Rubenerd: Updating them Firefox 8.0 browsers

Firefox-tan

Just involuntarily updated my Firefox to 8.0. So far so good, though I may need to update my update regiment. Update my update… it's not good English to repeat the same word in the same sentence. Wait, just did it again.

The losing update battle

One of the many cronjobs I have running on my headless super duper Swiss Army Knife FreeBSD server is a script to check software updates on Mozilla's servers. Whenever a new version of Firefox or Thunderbird is released, the script downloads the latest en_gb dmg. I can then go around to all the Macs in the house and install the update.

In Singapore I didn't bother, but with download quotas here and on an ISP that doesn't have unmetered content, it saves a small bundle of transfer which I can then blow on an anime episode. Don't worry, I didn't mean that. True story.

With the latest rapid-release cycle adopted by Mozilla, it seems this "solution" will become increasingly unworkable, and I'll just have the applications themselves download the updates.

The actual update!

As for the update itself, I'm liking the more native-looking widgets on Mac, and it still fits in just fine on my KDE Fedora machines despite being a GTK import. Which reminds me, Fedora 16 needs to be downloaded and installed as well.

I'd also read the horror stories about how Firefox was going to be "hostile" to plugins, but my laundry list of mostly security and privacy related whatsits are running just fine. The only change was the add-on selection screen, which allowed me to disable ones I don't need when Firefox relaunched. Unsurprisingly, I didn't uncheck anything.

Select your Add-ons

A trip down memory lane

For some fun, here are a small sample of posts dealing with Firefox over the years. With this new rapid-release cycle, I think the gap between 4.0 and 7.0 you can see below will become the norm not the exception!

The losing update battle

The actual update!

A trip down memory lane

Author bio and support