# Firefox update

## bjdacre

Gentlepeople,

Firefox is probably the main piece of software I use on my computer, well, I mean a web browser, but for the time being that is Firefox and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

I also value stability so I have tried to keep my system running only software deemed by the package maintainers as stable.  Initially I didn't understand how Gentoo packaged and numbered Firefox until I discovered that Mozilla themselves maintain a long term support version.  That was until recently v31, and more recently v38.  When I was using Debian I used to get the latest version from backports and felt that by and large, keeping up with the latest version was more positive than negative, so the apparent conservatism of Gentoo took a little while to get used to.  However, I decided to accept it and let more knowledgeable people make the decision on stability.

Anyway, I was looking forward to getting the new lts version v38, and finally this morning on my daily system update, there it was.  Yay, I think...

Definitely yay;

Compilation surprised me and took maybe 2 hours (maybe less) rather than 4.

Not so sure;

Starting it up I find it is the developer edition and it has created a new profile so all of my customisations are lost.  I suppose I can copy across the old profile (I'm not sure what the effect of this will be but I can always delete it and start again as the new version demanded anyway).  I also don't seem to be able to choose small icons so that I get more compact (vertically) toolbars and menus.

But this is not my major concern.  Is the developer edition now considered the new stable version.  I did a wee bit of reading, and it seems to me that the developer edition will be used by Mozilla to test new features not deemed stable enough for the main line browser.  Now I'm not saying this would rule it out for me, especially if we got earlier access to the multi-process version of Firefox, but it does seem like some sort of policy change on Gentoo's part on what constitutes a stable version of Firefox.

So, is the developer edition the new stable version?  Should I go ahead and update my other computers to this new version?

Thanks.

Brendan

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## Apheus

I assume you have +bindist set on firefox (which is the default)?

See here: USE=bindist - profile selection pre-selects dev-edition-default instead of previously selected profile

Tldr: Unset the "bindist" use flag. For licensing reasons the unbranded version is selected by default in gentoo, but for some versions now this equals to the developer edition which messes up firefox's profile selection. Mozilla or Gentoo need to untangle "unbranded version" from "developer version" imho.

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## bjdacre

Thanks Apheus, that bug report was informative, if not quite helpful...   :Confused: 

You can also force profile selection by starting firefox with the -p PROFILENAME parameter.  I have, for the time being, disabled the preference allowing the developer edition to run at the same time as the normal version.

Has anyone compiled Firefox recently with bindist disabled?  Does this give you the non-developer version?  The comment on the effects of bindist arguably just apply to redistribting a binary version...

Brendan

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## Hu

I am using Firefox 38.1 ESR with USE=-bindist and never encountered anything related to developer mode.  The new Firefox is uglier than the old one, but otherwise works the same.

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## bjdacre

Thanks for that information  Hu.

And now I can confirm it.  I re-compiled it myself and voila, vanilla (uglier) branded Firefox...

It did give me a warning about distributing the binary, even on my local network, but this is Gentoo...  I compile everything with customised cflags, so I can't safely copy from one pc to another anyway...    :Smile: 

Brendan

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