[K12OSN] Firefox 3 downgrade

Terrell Prude' Jr. microman at cmosnetworks.com
Wed Aug 13 15:20:54 UTC 2008


David Hopkins wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 10:04 AM, Nils Breunese <nils at breun.nl> wrote:
>   
>> David Hopkins wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> I have upgraded most of my systems to CentOS 5.2 which includes
>>> upgradiing FF to 3.01. But ... FF3 is incredibly slow, much slower
>>> than my sole remaining FF2 system which is running an older version of
>>> Fedora.  Browsing the mozilla forum, it seems that this is being
>>> observed by others. One option is to figure out why it is so slow.
>>> Another is to downgrade.  I'd select downgrade but I get lots of
>>> unresolved dependencies  (using CentOS).  Has anyone else on the list
>>> had issues with FF3?
>>>       
>> CentOS 5.2's Firefox 3 works fine on our (K12LTSP 5EL 64-bit) server AFAIK.
>>
>>     
>
> That is part of the problem ... it works fine for some and is dismal
> for others.  It is taking 30-40 secs just to load pages like ccn.com,
> msnbc.com.  If I click on another tab, wait a second, and click back,
> then it loads the page much more quickly.  I just re-installed it on
> one of my 32bit systems and it installed 30+ language packs as well.
> I am posting this email from a fresh install of CentOS 5.2 x86_64
> without a single plugin and it is still slow.  I have tried deleting
> the .mozilla directory and that didn't change the behavior at all. The
> other behavior I've noticed is that if I uninstall the package, the
> overall system performance improves (like file copies, loading other
> apps) but once I install the rpm, it slows down again. Very very
> strange.  I'd like to go back to FF2 but can't seem to find a
> repository that has that version. I can download the rpm and then I
> get unresolved dependencies (like system-bookmarks).
>
> I have a new x86_64 server that I need to install, so I'll try that
> with the latest k12ltsp EL version and see what happens.
>
> Thanks
> Dave Hopkins
>   

RPM repositories aren't always the answer.  You could do it the same way 
I do it on some of my systems (CentOS, Slackware, etc.).  Just download 
the Firefox 2 tarball (not the "installer" package, I mean the other 
one, it's about 9.3MB), un-tar it into, say, the "/usr/local/firefox2" 
directory, and symlink /usr/bin/firefox to /usr/local/firefox2/firefox.  
Boom, you should be good to go.

Here's how I do it, step by step:

1.)  Download Firefox 2.x to some directory (we'll say /home/temporary 
for this example).
2.)  Become root.
3.)  cd /usr/local
4.)  tar -xvzf /home/temporary/firefox-2.0.0.x.tar.gz
5.)  ls -l  (you should see a "firefox" directory now)
6.)  mv firefox firefox2.0.0.x  (this is just for you to remember which 
version of FF it is)
7.)  ln -s /usr/local/firefox2.0.0.x /usr/local/firefox  (just a symlink 
to make it slightly easier to upgrade later, not required)
8.)  cd /usr/bin
9.)  mv firefox firefox.bak
10.)  ln -s /usr/local/firefox/firefox

And then, give 'er a spin.  You should be able to click on any of the 
"Firefox Web Browser" icons and have v2.0.0.x come up.

--TP




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