[hardy] firefox 3 (beta) is riddled with problems

[Mike Green]

Binary package hint: firefox

How a beta release of firefox (3.0~b5+nobinonly-0ubuntu3) got chosen as the default browser in a long term release is beyond me, it is riddled with problems that left me with an extremely poor opinion of hardy. It took me all of five minutes to experience several show stopping problems.

After launching the shiny new beta version of firefox for the first time after upgrading:

1) Most of my existing addons stopped working and there were no replacements for firefox 3.

2) Java plugin missing.

3) Went to the CNN web site, browser crashed immediately after clicking on two news articles.

It took me all of five minutes to determine that I could not use firefox 3, so I installed the firefox-2 package. I then ran into even more problems.

1) None of my pre-existing plugins worked after having launched firefox-3, apparently firefox 3 clobbered something. Disabling each addon, re-enabling them, relaunching the browser, would work sometimes.

2) Update alternatives does not touch the /usr/bin/firefox symlink, causing random applications (kmail, knewsticker) to launch firefox 3 again and clobber my mozilla profile again, disabling all of my addons. I had to manually remove the /usr/bin/firefox symlink and recreate it, pointing to firefox-2.

3) The firefox-2 package should add a Provides: firefox so that firefox three can be completely removed without causing other packages that depend on firefox to be removed. I cannot currently extricate firefox 3 from my box without it wanting to autoremove important packages like subversion, mysql-client-5.0, ssh-ashpass, libsvn-perl, debian-keyring, etc....

4) Java plugin missing in firefox-2 also, had to manually create the symlink in /usr/lib/firefox/plugins.

There are just too many problems caused by foisting a beta release of a major package on unsuspecting users. Hardy should revert back to installing firefox-2 until installing and using both on the same box can be possible without rendering the user experience a nightmare.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

This is not a bug. Firefox 3 was chossen becuase firefox 2 i almost EOS within the next few months and we cant support firefox-2 after that so we took the best of both evils and included firefox 3 in hardy because it cant be LTS if we cant support the preinstalled browser. As for you issue try looking in the repos for the extensions you want to install we added a bunch of the, if they are not there look at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Firefox3Extensions to see why its not in repos yet. Please file a bug report with only 1 problem. Firefox 3.0 will be upgraded as upstream pushes new versions so it will be stable very soon as long as the blockers are done. last i hear it was about 1 1/2 months from Hardy date of release. we left firefox-2 in repos if you dont like the idea of using firefox-3 install firefox-2 but should be installed unles syou moved it.

[Mike Green (mikey-badpenguins)]

Perhaps you should read my entire bug report before marking it invalid.

Firefox 3 and firefox-2 cannot safely co-mingle on the same box. There is no way to tell the system to use one over the other, the alternatives system does not alter the /usr/bin/firefox link, causing applications like kde apps to launch firefox 3 via the /usr/bin/firefox symlink, which ends up clobbering all of the addons in firefox2 and firefox3.

The bug is not a particular package, it is the fact that both firefoxes cannot be used successfully, leaving the user without an adequate browser either way. I don't particularly care why it was chosen, I want a web browser that I can actually use on my ubuntu box. I don't have the time or knowledge to track it down to a particular bug and report it because it is a system-wide, multiple package problem. I will leave figuring out the best way to address solving it up to the experts.

If you ever expect bug #1 to be anything other than a joke, you might want to consider more thoughtfully bugs like this one before marking it invalid within 10 minutes. A distribution with a decent usable browser is a fairly significant barrier to widespread adoption.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

These are all bugs that have been reported. as for your answers i will redo them since i hit wrong key combo and deleted it all.
1) try using the extensions that we packaged in Hardy before using the ones from addon site, we cant support packages we dont package. so if its not compatible its easy to change in one of the files in the .xpi but look in Ubuntu for ours.
2)Java plugin might not have been upgraded when you upgraded to Hardy or its still in firefox-2 profile this was a bug before release as far as we have heard its been fixed.
3) your cnn issue is well known and being worked on. Please run locate libflashsupport.so if you see it please remove it unless your on 64bit also make sure you dont have swfdec in your profiles as that is causing crashes.

1)Its because the exsisting ones werent working clobbering profile how ever you want to look at it is because of a few reasons
A) they were not able to find updates for them
B) they are not our extensions that we package.
Please remember we cant support extensions from addon site. we can try but if ff cant find updates and disables them for that reason i suggest downloading the right ones for 3.0 or using ours.
2) there area lot of update-alternatives to use for browser and plugins look throught them and if for ff2 when you choose xulrunner please make sure its not xulrunner-mozilla-plugins as that is for 1.9 firefox 2.0 needs xulrunner package its version is 1.8
3) Can you please post the exact output when using APT-GET NOT APTITUDE as you stated they are autoremove that is a feature that is combined in aptitude but you need to run it in apt-get by stating autoremove in command. apt-get remove shouldnt remove most of them if not all of them. if you remove ff3 you might not want to remove xulrunner-1.8 as i recall it has a bunch of demands.
4) Java plugin problem doesnt sound like a firefox issue due to it wasnt ther ein ff3 and not there in 2 unless you switched browsers and thats why its moving around. All plugins in HArdy go to ff3 profile since it is default browser on Ubuntu Hardy this can be changed by playing with update-alternatives or you can give us more info on your system and maybe we can help you 1 issue at a time not all at once without any info on your system
As for me not caring that is not true. This is NOT a bug by definition, it is more of a complaint and complaints are not bugs and shouldnt be here. If you want help use or mailing list ubuntu-mozillateam found on lists.ubuntu.com or try answers.launchpad.net or on IRC at #ubuntu-mozillateam.
if you want to file a bug please file a bug with 1 issue/problem per bug. as for your main complaint being to not include ff3 as default well if we didnt we couldnt support any version of ff since ff2 is about to reach EOS in a month or 2. Hardy will get all firefox3 updates and will be stable in a month to a month and 1/2 usless the blockers are harder than Mozilla realized but they are knowcking them out prtty fast right now we are just about ready for RC1 to be released. So we decided to make ff3 because of us being able to support it along with mozilla updates. ff2 wont be getting any updates from Mozilla fairly soon normall 2...