[Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

cynwulf · 2017-10-26 11:22:43

greenjeans wrote:

cynwulf wrote:
Pale Moon is controversial. It's seen by some as a "snake oil" product, because the performance claims generally don't add up. .
Well, acknowledging for the moment that I and my wife are a sample size of just two, and hardware makes a difference, and all the other disclaimers necessary:
Extensive testing on several machines for me has very conclusively shown that Palemoon is faster than Firefox in every way that I have used it, for the most part it's a very dramatic difference.

Any actual data...?

Have you tried the latest Firefox (56?) which now uses "rust"...? Apparently according to anecdotal evidence and benchmarks it's "faster"... (or maybe it starts up faster...?)

greenjeans wrote:

It's reminds me of Firefox back when Firefox didn't suck completely.

Firefox has been "expanding" steadily for over 10 years. Around version 2.x was the last time I remember it being "fast" and "lightweight". This is effectively because Firefox is commercial (Mozilla foundation is bankrolled by Google, etc and has the google "safe browsing" spyware and geolocation built in) and strives to remain "current" and "competitive" to keep that revenue.

"Modern" browsers are anything but "light", obviously because they're not just for browsing HTML anymore. The sheer amount of functionality built into chromium/blink, webkit, Gecko, etc makes them pretty heavyweight, combine this with the "feature creep" factor and the amount of redundant code (especially with regard to Gecko) and you've got something which will take hours to compile and need a lot of RAM.

Apple avoided Gecko (which had/has a lot of old Netscape code) and adopted KHTML for Safari, starting webkit in the process. As I recall at the time, bloat was one of the main concerns and KHTML (Konqueror's layout engine) was cleaner and more stripped down.

Last edited by cynwulf (2017-10-26 11:25:42)

fungus · 2017-10-26 14:10:09

In what ways is FF-esr better beyond the marketing propaganda?

As I understand it the extended life support provides a more stable code that can be audited line by line before a new version is released and all revisions can be added to the existing code instead for an all new package replacing the old. This gives more (if not adequate time) for security concerns to be addressed and published. Meanwhile bugs in functionality cand be backported if the apply. I believe the current version is 52-4 and has most of any bugs that ever appeared on 52 solved.

But there may be more to this than meets the eye. It has only been a year or two? that debian quit making their own ff as iceweasel and icedove instead of tb. I believe this -esr series was the bargain they struck with mozilla for a free-er and more steady code.

cynwulf · 2017-10-26 14:44:33

fungus wrote:

In what ways is FF-esr better beyond the marketing propaganda?

I've often wondered...

As I recall ESR was the bone they threw to corporate users. This was because in a corporate environment every piece of software has to be evaluated, so a moving target like firefox on the "release" channel was difficult to deal with. ESR was the compromise they came up with for this purpose I believe - It has nothing to do with Debian.

The new "release" model ("release early, release often" - as per the Linux kernel development or "aping whatever chromium are doing", as some saw it) was initially very unpopular with end users and many IT professionals alike.

fungus wrote:

As I understand it the extended life support provides a more stable code that can be audited line by line before a new version is released and all revisions can be added to the existing code instead for an all new package replacing the old. This gives more (if not adequate time) for security concerns to be addressed and published. Meanwhile bugs in functionality can be backported if the apply. I believe the current version is 52-4 and has most of any bugs that ever appeared on 52 solved.

ESR is just a code base "freeze" which is supported with backported security updates for longer. It won't get all the functionality from the new "release" releases, but it should get security patches.

I'm not sure of the ins and outs of why Debian recently reverted back to firefox branding (someone here will know), but the reasons for iceweasel were that Debian could not comply with the Mozilla licence and still call the software firefox, if it was going to apply it's own patches (as it does with most other packages for the duration of a stable/oldstable release).

And as I recall the use of the logos and trademarks and using the name "firefox" were two separate issues as well.

Years ago there were numerous arguments on the old Debian forums about Iceweasel and Firefox not being the same, etc.

Last edited by cynwulf (2017-10-26 14:45:23)

greenjeans · 2017-10-26 20:32:25

Finally found found a bug (I think) in Palemoon, it doesn't seem to know what to do with an .mhtml file. Chromium opens them up perfectly, but PM errors, it throws up a sort of "what do you want to do with this file? Open, save? thing, and when you click "open" it doesn't open it, throws up a new tab, and presents you with the same question box again, over and over.

Other than that, Palemoon does a good job, it does lag on opening some, but not as bad as Chromium has gotten and waaaaaaay better than FF.

185 kb to install python-webkit and throw up a tiny fast browser, vs 170 mb of Chromium and over 100 mb of FF, it's ridiculous really, I find myself using the python browser more and more. I'm guessing it wouldn't be too hard to solve the occasional crash caused by video or add some rules that blocks it and JS and such. I had it working great on Youtube for a while, isn't youtube all HTML5 now? Not going to add flash just to see, lol.

185 kb. <---the "massive bloated webkit", lololololol!

cynwulf · 2017-10-27 08:57:44

PythonWebkitGtk is an API, it's a little bit more than 185 kB, but that's irrelevant... it depends on the webkit layout engine which is where the bloat comes in... the browser's functionality is mainly in the layout engine, the rest is known as the "chrome". By using a simple python front end, you're using a different, very stripped down and featureless, chrome, but in terms of resource saving, it's negligible - the layout engine is what consumes. The only other major factor in memory consumption is cached pages - that can take up a lot of RAM, very quickly.

Taking Debian jessie as an example: libwebkitgtk-1.0-0_2.4.9-1-deb8u1_amd64.deb the installed size of webkitgtk is 32,760.0 kB.

Upstream source tarball:

https://webkitgtk.org/releases/webkitgtk-2.18.1.tar.xz

14.1 MB xz archive
122 MB extracted size

More than a few lines of code there...

KHTML, the layout engine, webkit was forked from is significantly smaller with an installed size of 8,673.0 kB

Last edited by cynwulf (2017-10-27 09:28:51)

greenjeans · 2017-10-28 20:55:39

Palemoon does the same thing if you try to use it to open a pdf too. bummer. I really hate pdf's, but wife uses them so.....

Seems like the only game in town anymore with all the features is Chromium.

cynwulf · 2017-10-28 21:31:22

Try the netsurf browser

greenjeans · 2017-10-28 21:55:50

cynwulf wrote:

Try the netsurf browser

I have. Have tried all the ones in the repo and then some. Netsurf is kinda cool. For me personally I probably use Chromium the most, followed by Palemoon and then my little non-bloated python browser.

My concern is more for what I'm sending out with my little project distro, I want to make it nice, as much functionality as possible but still fast and lightweight.

Seems like I get to choose one of those three criteria and that's it, can't have all 3.

cynwulf · 2017-10-28 22:05:21

Netsurf seem ideal for a lightweight Linux distribution - and if the end user wants something not so light, then that's up to them. Sadly, as you've no doubt discovered, "light" tends to mean featureless and no javascript.

How is midori on Linux these days? It was a core dump factory on OpenBSD last time I tried it, it's not so bad on DragonFly and FreeBSD. Again, it's webkit, but it is (or was) 'lightweight' for a browser based on that layout engine.

Last edited by cynwulf (2017-10-28 22:07:15)

greenjeans · 2017-10-30 20:38:27

cynwulf wrote:

How is midori on Linux these days? It was a core dump factory on OpenBSD last time I tried it, it's not so bad on DragonFly and FreeBSD. Again, it's webkit, but it is (or was) 'lightweight' for a browser based on that layout engine.

It worked surprisingly well for me the last time I tried it, but last I checked it wasn't in the repo anymore for some reason, thanks for reminding me of it, I am going to download the latest version and give it a try again, it might be more apropos for what i'm trying to do with Vuu-do.

I wonder why it's not in the Devuan repo anymore?

cynwulf · 2017-10-30 21:49:15

It never made it into the Debian Jessie release (whch the first release of Devuan is based on) as I recall.

Seems like it's been removed again earlier this year:

https://packages.qa.debian.org/m/midori.html

There is a backport for Debian Jessie, not sure if there is similar for Devuan?

If not, I suggest just grabbing the source, debianising it and building your own package.

Adding any Debian repositories, whether binary or soure could result in a broken system.

So jst have a look here:

https://packages.debian.org/source/jess … rts/midori

If you install those development files from your own repositories via apt, then something like (not a full comprehensive walkthrough):

# apt-get install dh-make fakeroot

(or use aptitude if you prefer or "apt" or whatever they've decided to call it now...)

$ cd ~
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ wget http://midori-browser.org/downloads/midori_0.5.11_all_.tar.bz2
$ tar jxvf midori_0.5.11_all_.tar.bz2
$ mv midori_0.5.11_all_.tar.bz2 midori_0.5.11_all_.orig.tar.bz2 # dhmake wants lower case names, source tarball needs renaming with orig
$ cd midor_*
$ dh_make

Tell dhmake you want a single binary package, enter your info as the package maintainer.

If successul, you've Debianised the source.

Then:

$ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc

Might take a while...

Finally:

$ cd ..
$ su
# dpkg -i *deb

(all untested obviously)

Last edited by cynwulf (2017-10-30 21:49:50)

greenjeans · 2017-10-30 22:18:12

Wow, good info, thanks! Saving that for another case scenario, in this case Midori had a .deb on their site, had to add a couple of depends, then dpkg'ed the .deb in.

Doesn't seem quite as nice as last time I tried it, but it's certainly lightweight, the depends had some heft but not bad (and some of that will go bye-bye as soon as I run bleachbit).

On first glance, it takes some configuring, had to work to figure out how to put a Home button in the toolbar. And currently it's missing icons used for the new tab button, and also for the address bar, both places are giving me the little red X. It recommends gnome-icon-theme so i'm guessing maybe it's using a gnome-specific icon name for both...arrgh...have to check the damn source now and find out what it is, as I sure as hell ain't gonna re-install those icons.

ETA: Ahh, neither my main icon set or hicolor had the icons it wanted, found them in Adwaita by specifying a fallback in the ~/.gtkrc, will make some for Oxy2-ZEN.

I will take it for a spin the next week or two, it may work out. Certainly love to hear anyone else's impressions if they try it.

Last edited by greenjeans (2017-10-30 22:57:13)

cynwulf · 2017-10-31 09:02:52

greenjeans wrote:

Doesn't seem quite as nice as last time I tried it, but it's certainly lightweight, the depends had some heft but not bad (and some of that will go bye-bye as soon as I run bleachbit).

Getting a bit offtopic here, but bleachbit is a "cleaner" application. It does not and should not be touching any installed binary packages, and it certainly should not be run as root regardless. This pretty much only leaves your /home/your_user directory.

greenjeans · 2017-10-31 19:33:33

cynwulf wrote:

greenjeans wrote:
Doesn't seem quite as nice as last time I tried it, but it's certainly lightweight, the depends had some heft but not bad (and some of that will go bye-bye as soon as I run bleachbit).
Getting a bit offtopic here, but bleachbit is a "cleaner" application. It does not and should not be touching any installed binary packages, and it certainly should not be run as root regardless. This pretty much only leaves your /home/your_user directory.

Well I don't sweat the off-topic part of it, but it is an opinion, one I don't share after many years of using Bleachbit.

Bleachbit isn't capable of modifying binaries without some extra code. The default settings don't touch system files that are critical, you would have to write a custom cleaner to even do so. Bleachbit in normal use is only a quick shorthand app to do cleaning a user should normally do anyway, linux is not perfect and some files never get truncated or deleted in a timely fashion and you get ginormous logs, xsession-error files etc.

The root account gets clogged up too if you use it a lot, which I do, some folks run as root all the time.

It's completely configurable, and you can turn off anything you don't want touched. I set all the default settings for Beachbit in Vuu-do, and they are the same settings i've used for the last almost 8 years that i've been using it. Literally several tens of thousands of times that I have run Bleachbit, and I have yet to have a problem. I even write distro-specific custom cleaners from time to time and they always work well. Bleachbit has saved me cumulatively many hours over the years of having to do all the stuff by hand before I make an iso run.

cynwulf · 2017-10-31 20:39:00

Yes, that's what I was referring to. Bleachbit is a "cleaner", so it deals with dotfiles, etc, not the package management system.

As far as I know it's not going to remove unwanted deb packages for you and resolve dependencies. Thus I'm not entirely sure how it will make Midori browser, "lighter".

To remove unwanted deb packages there is an autoremove option to apt or apt-get, another package manager front end, aptitude, is also good at cleaning up unwanted cruft. It might help you "slim down" your installations.

greenjeans · 2017-10-31 20:58:42

cynwulf wrote:

As far as I know it's not going to remove unwanted deb packages for you and resolve dependencies. Thus I'm not entirely sure how it will make Midori browser, "lighter".

Semantics is all. It doesn't make Midori lighter, it makes the system lighter. Removing translations and other cruft. You will have to make a custom cleaner to deal with the docs in /usr/share/doc.

And it will remove some unwanted .debs, it has an Apt cleaning section and you can set it to delete the auto-removeables.

Cruft. there are thousands of packages in the repo in which the actual executables are a tiny fraction of the package size, some have changelogs that go back to the 90's and are huge.

I was looking at one today, it was listed in Synaptic at 613 kb, but 554 kb of that was all docs and none of them were any kind of manual or help in any form/

cynwulf · 2017-10-31 21:22:39

It's quite normal for a deb file to be packaged with docs such as AUTHORS, BUGS, NEWS, README, TODO, changelog, copyright. Doubtless there are countless more examples. A static library (.so) by comparsion may be tiny compared to it's documentation.

The only way around this is to repackage, or base your system off something other than Debian. Deleting files externally to the package manager means they come back when packages are upgraded or reinstalled. Same with any unwanted locales installed in /usr/share/locale/

Contrary to popular belief, Debian (and by inheritence Devuan) just isn't a light system. It's a general purpose distribution.

Last edited by cynwulf (2017-10-31 21:24:14)

greenjeans · 2017-11-01 18:32:09

cynwulf wrote:

It's quite normal for a deb file to be packaged with docs such as AUTHORS, BUGS, NEWS, README, TODO, changelog, copyright. Doubtless there are countless more examples. A static library (.so) by comparsion may be tiny compared to it's documentation.
The only way around this is to repackage, or base your system off something other than Debian. Deleting files externally to the package manager means they come back when packages are upgraded or reinstalled. Same with any unwanted locales installed in /usr/share/locale/
Contrary to popular belief, Debian (and by inheritence Devuan) just isn't a light system. It's a general purpose distribution.

Absolutely, and that's part of the fun for me, I could run a real lightweight distro easily enough, but you often have to sacrifice a lot to do so.

I have notes in Vuu-do about the subject of updates changing/adding things, all I can do is start it off small for folks that use it, after that they can choose to continue that policy or not. I do provide extensive documentation about what i've done and how folks can do it too though, it's not too hard, as mentioned above setting Bleachbit to do the work for you in one fell swoop is handy as a shirt pocket.

greenjeans · 2017-11-01 21:46:35

Midori won't do video of any kind at the moment on my machine, I have all the things it needs and video works fine on all the other browsers, but no joy so far.....

greenjeans · 2017-11-02 22:24:00

Still no joy with Midori and video....weird.

Too bad, I like it otherwise, but gonna have to give up on it for now.

fungus · 2017-11-03 08:29:10

Is it all video or is it video on youtube? If you have a local video file like an mpeg, will it not play?
In order to keep the browser unclogged and the cookie system separate, when I get a utube link I play it with smplayer or browse through youtube with smtube. In "most" cases it works as google changes their codings on an hourly basis and those video players must catch up all the time.

Ever since I got pale moon back I have not played a single utube video that had a problem, so it must be a hw related issue.

Flash is dead, it is done, after all this trouble it caused for more than a decade they pulled the plug. I hope adobe's stock-holders end up on the street begging for bread. Not my bread!

greenjeans · 2017-11-03 20:55:39

fungus wrote:

Ever since I got pale moon back I have not played a single utube video that had a problem, so it must be a hw related issue.

Yeah Palemoon works great, plays youtube fine and everything else too. Have not checked Midori with alternate video site or local, will do so, I don't know if flash works or not as i'm not installing that garbage ever again. Adobe can take a long walk off a short pier as far as i'm concerned.

shevy · 2017-11-13 21:34:02

> Yeah Palemoon works great, plays youtube fine and everything else too.

I hope that Palemoon becomes a serious contender. Ever since the Mozilla
team decided to deprecate ALSA (as a primary backend on linux) and forced
users into the Pulseaudio way (who wrote it ... yup, red hat poettering), I stopped
caring about firefox.

I actually think that it may be better altogether if mozilla disbands - because it is
evident that all hope is lost with them. This is not just pulseaudio by the way;
alienating developers by deprecating their work out of nowhere; claiming to be
a privacy-respecting organization but then using google analytics "because it
is so useful"; being unable to use C++ and so inventing a new language altogether
(rust ... what the ...); making changes that are irrelevant for many old powerusers
and so on and so forth. They are killing firefox, either out of stupidity or deliberately,
so we really need more real alternatives. I actually don't even think that browsers
in general should be COMPLEX. They should be simple, lean, flexible but
also USEFUL and modular.

I don't have pulseaudio and don't want it. Firefox keeps on trying to auto-update
all the time, even when I set that it shall not do so via about:config. If it auto-updates,
I lose all audio in the browser because I don't have pulseaudio. Isn't it weird when a
company auto-updates you and you lose sound in the process? The canceling of
auto-update via about:config also does not work 100%; I still get the main firefox
widget that keeps on nagging "you should upgrade because a new version has
been released". And I found no way to disable that nagging widget either. I tried
with ublock origin to block it away but unfortunately it only blocks external stuff,
not fireox-pester pop-ups.

As a backup browser I use opera. Opera uses google chrome unfortunately so it
is just a copy-cat but ... I simply need to get things done. I can't use linux
without browsers, they are that important. :\

Last edited by shevy (2017-11-13 21:37:05)

cynwulf · 2017-11-13 23:24:59

Otter Browser (Opera 12 style) is nicer than "Opera": https://otter-browser.org/

Webkit engine again though (but original webkit rather than blink/chromium).

There is also Vivaldi, which is closed source, but from one of the original Opera software founders.

greenjeans · 2017-11-13 23:43:14

cynwulf wrote:

Otter Browser (Opera 12 style) is nicer than "Opera": https://otter-browser.org/

QT5....yuck.

The officially official Devuan Forum!

#26 2017-10-26 11:22:43

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#27 2017-10-26 14:10:09

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#28 2017-10-26 14:44:33

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#29 2017-10-26 20:32:25

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#30 2017-10-27 08:57:44

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#31 2017-10-28 20:55:39

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#32 2017-10-28 21:31:22

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#33 2017-10-28 21:55:50

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#34 2017-10-28 22:05:21

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#35 2017-10-30 20:38:27

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#36 2017-10-30 21:49:15

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#37 2017-10-30 22:18:12

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#38 2017-10-31 09:02:52

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#39 2017-10-31 19:33:33

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#40 2017-10-31 20:39:00

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#41 2017-10-31 20:58:42

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#42 2017-10-31 21:22:39

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#43 2017-11-01 18:32:09

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#44 2017-11-01 21:46:35

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#45 2017-11-02 22:24:00

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#46 2017-11-03 08:29:10

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#47 2017-11-03 20:55:39

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#48 2017-11-13 21:34:02

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#49 2017-11-13 23:24:59

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

#50 2017-11-13 23:43:14

Re: [Solved] How to install the new version of Firefox on Devuan?

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