Bonum Certa Men Certa

Mozilla Bricking Firefox ESR Deliberately. This Code Breaks Tor Browser Too.



Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer

Firefox ESR meme



The Tor Browser, currently based on Firefox ESR 102.14, hasn’t been able to play any videos for about 3 months now on most Linux distributions. So everyone using it is now completely secure from maliciously crafted videos seeking to exploit your codecs embedded in Web pages. B-)



Thanks Mozilla! 😛



What seems to have happened is that they patched support for ffmpeg 4 out of Firefox and BACKPORTED it to 102 ESR for no reason, meanwhile they also didn’t add support for ffmpeg 6.



(Even though ffmpeg 4 is a currently supported stable branch upstream.)



Also, around the same time ffmpeg 6 landed in Fedora (close to the time I deleted Fedora and moved to openSUSE Leap KDE) and broke video playback in SeaMonkey, however I talked to the SeaMonkey developers on IRC and they quickly patched it so it can handle both versions!



It was one of the last patches that went in before the current release.



So now SeaMonkey has video playback with both versions, unlike any version of Firefox.



Which is cool, because no matter what you do, it works.



Also, SeaMonkey lets me shop at Walmart, which is broken in Firefox 115 ESR.



I could check Walmart in Firefox 116, but then I’d have three versions of Firefox (or derivatives) on my computer and they would all have different annoying and serious defects.



Mozilla is trying to brick things deliberately in Firefox, for no actual reason than to harass people trying to use something that’s not their latest and shittiest version yet.



The SeaMonkey people are actually really nice.



It’s unfortunate that Mozilla won’t actually commit themselves to keeping the major features of the browser functional for as long as they claim to support an ESR.



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