Revisiting how we build Firefox

[Mike Hoye]

On 2015-07-08 7:16 PM, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult wrote:
> And yes: I'm strictly opposed to applications updating themselves (or 
> even just components of / extensions for itself) - these things should 
> run entirely through the OS'es/distro's package management. It's even 
> a major security issue. 
I'll double check this, but I'm confident that if you install Firefox 
via your package manager, that's where your updates will come from as well.

If you download Firefox directly from us and install it yourself, it 
will try to update itself, and that's definitely how it should be since 
it doesn't exist as far as you package manager is concerned. If that 
upsets you you can certainly turn it off, though I strongly recommend 
you don't.

> IMHO, it devolved. The fundamental concepts - like package management -
> are there since decade. On many platforms (eg. GNU/Linux) it's the
> standard and well proven - just some esoteric platforms still dont have
> it (or just start introducing something in that direction ...)
Those esoteric plaforms are "MacOS and Windows", where something like 
99% of our users are.

I'm 100% in favor of package managers - apt is love, as far as I'm 
concerned - but we need to ship our software to our users as we find 
them out there in the world on the hardware and OSes they have, not as 
we might wish them to be. Something like 16% of the Web's users are 
still running XP, and whether or not we like that doesn't matter at all; 
they deserve to participate in the modern Web with a safe, modern browser.



- mhoye