Firefox setup

[lester]]

removed

[huggybear]

First post and it's a HOWTO. You are rad! Welcome!

[lester]]

tanks huggy
will post an image of my not_a_johndeere up on blocks in the snow when I get an extra few minutes ...

[lester]]

I have a one track mind.
I knew about Mikes weasel page for many many moons now, one track at a time.
running stable, want new weasel?
follow simple instructions.
http://mozilla.debian.net/

[craigevil]

Tech Patterns :: Switching from Debian Iceweasel to Firefox, permanently - http://techpatterns.com/forums/about1435.html

I am lazy I just leave it in my ~Downloads, Firefox is my default browser, while Thunderbird is the default mail client.
Been using Firefox since the name change in Debian with no issues.

[huggybear]

craigevil, why do you prefer the branded version? I'm just curious.

[craigevil]

craigevil, why do you prefer the branded version? I'm just curious.

Iceweasel at least for me, has always used more resources, and tends to lockup/crash more than Firefox.
Same extensions/themes/tweaks on both. That and up until recently Iceweasel was several versions behind Mozilla Firefox. Which is why I also use Thunderbird, Icedove has been way behind in the repos for a long long time.

[jheaton5]

So much for "Iceweasel is Firefox"

[huggybear]

I've honestly never noticed that difference. The only iteration of Firefox that I see crashing very often is the official Firefox Windows build when used on Windows XP. Iceweasel and Firefox on Linux behaved the same for me. Granted, I've rarely used Firefox proper on Debian, rather Ubuntu, so it could be that Ubuntu patch their packages frequently.
I've read once, during the Etch era, that Firefox was linked to certain different libraries when compared to Iceweasel, so it could be that.
I've found the link to it again. Here's the relevant quote:

The Mozilla people talked about Debian-specific changes that changed frozen APIs, breaking extensions (from Lucas’s blog again).
So, let’s dig into our firefox_2.0~rc1+dfsg-1.diff.gz:

Changes to disable application upgrade (we want that to happen through apt-get) and change some other default preferences,
Changes to fix “make distclean” so that it really cleans the build directory,
Change not to build the “mangle” utility,
Change not to call netstat to generate entropy, which is useless on linux,
Changes to make Firefox® build and work on architectures such as hppa, mips, mips64, m68k, ia64, sparc64, alpha, and arm, which the Mozilla® guys don’t seem to care much for,
Change to add a preference directory so that users can put their set of customized preferences in /etc/firefox/pref,
Change to allow to build flat chrome without the zip utility,
Change to allow to use system library for myspell, instead of statically linking the bundled one,
Changes to allow to build s390 binaries on s390x host with s390 toolchain (same applies with x86 binaries on amd64 host with x86 toolchain),
Changes to work around bugs with the hidden visibility pragma on gcc,
Changes to make the pango backend actually build correctly,
Changes to avoid some error messages while trying to create Makefiles from inexistant Makefile.in’s,
Change to install in /usr/lib/firefox instead of /usr/lib/firefox-x.y,
Change not to build useless chromelist.txt files,
Changes to make helper applications with parameters work,
Changes to allow builds against GTK 2.8,
Changes to work around an Xrender bug,
Changes to make the Gecko/yymmdddd string taken from preferences instead of being half-hard-coded (you could change it with preferences, but it would still be set to the hard-coded value at start time ; and you could change it again with preferences…),
Change to allow mice extra buttons to act as something else than a left button,
Change to allow to build with -Wl,–as-needed to avoid linking against a whole lot of useless libraries, without losing the link on libxpcom.so which is required by some extensions’ components,
Changes not to shlibsign the NSS modules at build time, since we’re stripping the binaries afterwards, thus breaking the signature. We do build the signatures later, within the maintainer scripts.

This was true for the 2.0.x releases, so I'm not sure whether that could have anything to do with the difference in performance/stability.

[lester]]

Thanks for posting the link Huggy!

Personally, I see no difference at all in performance or stability between the weasel and the fox.
I do notice differences between free and proprietary plugins.
I enjoy being able to run different versions of mozilla ( not at the same time) on my install when necessary,
which is not possible to do with the weasel AFAICT.
I dabbled a bit with user agents a few years back, but I saw no benefit from changing it at that time or presently.
I do hope ogg and VP8 start getting more users and published content, like yesterday.

And if I need to use different settings for different versions I can use the browsers user profile
And if that does not suffice I can add a user and build the new profile from scratch.
But, I usually don't need to do either.