Hi Kari,
Some months ago, I had email discussions with a guy I knew from a computer users group that I used to participate in several years ago. From mainframes through PCs, he is one of the most knowledgeable and capable computer people I ever met. He can troubleshoot almost anything, resolve all sorts of hardware and network issues, rewrite driver code if need be, etc. He claimed that the risk of serious infection through your browser (unless you unwisely open suspicious links or attachments) is pretty low. We have to color that statement a bit by the fact that he primarily runs ArcaOS (the successor to eCS | OS/2), and to a lesser extent Linux, which are exponentially less vulnerable than Windows.
[By way of analogy, imagine for the moment that XyWrite was a major player in the word-processor market -- such as it remains, these days -- that you were a heavy user of the U2 library, and then the word suddenly and arbitrarily came down from on high that U2 was being withdrawn and invalidated. You'd be really ticked off, wouldn't you ?]
I (briefly) experienced the new FireFox, and for its former ecosystem of highly valuable browser extensions, it is nothing less than a genocidal bloodbath. (O.K., maybe that is phrasing things a tad towards the overly dramatic . . . but it's still accurate.) Mozilla claims that there are replacement add-ons to be had, in the brave new world of their new APIs. But that is a big lie. If said so-called replacement extensions (just read the reviews !) are not non-existent, to my eye they appear paltry and pathetic in comparison. I could cite abundant examples, drawn from my roster of regularly used extensions, the vast majority of which have now been mowed down, as if they were victims of the St. Valentines Day Massacre. It is untenable, it is unacceptable. I simply could no longer use the Firefox browser for so many essential functions. And no other browser has anything like that add-ons infrastructure. (I use multiple browsers, so I think I have some clue about this.) When I had run this past the guy who manages the portable versions of FF over at portableapps.com, his response was that those extensions did not have all that many users, and the browser security considerations outweighed this anyway. Pure BS, I say !
Some have speculated about trying to migrate the previous extensions over to other forks of Mozilla, such as Palefox or Waterfox or Seamonkey. I don't know whether that could work, though I'd be willing to investigate it, if necessary. Now and for as long as possible, I'll continue to use the final, "legacy" version 5290 of Firefox, or rather the portable edition thereof. Where / if that plan gets compromised, I'll have to fall back on Opera, Chrome, or _____ ? I basically have to do that anyway, because there are always web pages that either won't display or print properly. Some still seem to have been constructed for IE only, or whatever MS has replaced it with.
You can go into About:Config and set your FF browser version for "Never Update", and just ignore their admonitions. Mozilla has destroyed a once-great product, in my view. I don't want any part of what they are doing now.
Jordan
From: Kari Eveli
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, September 6, 2018 1:47 AM
Subject: Re: Dire straits for Firefox users
Hello,
Today it happened, Firefox suggested a "security update", and when I
applied it, I was running Firefox 60. So, I had to downgrade to 52.9.0
ESR to run my daily chores. The solutions proposed to replace my old
extensions just did not cover my needs at this point. I used backups to
recover my latest version, but you can install an older version of
Firefox by downloading it from (in my case)
https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/52.9.0esr/win32/and
choosing the appropriate language version.
Best regards,
Kari Eveli
LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland)
lexitec@xxxxxxxx
*** Lexitec Online ***
Lexitec in English:
http://www.lexitec.fi/english.htmlHome page in Finnish:
http://www.lexitec.fi/J R FOX wrote on 26.5.2018 at 20:01:
> If necessary, I may just keep on using the last functional ESR for FF on
> an indefinite basis . . . because I think the added functionality of
> those extensions outranks the other concerns. I have long been
> buttressing them with use of the other two browsers I mentioned anyway,
> for various reasons. At the same time, I have to wonder whether the
> supposed security risks with the non-updated product are greatly
> overblown. I think that could be true, but it may depend to some extent
> upon one's individual browsing behavior.
>
>
> Jordan