[kwlug-disc] Firefox ESR

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

There seems to be a few people who do use Firefox ESR.

Ron,
Yes, that is the same PPA I am using.
My sources.list.d line looks like this (I am still on 20.04 LTS):

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mozillateam/ppa/ubuntu focal main

firefox-ese 115.5.0esr+build1-0ubuntu0.20.04.1~mt1 amd64

The issues are in two main areas: timezone, and font size.

1. Timezone:

The symptom is that Gmail shows the time wrong (showing GMT
time, not Eastern standard)

Going to the  Web Developer Tools and typing:

Date();

Returns:

"Mon Dec 04 2023 22:16:51 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)"

The offset for the time zone is wrong.

Or:

Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone;

Shows: UTC.

The same thing shows up on this page:

https://webbrowsertools.com/timezone/

Timezone is UTC, and offset is zero minutes.

When you search about that, the answers that show up all center on
an about:config value for private.resistFingerprinting that should be
set to false. It is set to false in my case.

So it is not that.

Digging deeper shows a bug that was present in various versions of
Firefox, including ESR 115, and was fixed here:

https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-esr115/rev/d7948b142f43

Basically, it tries to access /etc/locatime, which is a symlink to the
real localtime (/usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Toronto in my case),
but because Firefox is sandboxing, explicit permission must be given
to /usr and all its descendents.

When I go to the PPA pool/main/f/firefox-esr, and download the source
(firefox-esr_115.5.0esr+build1.orig.tar.xz timestamped 14th Nov 2023)
I do see the lines that provide the fix:

+  // Bug 1848615
+  policy->AddPath(rdonly, "/usr");
+  policy->AddPath(rdonly, "/nix");

But still, GMT is the timezone in the browser despite that.

2. Font sizes

My settings are like this screenshot. Note the check box is NOT checked:

https://imgur.com/L7RqZN7.png

Some sites do show up correctly. But others don't. The font is too small.
Examples: Slashdot.

When I was on Firefox 120, and long before, I used to zoom, say to 120%)
it would stick for this site. I do have +/- in my toolbar for that purpose.

Now the new size no longer sticks.

In about:config, I have both browser.zoom.siteSpecific and .updateBackgroundTabs
set to true (the default). But they don't have any effect. If two tabs
are open on
Slashdot or some other site, and I zoom, only this tab has a readable font size,
but the other is totally oblivious to it. And if I open a new tab, it
is still at the
default small size that is unreadable (to me).