Re: removing old firefox ESR releases?

[Christopher Pinon <cjpinon%secondfloor.xyz@localhost>]

John D. Baker <jdbaker%consolidated.net@localhost> wrote:

> On Sat, 1 Jun 2019 17:30:03 +0200, Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>
> wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, Jun 01, 2019 at 05:05:35PM +0200, Thomas Klausner wrote:
> > > www/firefox52
> > > 
> > > Is anyone still using any of these, and if yes, why?
> > 
> > 52 is the last ESR that does not need rust, please keep it.
> 
> Yes, please do keep it.
> 
> It's also the last version still in pkgsrc that can be built with gtk2
> instead of requiring gtk3.

I felt suddenly inspired to try to compile firefox52 on my NetBSD 8.0
amd64 VPS. It took a good three hours (and I already had gtk3
installed), but it succeeded! (The sequence of compilations stopped once
because I hadn't yet added "ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES+= lame-license" to
/etc/mk.conf for lame, but otherwise no issues.)

On the first run of firefox52, I encountered the (not unknown) "Your tab
just crashed!" problem. Although firefox52 itself didn't crash, any
attempt to open a tab on that run resulted in the tab's crashing, which
also caused a core dump.

Interestingly, on the second run of firefox52, it seemed to correct
itself and the tabs didn't crash. But, unfortunately, on the third run,
the tabs crashed again (causing a core dump).

On the Mozilla support forum, it's suggested that a work-around for this
problem is to go into 'about:config' and to make sure that both

browser.tabs.remote.autostart

and

browser.tabs.remote.autostart2

are set to 'false'. In my installation, the second line had been set to
'true'. So far, this work-around seems to work and I haven't had further
tab crashes after a number of runs.

(See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1167673 and
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1159697 .)

C.