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Who has the latest Firefox ESR Installed?


ThomasW

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Hello everyone!

I have been using Mozilla Firefox ESR as my main Web browser for the big "social media" which demand all the latest "HTML5" and JavaScript dingledongles and multimedia support.

I have just received a notification that the latest update, 52.6.0 ESR, is now available for download.  I read the release notes and it says that the update includes a patch to mitigate the new Spectre vulnerability.

Before I irreversibly alter my system by updating, I wonder

  1. Would this update cause intolerable slowdown to a browser which is tasked daily with loading some of the slowest, most horrible Web sites ever to be constructed, or
  2. Would it be stupid to forgo this update because of the security risk, being online, as well as all the other security updates that are part of this package.

Thanks,
      Thomas

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I don't understand what's bothering You. 52.6.0 is a planned quarterly browser security update with various stability and regression fixes. Browser itself is unaffected by slowdowns, only operating system updates can cause global system slowdowns for all applications. Install this update boldly and without any doubt.

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@ThomasW
Without knowing the exact details of what has been changed in the browser, it's hard to say with 100% certainty that these fixes won't slow anything down. However, it seems very unlikely based on the overview given by Mozilla. Don't let the common word "time" confuse you, reducing the precision of time sources should in no way affect site loading times; and it's hard to imagine any legitimate scripts used by social media sites needing microsecond precision for anything, so they should be unaffected as well.

As @Bersaglio said, don't worry about it (least of all on XP, which hasn't received slowdown-causing OS-level mitigations). Besides, ESR means no feature changes, so even in the very unlikely case of there being slowdowns, you can always go back to the previous point release without the risk of messing up your profile. :)

Edited by mixit
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Why are you using it on Windows 7 rather than a later version as a matter of interest Den?
I'm using Firefox 56 on Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.
I won't go any higher as I would lose too many of the extensions I like.
Is it because you use NPAPI plug-ins?
:dubbio:

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Because I want to keep all my usual extensions and plugins and I also use it as a standard for establishing what the expected behaviour should be for some local feature I'm not used to or to some web-page that seems to be acting funny.
At the moment I have the following setups (W7U SP1 x64 + XP-Mode; W7U x86 + 2x XP SP3 on a i7 3770K / Z68) = Main Machine; (2x W7U x86 + 2x XP SP3 on a i7 3770K / H67) = Secondary Machine; (XP SP3 transplanted from the old A7V600-X on a Phenom II X4 940 BE / nForce 430) = Old Setup Updated and an Eee PC 900 with  XP SP3. All of them also boot Porteus and all have IE8/FF esr/New Moon on the XP boot partitions and IE10/FF esr/Chrome on the W7U boot partitions. One XP has also Opera 12.18 and two XPs also have Chrome 49.0.2623.112. Duplicate setups in each machine are reserved for banking. All machines also can boot to MS-DOS 7.10.

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Gosh, and I thought I had complex systems! :lol:
It will be a sad day when Firefox 52ESR has to be abandoned, because it still supports so many legacy things.
:)

Edited by Dave-H
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We can go on XP SP3 with FF esr (when it stops, there'll be a fork, for sure) and New Moon up to, perhaps, early 2020 (POSReady 2009 EoS is April 9, 2019, of course). And those, like me, who drew the line after 7 SP1, may get on it maybe half-a-dozen years further on. After that, unless ReactOS delivers, it's xxxxBSD or Linux or, maybe OpenVMS. But that's too far in the future to bother about now. Let's get to 2020. After New Year's Day, we can reevaluate what to do thereon. :)

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Hi everyone,

Thanks for the replies and confirmation!

I didn't get any e-mail notifications so I thought everyone had ignored my post so I'll have to check my settings! :rolleyes:

 

On Wednesday January 24, 2018 at 6:19 AM, Bersaglio said:

I don't understand what's bothering You. 52.6.0 is a planned quarterly browser security update with various stability and regression fixes. Browser itself is unaffected by slowdowns, only operating system updates can cause global system slowdowns for all applications. Install this update boldly and without any doubt.

My concern was the slowdowns everyone is talking about regarding the fixes to this issue in general.  There are many regular, "planned" updates that cause horrible and irreversible results from many organizations, which seem to increase by the day, and my trust of Mozilla and its judgement has been decreasing at an accelerated rate for the past seven years or so, but given these good reports, I'll be happy to update now! :)

Keep in mind that the PC I use daily at the moment is an IBM ThinkPad T60p with the fastest options available AFAIK (2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 128 MHz ATI MOBILITY FireGL V5250 with terrible overheating problems) so these things are much more noticeable on a now 11(!)-year-old laptop as compared to some of the super-fast desktops you folks are talking about.  When my desktop was working (with at least four-core i5 CPU and SSD with ~2013 chipset), even Internet Explorer 8 ran incredibly fast!

Edited by ThomasW
Added detail.
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15 hours ago, ThomasW said:

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the replies and confirmation!

I didn't get any e-mail notifications so I thought everyone had ignored my post so I'll have to check my settings! :rolleyes:

 

My concern was the slowdowns everyone is talking about regarding the fixes to this issue in general.  There are many regular, "planned" updates that cause horrible and irreversible results from many organizations, which seem to increase by the day, and my trust of Mozilla and its judgement has been decreasing at an accelerated rate for the past seven years or so, but given these good reports, I'll be happy to update now! :)

Keep in mind that the PC I use daily at the moment is an IBM ThinkPad T60p with the fastest options available AFAIK (2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 128 MHz ATI MOBILITY FireGL V5250 with terrible overheating problems) so these things are much more noticeable on a now 11(!)-year-old laptop as compared to some of the super-fast desktops you folks are talking about.  When my desktop was working (with at least four-core i5 CPU and SSD with ~2013 chipset), even Internet Explorer 8 ran incredibly fast!

@ThomasW

You bring up interesting points. As far as your ThinkPad goes, it's one thing to use a computer for only the software it was designed for, and quite another to use it for software still being released today.

The T60 will run quite well for software designed in that era, circa 2006-2007. However, for optimal performance you'll want a newer machine for modern software.

My recommendations are 1) to run a modern machine with XP drivers available (this is getting more difficult to do as time goes by, but most machines up to 2014 should still have drivers available, or 2) use an XP virtual machine.

I'm currently using a laptop with XP, as I like to be able to take it with me wherever I am. It shipped with 3GB RAM in 2011, and 4GB seems like overkill since 32 bit has its limits anyway. I installed an SSD and this makes a huge difference.

If you aren't using an SSD, perhaps you should consider it. I believe the T6x are the first with SATA, and SSDs are extremely cheap now. Even the entry level CS900 makes a marked improvement over HDD, and it's only about $50.

 

devmgr.jpg

sysprp.jpg

 

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  • 4 months later...

Firefox has updated to ESR version 52.8.1 as of June 6, 2018 for those who have not performed the update.   Security fixes in the release notes!

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