The switch from iceweasel to firefox

[michaaa62]

I am not sure, if this is the appropriate section, feel free to move!

Finally, or for now, Debian is moving from iceweasel to firefox.
Is the a recommended package to choose between firefox or firefox-esr?

[piper]

I say nightly 48.0a1 (2016-03-12) 

 Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) is all up to the user and how the user use's his/her computer.

A older blog that is probably still a good read.

Remember, we are sid, we are sidulated

[DeepDayze]

Firefox-esr is a longterm supported release and apparently it gets installed by default in a dist-upgrade. From what I gather the esr release on Debian will be supported for 9 months rather than the 6 week schedule that is standard.

[musca]

Hello,

while dist-upgraders get Firefox-esr, siduction will switch from Iceweasel to Firefox with the next release.

Firefox will bring new features every six weeks and we embrace the change.
This only applies to four flavours as listed below.

Desktop  Browser Cinnamon  Firefox GNOME  Firefox Mate  Firefox KDE   Firefox (Konqueror for internals) LXDE   Midori LXQT  Qupzilla XFCE  Chromium Xorg  ?  

We are aware that webkit-based browsers are a security concern.
GNOME already dropped its epiphany browser for this reason, but yelp has similar issues.
KDE's Konqueror merely is meant to be used as a filemanager or for reading internal docs with its kio-integration.
Other lightweigth browsers like Midori, Qupzilla or even Xombrero ("Built with security in mind") share the same security concerns.
The rendering engine of Chromium, Blink, has been forked from webkit to speed up the development.
 
greetings
musca

[piper]

You can also use  mozilla.d.n (http://mozilla.debian.net/) to install firefox.
Mozilla.d.n is for people that don't want to use the ESR (you do have that choice also, esr45, release, beta, aurora).

You can probably get away with installing firefox, then purging iceweasel then doing something like  ln -s /usr/bin/firefox /usr/local/bin/iceweasel should be good to go.

[terroreek]

Anyone else having an issue with firefox where in the application menu in gnome it just shows as a generic program image instead of the firefox logo. 

-edit-
well a reboot later and everything is good.

[sunrat]

I did have to manually select Firefox in Icedove to open http/https links after the d-u brought in ESR version. It showed "Open with Firefox"  but didn't work.
No other issues so far.

[der_bud]

Just an information/observation: with iceweasel x-www-browser pointed to /usr/bin/iceweasel. After D-U to firefox the latter is a link to firefox, so x-www-browser still works (for example opening links from a console window, irc,...). If people delete the 'obsolete' package iceweasel, like I did, this link gets removed, but x-www-browser still points to now not working iceweasel. In this case I needed to manually

Code: [Select]

update-alternatives --config x-www-browser an select firefox.

[piper]

If using firefox/firefox nightly  in /opt

Code: [Select]

update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/x-www-browser x-www-browser /opt/firefox 90

update-alternatives --set x-www-browser /opt/firefox