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Re: Firefox 52esr on PPC32 is outdated



Hi,


Leo Historias wrote:
They should update firefox to the latest one considering it is outdated and 52esr is out of support. 115ESR or 128esr is more updated than 52esr.

because Mozilla makes things unbuildable and unportable nowadays. Even if you could get it to run it would be full of endianness bugs. Also, if you compare to the 32bit version on Intel it is of limited use on single-core processors comparable to a G4. Only on the rarer Core Duo it is usable for daily browsing.
Sadly, most issues apply to ppc64 too, except more computing power.

For browsing on PPC or SPARC or similar one is better served with various forks of Firefox and PaleMoon, like SeaLion, ArcticFox, WhiteStar. They are not in the official debian repository

An intermediate compromise would be SeaMonkey which I was able to compile myself up to its butlast release at least on FreeBSD/amd64 - it doesn't have yet exotic dependencies beyond rust, but I didn't attempt on Debian yet.

Still, since those forks derive from Mozilla, they suffer from the questionable sources of upstream in the long run and suffer from the limited manpower applied to the projects.
I do know, since I (try) to maintain ArcticFox.

Also, bad news for the latest version: it is for some unknown reason broken on Debian PPC. It works on Debian Intel and PPC works on NetBSD... I don't have other Linux PPC systems to test. Given it takes 6-7 hours to compile, even bisecting is hard. Furthermore it requires python 2.7, and this excludes my second bild system which could help. My attempts to generate a new python 2.7 failed and I gave up.
So... for now, no PPC.

https://github.com/rmottola/Arctic-Fox/issues/210


Riccardo


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