On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 4:56 PM, Kevin Fenzi <kevin@scrye.com> wrote:
On Sat, 08 Oct 2011 23:43:58 +0200
Christoph Wickert <christoph.wickert@googlemail.com> wrote:

...snip...

> So what can we do to improve the situation?
>      1. Can we bring back the language packs as part of the packages?
>      2. Can the FF maintainers make sure that all maintainers of
>         extensions get notified of changes *before* release of a new
>         package?
>      3. Can someone (I'm looking at you, QA) make sure all extensions
>         are still compatible?
>
> More ideas or suggestions?

Sadly, upstream is being pretty distro hostile these days I fear.

We can try and put our efforts behind
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal
and hope there's a extended support version? Possibly we could ship
both that and the latest Firefox-999 version.

kevin

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I've heard that Mozilla will be making some massive changes to their handling of Extensions for Firefox 8 to fix a lot of these issues. Since Firefox 4, there actually have not been a lot of changes to the Extensions API, but because Fedora doesn't have the rebuilding mechanism that Mozilla Addons has, the extensions have not been automatically updated with new compatibility information.

One major change I know of is that Extensions will be assumed compatible by default instead of incompatible. That means that while Firefox will warn users about extensions that say they only support older versions, they will not be disabled.

Not all the blame lies on Mozilla though. Fedora could do better on handling Firefox updates too. Unlike the upgrade from Firefox 3.6 to Firefox 4, Firefoxes 5, 6, and 7 are not actually really that major. Firefox 8 will make some radical changes, but functionally it isn't a major upgrade. We need to start treating Firefox releases as safe, minor upgrades beginning with Firefox 8.