Firefox 1.5 not 2.0

Mozilla.org made a big push to get everyone to switch from Firefox 1.5 to 2.0, and de-supported Firefox 1.5 in May 2007. Red Hat, SuSE, and other distributions established a collaboration to continue supporting Firefox 1.5 after Mozilla discontinued support.

The rationale for sticking with 1.5 was:

• There were costs involved in dealing with subsystems that had started using libraries from Firefox (devhelp, epiphany, galeon, gnome-python2-gtkmozembed, liferea and yelp), and in dealing with migration issues for plug-ins and extensions based on Firefox 1.5.
• Firefox 2.0 had re-introduced bugs that had been fixed in Firefox 1.5 for rendering international characters, printing, cascading style sheets, security and random application freeze-up.
• RSS handling took a step backwards in functionality.
• The new functionality in 2.0 was deemed not significant enough to deal with the costs and regressions.
• A consortium of Linux distributions including Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu and others formed to continue supporting Firefox 1.5 after Mozilla.org support ended.
• Significant improvements to behavior under Linux and cleaner support of applications wanting to use the Mozilla-supplied libraries were slated for Firefox 3.0.
• Red Hat made the primary focus of Enterprise Client to be customers with large deployments that could not easily take an upgrade to Firefox.

With a support consortium in place, a pathway to good code and significant functionality improvement established, and the committment to not forcing big changes on customers, Red Hat locked itself in to Firefox 1.5.

It is unfortunate that the other members of the Linux Firefox 1.5 support consortium seem to have caved to the Firefox 2.0 marketing push. All the other distributions offer 2.0 either by default or as an option. This makes Red Hat's carefully reasoned decision look like a bad one.

There are options for installing Firefox 2.0 on Red RHEL but they create problems:

• Firefox 2.0 and 1.5 profiles are incompatible, so you need to use the profile manager and be very careful never to run 1.5 on your 2.0 profile. When the time comes to update to the new version of Firefox from Red Hat, you will need to be very careful that the right profile migrates over and becomes your one and only.
• Removing Firefox 1.5 completely would eliminate the profile conflict, but then the applications that depend upon the Firefox 1.5 libraries (devhelp, epiphany, galeon, gnome-python2-gtkmozembed, liferea and yelp) would break.
• Adopting an early release of xulrunner would eliminate the library conflict, but that release is not maintained, and contains known security problems.
• MIT could craft shadow RPMs that replace the dependent subsystems and Firefox, but dealing with any updates by Red Hat to the dependent subsystems or Firefox would be messy. If both MIT and Red Hat did not agree perfectly on the version numbering, systems could get into a state where nothing could be installed until a careful removal of components was made by a wizard.

Bottom Line: No Firefox 2.0 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.