Thunderbird/Firefox version confusion

[jlfessler]

Kind of confused here, so I'll apologize in advance if the answer is obvious. It looks as if TB and FF are packaged in Fedora 14 (yes, I know I"m behind) as version 3.x, yet Mozilla is touting version 8. That seems like quite a version number gap.

Is there a special repo that contains the newer TB/FF versions, or am I just not understanding something?

I would have thought that 64-bit Linux versions of these two would be pretty common by now.

What am I missing?

-J

[alf55]

Kind of confused here, so I'll apologize in advance if the answer is obvious. It looks as if TB and FF are packaged in Fedora 14 (yes, I know I"m behind) as version 3.x, yet Mozilla is touting version 8. That seems like quite a version number gap.

Is there a special repo that contains the newer TB/FF versions, or am I just not understanding something?

I would have thought that 64-bit Linux versions of these two would be pretty common by now.

What am I missing?

-J

Here are the dated with the releases of Firefox.

 1.5   released on 23 Jun 2005
 2.0   released on 22 Mar 2006
 3.0   released on 17 Jun 2008
 3.5   released on 30 Jun 2009
 3.6   released on 21 Jan 2010
 4.0   released on 22 Mar 2011
 ============================= Rapid release development cycle starts
 5.0   released on 21 Jun 2011
 6.0   released on 16 Aug 2011
 7.0   released on 27 Sep 2011
 7.0.1 released on 29 Sep 2011
 8.0   released on  8 Nov 2011
The llanned release date for version 9.0 is 20 Dec 2011

I run gentoo and am using version 7.0.1.

By the way Fedora is at version 16 now and it was release on 8 Nov 2011 (the same day as Firefox 8, so it probably has version 7 of Firefox.

Your Fedora 14 was released on 2 Nov 2010.

[Krendoshazin]

Mozilla are ridiculous when it comes to version numbers, and the fact that they've jumped 3 versions in 6 months proves that. Their version numbers are pretty much meaningless.

[jayd512]

Addressing the question of software repos, there's two main ones that you'll need. And they should have the updates software that you're asking about.
Open a terminal. As root, do this:

rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Then:

yum update

[oz]

Not certain, but I believe Mozilla is trying to catch up with the numbering system for Windows Internet Explorer, which seems very unnecessary in my opinion, but then they didn't ask me before making the changes.

[jlfessler]

Thanks large. Now, I take it the two rpmfusion repos you mentioned are for the 32-bit versions of FF/TB? If so, have you any leads on their 64-bit cousins?

And thanks again.

[jayd512]

For standard software, I've not come across a reason to have any other repos.
rpmfusion has always been the go-to for everything.

And if I'm wrong, I'll love to learn about it!

[jlfessler]

My kpackagekit is pointing at rpm fusion for fedora 14, both free and nonfree, but the only hits it gives when thunderbird or firefox is punched into its seach box is for the 3.x version. I've downloaded the tar.bz2 files for both apps from Mozilla's ftp site, so I have the 64-bit code, but being a lazy sod I was hoping for an easier installation. Spoiled I guess.

Thanks to all who replied.
-J