REQ: firefox-esr package needed

[Peter Passchier]

Just like Debian offers.

Ubuntu needs to offer the firefox-esr package to be taken seriously in the enterprise space. And I am sure there are a lot of users that appreciate their addons not potentially breaking that often (which is the real issue for me personally).

Our organisation strongly recommends firefox users to only use ESR. This makes it hard for me to push Ubuntu within our organisation.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Melvyn Sopacua (mrsopacua)]

Not because of the enterprise argument, but because Xul support will be dropped in 57.x. This means a large number of vital extensions will cease to work.

Before switching Zesty over to 56.x, please consider adding 52-ESR for Zesty users. Come release 56.x profiles will no longer migrate correctly if one decides to downgrade.

Detailed information available here: https://github.com/Aris-t2/ClassicThemeRestorer/issues/299

[Norbert (nrbrtx)]

This problem is very actual.
It was discussed at least twice on AskUbuntu (see https://askubuntu.com/questions/305199/is-there-a-deb-package-to-install-firefox-esr and https://askubuntu.com/questions/505895/how-can-i-install-an-older-version-of-firefox-in-ubuntu-14-04 ).

For Ubuntu Trusty and Xenial exists new Jonathon F's PPA (https://launchpad.net/~jonathonf/+archive/ubuntu/firefox-esr).
Users can install Firefox ESR with the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/firefox-esr
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox-esr

Thank you, jonathonf!

It maybe very useful because of new Firefox add-on policy.
I have installed 10 add-ons and 9 of them are marked as LEGACY (see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-add-technology-modernizing ).

So for enterprise users we really need ESR version of Firefox.
Please make official Ubuntu package with it.

[Simon Quigley (tsimonq2)]

This isn't a Debian issue.

[Simon Quigley (tsimonq2)]

I'll send an email to the Ubuntu Developers list on Monday. With my Lubuntu Release Manager hat on, this is desirable for Lubuntu.

[Simon Quigley (tsimonq2)]

Or, I guess this is a thing :)

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2017-September/017665.html

[Norbert (nrbrtx)]

Do you have any news about packaging Firefox ESR in supported Ubuntu?

[Rico Tzschichholz (ricotz)]

Firefox 52 ESR packages for all supported Ubuntu versions are available here:
https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

[Norbert (nrbrtx)]

Some days ago Mozilla released Firefox 57 which completely disable classic ("LEGACY") extensions. I think that real enterprise users are not happy with this new feature. Users do not need bells and whistles, they need to do their work with stable user experience and without security vulnerabilities. Firefox users can’t repair car while driving it.

The current status of porting LEGACY extensions to WebExtension are located in Google Spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TFcEXMcKrwoIAECIVyBU0GPoSmRqZ7A0VBvqeKYVSww/htmlview). The percentage of WebExtensions is not too high.

According to this fresh AskUbuntu question "How do I downgrade Firefox v. 57 to v. 56?" (https://askubuntu.com/q/977138/66509) - the problem is critically actual nowadays.
We have 12000 views of this question for 36 hours.
The accepted solution is mine: it suggests to install Firefox ESR from PPAs (jonathonf or mozillateam).

But stop and read it again. Why users should use PPAs for most common software such as web-browser (Firefox is actually default web-browser in Ubuntu)?
What will happen if these PPAs become compromised?

Debian already has Firefox ESR for all supported versions.

So I (and other users from AskUbuntu) kindly ask you (Ubuntu developers) to make official ESR package and put it alongside bleeding-edge version. You can make partnership with Mozilla Team here, I think.

I posted the similar question to the new community.ubuntu.com (https://community.ubuntu.com/t/firefox-esr-package-is-really-needed/1970).

[linux64kb (linux64kb)]

It seems there is an official Canonical ppa for this now.

https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

[Adam Porter (alphapapa)]

Unbelievable: Canonical has released Firefox 57, which no longer supports XUL extensions (i.e. the ones in use since Firefox was created, and when Trusty was released), in 14.04 Trusty. This is breaking users' Firefox installations in a "Long Term Support" release. And still no official ESR package.

This is absolutely unacceptable. Ubuntu LTS releases can no longer be taken seriously. Back to Debian for me (a long time coming, but this is like the last straw). 10 years ago, Ubuntu was doing good work, making up for many of Debian's desktop weaknesses, but now Ubuntu isn't even trustworthy. Debian would never do something like this.

[Peter Passchier (peter-passchier)]

OT, but I agree, this is bad... I blame Mozilla first, but on this issue, Ubuntu is even more to blame. I am more and more running software outside of the repos, binaries or compiled here. At this rate I might go to something like Slackware... Or back to Gentoo or something based on it where you don't need to compile absolutely everything.

[Vasiliy (count0-3)]

Recently upgraded Firefox, and it wants Pulseaudio. This sucks, found ESR packege working with ALSA. PLease add ESR to official repo, I use only LTS, and want ESR for me and my users.

[Maxime Accadia (maxacc)]

I work in education and we use Firefox ESR from https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/ppa.

This is not ideal ; a year ago or so, this repository was not up to date.

Organizations can use Firefox policies for configuration[1] and some of them are ESR-only (or at least one of them : https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates#searchengines-this-policy-is-only-available-on-the-esr).

--

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-using-policiesjson

[Maxime Accadia (maxacc)]

An other reason not to use https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/ppa for Firefox ESR : it doesn't have any language packs.

[Maxime Accadia (maxacc)]

My bad. https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/ppa *does* have languages packs for Firefox ESR (see http://ppa.launchpad.net/mozillateam/ppa/ubuntu/pool/main/f/firefox-esr/).