Raspberry Pi Forums

Hi. I have some questions about web browsers, and the relation between Debian Stable and Raspbian.
Because English isn't my first language, I just want to be clear that I am not criticizing anything. I am fairly new to all this and am trying to understand it better.

I noticed that the chromium browser included with Raspbian doesn't seem to be coming from Debian. I assume that it is built by someone from the Raspberry Pi foundation. I am a little concerned however that, even if it is the default included browser, it can be months behind the latest release. I understand that there could be no security fixes sometimes and that it would be fine to stay on an old version but it doesn't seem to be the case. The latest chromium updates do fix a lot of security issues.
Are there plans to automate the process so that users have a more up-to-date versions?
Or maybe there is something I don't understand?

I also tried to use firefox on Raspbian. The latest version available, that seemed to be the Debian stable version, was the esr version of Firefox and was working pretty well for most webpages. Only multimedia stuff seemed to be broken.
But now that the latest supported esr version is 60, it doesn't seem to show up in Raspbian. It is, however, available in Debian stable.
I thought that Rasbian was based on Debian stable and that most Debian packages were available in Rasbian.
Am I missing something? Or is there a reason firefox isn't available anymore (it is, but not a supported version).
If there is, will it be again sometime in the future?

Thanks

Chromium has been tweaked for the RPi - standard Debian software may or may not run very well as we only have 1GB ram.

(Firefox 60, I believe, uses pulseaudio, & not alsa, which is what Raspbian uses, you would, I think, have to install that to have it work properly.)

I understand it's a modified chromium version. But modified or not, I am simply concerned with the lack of important security updates, especially when it is the default browser.
I wonder if there are plans to automate/speedup the releases.. Until then, there may be alternatives, like firefox...

The thing is, firefox 60 esr isn't even available in the Raspbian repositories... only the older, unsupported version is. It was fine up to a few days ago when they dropped support for the old version and made 60 esr the maintained one. It could be that for some reason 60 won't become available, but the thing is that the old version isn't supported anymore, even for security, and 60 esr is now the current version available in Debian stable. And since most packages updates from Debian stable are available in Raspbian, I wonder why it doesn't show up.

lgalex wrote: ↑

Mon Sep 17, 2018 4:54 pm

I understand it's a modified chromium version. But modified or not, I am simply concerned with the lack of important security updates, especially when it is the default browser.
I wonder if there are plans to automate/speedup the releases.. Until then, there may be alternatives, like firefox...

The thing is, firefox 60 esr isn't even available in the Raspbian repositories... only the older, unsupported version is. It was fine up to a few days ago when they dropped support for the old version and made 60 esr the maintained one. It could be that for some reason 60 won't become available, but the thing is that the old version isn't supported anymore, even for security, and 60 esr is now the current version available in Debian stable. And since most packages updates from Debian stable are available in Raspbian, I wonder why it doesn't show up.

First and foremost Raspbian is a fork of Debian ARMHF ARMv7 compiled to run on ARMv6 and ARMv7...

....therefore some packages can not be compiled to run on ARMv6 architecture.

There is no doubt that eventually we will see chromium-browser updated and hopefully other web browsers, but chromium-browser is a priority as it offers Flash Support which is needed for Scratch2.

fruitoftheloom wrote: ↑

Mon Sep 17, 2018 8:32 pm

First and foremost Raspbian is a fork of Debian ARMHF ARMv7 compiled to run on ARMv6 and ARMv7...

....therefore some packages can not be compiled to run on ARMv6 architecture.

There is no doubt that eventually we will see chromium-browser updated and hopefully other web browsers, but chromium-browser is a priority as it offers Flash Support which is needed for Scratch2.

Ok got it. But I wonder if it is the case with the new firefox 60 esr. And if it is, how long will it take before the old unsupported version is removed from the Raspbian repository? I (maybe incorrectly) assumed that packages available for Raspbian were at least maintained for security (like for Debian Stable), especially if they are well known (and a web browser) like firefox.
But again, it is not a criticism at all. I do understand that ressources are not infinite and that the priority is probably somewhere else. I'm just trying to understand how it works.

I would't really mind about Firefox if chromium was updated more often... or at least faster when there are multiple security fixes... But again, maybe there is something I don't understand about it.