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 418885

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Gustavo Homem]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070206 Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070206 Firefox/3.0.1

Firefox System Requirements:

    * Windows 2000 (8 year old OS)
    * Windows XP
    * Windows Server 2003
    * Windows Vista
    * Linux with GTK+ 2.10 (1 year old at most)

Source: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/system-requirements.html

The problem:

It is a major mess to install Firefox 3 on Linux, except on a very new distribution.

Some facts:

- Business users do not upgrade distributions every year
- It's common to use the same distribution with surgical updates for 3-4 years
- Firefox is a very important package and business users use it for critical tasks
- Users that work on 2 year old distros should still be able to have Firefox

Practical case:

A 20 workstation network with a 2 year old distribution (GTK+ 2.8):

- firefox 3 doesn't work
- either upgrade the whole distro (reconfigure hw, backup data, etc) or install GTK+ 2.10
- in order to install GTK+ 2.10 one must install Cairo, Pango, Libglib and other dependencies
- this means creating packages and throwing them on a custom repository, unless one wants to mess up every single machine manually with packages on /usr/local
- 22 packages had to be backported (rpm --rebuild), while others had to be recreated due to backport problems (./configure, make, checkinstall)
- this took 3 days of specialized manpower, is distribution-specific, so doesn't help all the others with the same problem

Conclusion:

- the FF3 dependencies are not a good idea
- FF3 will spread more slowly on Linux under these conditions
- FF3 will pass a negative image of Linux when you compare the dificulty of installation with Windows (even windows2000 which is 8 years old)

Solution:

A self-contained Firefox 3 package that includes Gtk+ 2.10 and installs on generic Linux distro, could be created.





Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
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