So, as many of you may be aware, Firefox 3.6 was released. It was a momentous occasion, parades in the streets, a metal of honor from the President, ticker-tape para-...
... yeah, so FF 3.6 was released. Along with it, extensions were updated to support the new version. One of those extensions, Save Link In Folder, is one that I use nearly perpetually on my primary webbrowsing machine at home. The update broke v3.5's support (at least in x64 on my machine), so I decided to update Firefox to 3.6.
Oh dear. Anyone not fluent in Geek can skip everything between now and the phrase "
AAARRRRGH!".
You see, the way Ubuntu does packages, the primary repositories have bugfixes for the versions of software released when the version of Ubuntu that you're using was released. In Windowsese, that'd be like having an App Store for Windows XP, only supporting applications released around the time XP SP3 was released, plus all updates since. Ubuntu updates every six months, so it isn't quite that bad, but same concept.
I'm running Karmic Koala (9.10 - meaning it was released October in 2009) on this machine, so FF3.5 is in the default repositories, but not FF3.6.
The normal way around this is to add a repository for the developer - in this case, Mozilla. Problem being that the only repository that I've found are for the daily builds, which is on 3.6.2 and has more bugs than you can shake a stick at. For instance, I have my computer set to prompt me whenever a site asks for a cookie (that way I only end up with cookies for sites that I care about). In 3.6.2, whenever this happened, FF would lock up. After restarting FF, the site would simply never load - for every single site. No matter, this isn't meant to be a stable release, right?
That was supposed to be a repository for stable releases.
So, try to do the autoupdate from Mozilla? Yeah, Ubuntu devs disabled it.
Download from Mozilla's site? Linking all of those areas is a royal nightmare, that's part of the reason why it is in the repositories to begin with.
That left me with compiling from source. Screw that, I don't want to compile anything from source unless if I absolutely have to, as I always end up in dependency hell for hours on end just to be able to compile it.
So I searched around for alternate builds of FF. There is one in particular I'm familiar with from back in my craptop days called
SwiftFox. Basically builds of Firefox optimized for a particular processor as opposed to just general builds. Downloaded the one for my OS/Processor (Swiftfox for AMD64 x64, if anyone cared) and ran the .deb. Translation for those in the Windows world, I downloaded the installer off of the website (more like an MSI) and installed it).
Worked fine... except Flash stopped working. Completely.
I tried in a different browser, then realized that my other browsers hate using Flash. Protip: Using Opera for Linux plus the flash plugin = Synergy crashes. I use synergy for keyboard and mouse sharing, and I kinda like being able to type.
Konquerer simply refuses to function properly with Flash no matter what I do, so it isn't a very valid test.
Thus, downloaded a different browser: Chrome. Google recently released Chrome for Linux, so I thought I'd give it a shot - high chance of it working with Flash after all, given Youtube. Worked flawlessly, including Flash.
Thus Flash itself wasn't the problem, it was something with Swiftfox. Eventually found out that the version of Swiftfox I'm using was expecting the 32-bit flash plugin instead of the 64-bit one that I had installed. Put that in the appropriate directory and everything is happy now.
AAARRRRGH!I mean, yeah, I didn't switch to Linux as my primary OS because I thought it'd be easier, but come on! This is the #1 browser on the most common variant (and latest version) of a Desktop OS running a simple plugin. This isn't rocket scientry* here.
As much as I hate them, someone really needs to hire a focus group for this crap or something. Mozilla would blame Ubuntu, Ubuntu would blame Mozilla, they'd both blame Adobe, and Adobe would blame everyone else. I don't care whose fault it is, I just want the stupid thing to work, work well, and without me tweaking everything.
* - I think around four people will get that joke. Two of which might read this. Maybe.
