firefox is pretty useless ...

[DTD]

On Tue, 11 Jul 2017, Lars Engels wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 09:45:10AM -0500, Bob Willcox wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 05, 2017 at 02:07:29AM -0400, DTD wrote:
>>> if you use xfce. By definition it is not a problem that:
>>>
>>>    1) install a new copy of FreeBSD 10.3
>>>    2) pkg install xorg
>>>    3) pkg install xfce
>>>    4) pkg install firefox
>>>
>>> installs a firefox package that does not run. The project seems to do a bit
>>> better than this on Windows, but they (I think) have to in that environment. The
>>> official answer to the above is:
>>>
>>> --- Comment #1 from Jan Beich <jbeich at FreeBSD.org> ---
>>> Partial upgrades i.e., mixing dependencies from different svn checkouts, dates
>>> of "pkg install" or locking dependencies, are not supported. firefox will
>>> refuse to build unless you upgrade sqlite3. Some version requirement are
>>> specified in the port's Makefile
>>>
>>>    $ fgrep sqlite www/firefox/Makefile
>>>                    sqlite3>=3.17.0:databases/sqlite3 \
>>>                    ${PYTHON_PKGNAMEPREFIX}sqlite3>0:databases/py-sqlite3 \
>>>
>>> "pkg upgrade" may help you resolve this.
>>>
>>> The only problem with this 'solution' is that upgrading sqlite requires a
>>> cascading series of updates that breaks parts of xfce. Other than that no
>>> problem here. So if you use twm firefox is your browser.
>>>
>>> The next time I build a system I will try installing firefox first. I got here
>>> because I wanted to ungrade thunar (xfce's file manager). That upgrade broke
>>> the version of firefox that was running (47.somethine). Chasing and fixing that
>>> chain eventually required a reinstall. Happily (for me) chrome works.
>>
>> Hmm, what firefox port are you building/running? I'm running version 54.0
>> (firefox-54.0.1_1,1) without any real issues (well, none at this point). I
>> don't install or run xfce, but use the ctwm window manager (ctwm-4.0.0,1).
>> Perhaps that's the difference.
>>
>> I'm also running 10.3:
>> FreeBSD luke.immure.com 10.3-STABLE FreeBSD 10.3-STABLE #3 r320754: Thu Jul  6 15:13:13 CDT 2017     bob at luke.immure.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/LUKE  amd64
>>
>> As an asside, I recommend running v 54 of firefox in any event. The new
>> thread support seems to have significantly improved its performance and
>> stability for me (at least).
>
> Yes, it feels much faster even on my venerable Thinkpad X200.

Thank you both for the feedback. My problem is almost certainly because of xfce. 
A number of components share various dynamic libraries. Updating firefox/mozilla 
removes various modules or entry points to a module. The thing that sent me off 
on the rant was installing on a clean system does not work for 10.3 under 
firefox is install prior to xfce. I did a PR on this which was dismissed as, not 
a problem. I think that the very least the firefox project can to is to 
structure the package so you get a chance to abort the install if you do not 
want certain packages updated, removed or replace. The LibreOffice and gimp 
packages are structured this way.

I like xfce because compared to Gnome/KDE it is relatively light-weight. It does 
not seem to have a large number of FreeBSD users. About building, I am a package 
only guy, most of my systems are less than $400, building a workstation is not 
an option :) I am using 54.0.1. It is also much faster to start and generally 
better for me.

Doug