An ongoing debate between Vince Coen and All rages on ...
VC> Any one know if there is a way of getting an u to date version for the VC> Pi ? VC> Supplied one is v52.
The latest version that works with Raspbian is ESR v54 (v55 thru 58 have unresolved issues) and the default browser for the Pi is now Chromium {chuckle}
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I wish I knew. The V52 one has the stupid screen layout with tabs for page titles *above* the navigation and bookmarks bars instead of below as the older versions did. With more recent versions of FF, it is possible to add config lines in userChrome.css to put the tabs back where they always used to be (this certainly works for V66 on Windows) but it has no effect on V52 on RasPi; not tried on my Ubuntu/i386 PC yet.
Hopefully FF will compile a more recent version of the source code for ARM CPU so it can be installed on Ras Pi.
I'm not sure why the config file is called userChrome.css when it relates to Firefox, not Chrome which is a competitor.
More generally, Google's 'Chrome' line (browser, Chromebooks, etc) speaks to the worldview that everything is on the web, and hence a web browser/laptop/etc is the minimal amount of adornment that allows you to access all of these things. Hence the browser is called 'Chrome' because it's essentially the minimalist window frame through which you view the web. In its origins in UI, 'chrome' originates from extra little trimmings like bumpers around the main product (the car).
Sounds as if "Chrome" was already used as a generic term for GUI "ornamentation" (which is the context in which Firefox's "userChrome.css" uses it), before Google came along and used the word as the name of their browser - and inevitably "Google Chrome" becomes shortened to "Chrome" in everyday parlance. I'd only ever heard of "Chrome" in the context of the Google Chrome browser and a Chromebook which I took to be a low-powered laptop which used the Chrome browser for accessing online versions of apps which are normally installed on a more high-powered laptop; I wasn't aware of it being used as a synonym for GUI.
It's the same as "Outlook" which Microsoft originally used as a name to describe their Office (as opposed to domestic) email client.
Then suddenly they started using "Outlook" as their email domain name, as in email addresses " snipped-for-privacy@outlook.com" and hence causing great confusion for those who knew Outlook as the email client.
Incidentally, to get back to my earlier posting, I tried my userChrome.css file (from my Windows PC) in ~/.mozilla/firefox//chrome on FF 66 on Ubuntu, and it worked perfectly, giving the placement of the tab bars below the nav/bookmark bars. I imagine it will also work fine on FF 66 on Ras Pi - once that version of FF is ported to Ras Pi ;-)
By the way, has anyone else found that FF 52 ESR uses a *lot* of CPU power on the Ras Pi? My CPU usage (as shown by the widget in the taskbar) is normally about 5-10%, even when TVHeadend is recording an HD channel and an SD channel (from two separate DVB-USB decoders).
However the usage shoots up to about 50% as soon as Firefox is started and whenever I load a new page, only going back down to 5% about 30 seconds after a page has been loaded - until I load a different page or even scroll down on an already-loaded page, when it shoots up again.
Excessive CPU and especially memory usage, is the reason Chromium is now the default browser on the Pi. I'd swapped for the same reasons quite a while before.
Well, I'm not sure how much of that is inherently slower Firefox than Chromium. My guess is not much; point is mainly, I think, that the foundation spent time & effort optimising Chromium for Raspberry Pi (after they switched from Epiphany) and no such effort has gone into Firefox. Where optimising probably means hooking into proprietary GPU APIs.
The GPU acceleration is only a small factor, the speed of the javascript engine counts for far more. The biggest issue with any browser and the Raspberry Pi is limited amount memory, with the maximum on the 2/3/3+ being 1GB (far less than high or mid range mobile phones these days). Highly optimised javascript and rendering engines tend to use a lot of memory, so even if FF was inherently faster, if it uses to much too memory its performance will suffer badly on the Pi.
Chromium's memory management, both how much it uses initially, and how much it manages to free after closing pages, is quite a bit better than Firefox. So it performs better on the the Pi, and even more so after a long browsing session. Although I'd still recommend restarting the browser regularly to free up memory, and don't keep tabs open you aren't using.
It's a shame that Chromium doesn't (as far as I know) read JSON files of bookmarks/favourites. I keep a master copy of bookmarked sites on my main PC, and then export this to other computers and import it into each one's Firefox. The import process that is offered with browsers tends to assume that it is a one-off during-installation process rather than something that you do every few days/weeks as you bookmark new sites.
A lot of the online sync mechanisms for bookmarks require you to create an account, and then allow any computer to add/delete links, which gives the risk of accidentally deleting a link and having that deletion immediately propagate to all computers that use that online account.
I have what, to me anyway, is a much better system: a set of manually maintained web pages that hold my links collection. Because this is independent of any browser, its easy to transfer and has indeed moved over the years: Netscape-->IE-->Opera-->Firefox, Pale Moon and Lynx.
The main benefits are that you can add notes and links to passwords etc (which live in an encrypted container) for any links you find useful and that you can easily group links by topic and, say, alphabetic order. A lot of browsers don't allow you to add notes or to control bookmark ordering.
And last but not least, its simple to copy the set of pages to new computers or (better) keep them on your house server.
It doesn't, but I have a similar thing which compiles a bookmarks list into native form for Chromium and Firefox, and a plain HTML format. So I have the same bookmarks on every browser I use. (Except on the shinyphone. In time...)
I really ought to rewrite it to use YAML rather than a custom text format; it's quite old.
And I don't even do it manually. Netscape 4.8 writes its bookmarks as bookmark.htm. Copy that as a file and upload it to an easily accessed placed and it can be used by any browser on any machine.
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But, as I said, I like to add comments to a link and group them by category:
- Aviation
- Computing -Operating systems -Programming languages .... ...
for easier reference.
I also like to add notes and, where relevant, link the bookmark to an encrypted login name and password. AFAIK there isn't a browser that supports all these items in its bookmark list, but IIRC one or two do allow you to add a short note to a bookmark.
I think its worth my time to do all this stuff manually, and use 'tidy' to keep the pages neat, but of course ymmv.
Thanks for the information - Running the std distro for the Pi (Rasperian?) and it is up to date. Look like I will have to refrane from attempting a compile as you say 1Gb ram and no swap space does not help.
Just wish they would come out with a high spec Arm system to use for normal processing that dev can then be transferred over to the std (standard) Pi models.
That said I only bought the thing to run a very specific compiler that is only free for the Pi and I still have not been able to spend much time on that! Yes I am retired, seems to spend too much time on other developement at the moment.
You can if you're running a Linux distro which is compatible with recent Debian packages:
formatting link
(I think the "armel" build might be the one that suits the Pi).
There are tons of options for running different OSs on the Pi, and no doubt there are others with later Firefox versions than V.52. Many of those releases aren't as well tested or documented for the Pi as they are for PCs though.
Assuming that you've attempted to find more recent updates with whatever mechanism is built into your OS (presumably Linux based), and failed. I'm guessing that the OS has been following the ESR releases and haven't been able to build the latest one that followed V.52. The latest ESR versions use the new browser engine (Quantum) which is supposably faster and less resource intensive (worth considering when reading other comments about how Firefox perfroms compared to Chromium on the Pi). This is programmed in a new language called "Rust", and I might suppose that this is where an OS package maintainer may run into new difficulties in getting it to compile.
As for an answer. If your running a Linux distro closely based on a more mainstream one like Debian, which already has a package for a newer Firefox, it _might_ be possible to simply install that (look for any special notes about doing this with your distro, if it's not how it does things by default).
Or you might be able to find a static binary of Firefox for ARM V.6 (I think all the Pis are ARM V.6, best check it yourself). This should run on its own like an .EXE in Windows, as long as the Linux kernel you're using is a similar version to the one it was compiled for. These are only simetimes available though, and you might be even less likely to find one for ARM. Also, it works best for much simpler software, Firefox probably expects various files and directories to be created for it during installation, and you'll have to to this manually if using a static binary.
Then there's compiling from the source code yourself, but this will probably be _very_ slow if you do it on the Pi because Firefox is HUGE. Then there's the question: if you can do it without issues, why couldn't the package maintainer? [EDIT: Also, it probably won't work at all on the Pi because there isn't enough RAM (I needed over
1GB to compile the Chrome engine, Firefox is probably similar) - you would need to set up a cross-compiling environment on a more powerful PC, and prepare a package there (might as well upload it and become the new maintainer :) )]
Finally, you could change the OS you're running. Perhaps there's a later version of your Linux distro which you haven't upgraded to, and that has newer versions of Firefox? Otherwise, I've already pointed out that the many distros compatible with Debian pacakges have a new Firefox version available. I know at least some have releases for the Raspberry Pi. Then there are plenty of other ones besides - search Distrowatch and find one that suits you, then put it on another SD card and give it a go.
The latest version (for Fedora, anyway) is 66.0.3 - I got it in last Friday's update, and installing it promptly marked all my installed add- ons as invalid/untrusted and wouldn't run them. Apparently this was a known problem: v66.0.4 is now out and an update to get it has just finished. Running it shows that this version has fixed the problem with
66.0.3.
So, if the latest version for your OS is 66.0.3, then you probably don't want it if you have any add-ons installed or are planning to install them. Better to wait for 66.0.4
I also do both. Not manually, i.e. in an editor (although I write my own websites that way and don't have any problems wih it) but in Netscape's "edit bookmarks".
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