Firefox

Update: 2017-Nov-19: See the last section for automated installation and upgrading, which is now possible.

To read my RSS feeds, I use Tiny Tiny RSS, which worked fine until 21 Feb 2014.

On 22 Feb 2014, Ubuntu pushed Firefox 27, Tiny Tiny RSS stopped working, with a Javascript error. After logging in, there would be a pop up error referring to getCookie and tracing to prototype.js.

To solve this, I went back to the ESR (Extended Support Release). This was quite a few steps, so I am documenting them here.

To have better fonts in Firefox, you need to disable anti-aliasing, and clear all font caches.

Do achieve this, run the following commands from a terminal:

Clear the cached fonts in your home directory

cd ~
rm -f .fonts.conf .fonts.cache-1 .fontconfig/*

Disable antialiasing

cd /etc/fonts/
sudo mv 10-antialias.conf disabled-10-antialias.conf 

Reconfigure the fonts

sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

Now, restart FIrefox and check if the fonts look better ...

Ubuntu decided several months ago to forgo its policy of sticking with Firefox 3.6, and go with the latest versions from Mozilla.

With Firefox 13 running on Ubuntu 10.04, I had good performance, and did not suffer from this problem that I am about to describe. The only issue I faced was excessive disk activity and that was fixed by disabling the FireBug extension. Other than that, Firefox was speedy and responsive.