[BL] Firefox

baslinux at lists.ibiblio.org baslinux at lists.ibiblio.org
Wed Feb 25 21:04:24 EST 2009


It is possible to run Firefox on an old PC.
It is not quite as fast as Opera, but it runs 
well on my 350MHz PII with 128mb RAM.

Avoid Firefox 2 -- it is significantly slower 
than Firefox 1.  Avoid GTK2.  It is significantly 
slower than GTK1.  The best Firefox for an old PC 
is the final 1.5 release (which backported some 
bug fixes and security fixes from Firefox 2).
I recommend a GTK1 version of Firefox 1.5.0.12.

That limits our options considerably.  The official
precompile binaries for Firefox switched to GTK2
quite early in version 1.  Almost all of the Firefox 
binaries available for download will be GTK2.  If it 
doesn't say GTK1 then it's almost certain to be GTK2.

The file you want is: 
---------------------------------------------
firefox-1.5.0.12.en-US.linux-i686-gtk1.tar.gz
---------------------------------------------
Put that in google and you get nothing.  Put that 
in an FTP search engine and it will find nothing.  
I hunted and hunted for several days and eventually
found a place to download that file.  In Japan!
------------------------------------
http://myh.no-ip.org/~m-ito/firefox/
------------------------------------
And yes, althought the site is in Japanese, the
file is in English.

To the best of my knowledge that file is the only 
downloadable GTK1 copy of Firefox 1.5.0.12 anywhere
in the world.  If you think you may ever want to run 
Firefox on an old PC, I suggest you grab that file 
while you can.

Cheers,
Steven

Currently running: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; 
en-US; rv:1.8.0.12) Gecko/20070604 Firefox/1.5.0.12
with the mplayer plugin (which works with our mplayer).




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