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How Firefox flows downstream
(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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“Will Linux Users Miss Out on Firefox 3?” by Sean Michael Kerner talks about the release process for Firefox in Linux distros — basically taking note of the fact that distros repackage Firefox and thus it may be a bit of delay between the official Firefox release and when it shows up in distro updates. The headline is a bit misleading, I think — if you’re skimming Google News or a bunch of RSS feeds, the impression is “oh goodness, Linux users might not be able to use Firefox 3?” That would be news, if it were so, because I’m sitting here typing into a Firefox 3.0 RC while reading it…
It’s also a shame he didn’t talk to anyone on the openSUSE team or with Novell about our policies for Firefox…
But no, Linux users won’t “miss out” on Firefox 3. They might start using it a day or two later, assuming they’re running Firefox using the packages supplied by their distros instead of the tarballs from Mozilla. (Right now, I’m running one of the RCs using Firefox’s tarball myself, on top of openSUSE 11.0…)
I think the article presents the delay as something of a hassle or detriment to users, but doesn’t really take note of the fact that the distros do testing of Firefox updates to make sure they’re not passing on any problems via the update.
Also, I might add, it could be pointed out that Firefox’s update mechanism is necessitated by the fact that Apple and Microsoft don’t distribute Firefox — so their update mechanisms don’t do anything for the third-party software (like Firefox) that their users run.
Linux distros, on the other hand, have streamlined the update and distribution channel for thousands of applications — it’s entirely possible for users to get most (if not all) of their software directly from the distro, and avoid worrying about when and where updates are coming from. A single update mechanism will bring in all the required updates for software packaged and shipped as part of the distro — which is way more convenient.
I don’t think this feature gets nearly enough attention when Linux is discussed. (And I don’t just mean openSUSE here — to be fair, you get this advantage from all of the major distros…) About 98% of the software I use right now is directly available in the openSUSE repositories, so I don’t have to install and track it separately.
Bug testing is one, but having one place only to update (almost) all of your software is the one killer feature for me. Work related, I have a seldom booted Windows partition, and my wife is an OS X user. On most of my Linux boxes, the only manual interaction comes with kernel updates and the like, and all of the software is kept up to date - not only the OS, or a selected few applications. On my laptop, I start the update and get myself a coffee, and don’t do anything more with it. My regular Windows and OS X updates drive me nuts, spending hours for updating disparage application, using a dozen different update applications.
Does Linux need an easier install process? No, we already have good ones available… and an unbeaten update process.
I trade in a wait for Firefox for the tight integration with my system anytime. Besides, as far as I understand, the folks at Mozilla rely on the Linux distributors to iron out their own bugs (hint: the not so awesome performance thanks to reliance on a certain database). So, yes, I rather prefer to get my Firefox from SUSE (and OpenOffice.org with enhanced functions compared to Sun’s offering, and a usable KDE4, and …).
I wanted to download and install FF3 so I found this cool tip for openSUSE 10.3 users: http://forums.opensuse.org/applications/386197-firefox-3-rpm.html
Not to mention Firefox in openSUSE has a special add-on: our Beagle indexing plug-in. So we need to package Firefox to get that included in openSUSE.