Latest version of Firefox supported by CentOS 6.9?

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emcclure
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Joined: 2019/10/02 18:55:11

Latest version of Firefox supported by CentOS 6.9?

Post by emcclure » 2019/10/02 19:51:54

Hello,

We have a testing environment here that uses a proxy and one of the Linux images we use is CentOS 6.9. We can configure the system settings, but unfortunately it appears that Firefox does not pick up on those settings. To set the proxy settings we do this:

cd /etc/profile.d/
sudo vi proxy.sh

lines include:
export http_proxy=http://my.proxy.address:port
export https_proxy=$http_proxy
export HTTP_PROXY=$http_proxy
export HTTPS_PROXY=$http_proxy
export no_proxy=localhost, 127.0.0.1, etc
export NO_PROXY=localhost, 127.0.0.1, etc

Then
sudo visudo
Add a line that's something like
env_keep +=http_proxy https_proxy HTTP_PROXY HTTPS_PROXY no_proxy NO_PROXY

There may be some quotes in there, but the idea is after a reboot and I type in 'env' in terminal I see the listing for all the proxy settings.

It seems the default Firefox installed with CentOS 6.9 is 52.2 I think if my memory serves me correctly.

I've tried downloading the newest copy from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox but that doesn't work. I've copied it to the /opt folder and copied it to /usr/local/bin and created a mozilla folder, done some sort of symbolic link and none of that works. I had a similar issue with SUSE 12 SP3 and was able to get it to work. That had started at Firefox 60.8 and running an update only got me to 60.9. With the CenOS 6.9 image if I run a yum update it goes to 60.9, not the latest which is version 69.

Am I missing something? Is there some set of steps guaranteed to work? If it's just not going to happen that's fine and I can let my team know there's no workaround, but I just want to cover everything first before I make that statement. Thanks in advance.

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TrevorH
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Re: Latest version of Firefox supported by CentOS 6.9?

Post by TrevorH » 2019/10/02 20:28:12

CentOS 6.9 is more than a year out of date. You should be running `yum update` on a regular basis to keep up to date. The current version of firefox on both CentOS 6 and 7 is 60.9.0-1. We ship the ESR version of firefox (Extended Support) which is why the version number appears older. Mozilla publish a timeline for ESR releases and the version will likely change when that next comes out.

Be aware that CentOS 6 has only about 1 more year of security updates before it goes entirely EOL.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
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emcclure
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Joined: 2019/10/02 18:55:11

Re: Latest version of Firefox supported by CentOS 6.9?

Post by emcclure » 2019/10/03 15:39:30

Hi TrevorH,

Thanks for the reply. I understand what you mean by it being out of date. However I work for a software company and we have customers who use older versions of operating systems and we need to support them. So it appears that Firefox 60.9.0-1 is the latest supported version on CentOS 6.9? If that's the case then that works for me. I'll let my team and others know.

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TrevorH
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Re: Latest version of Firefox supported by CentOS 6.9?

Post by TrevorH » 2019/10/03 18:02:06

we have customers who use older versions of operating systems and we need to support them
You are doing them a disservice by doing so. If you encourage them to stay on unsupported, unpatched, vulnerable systems then that is not a good thing. Only the current version of each major version is supported. That's 6.10, 7.7 and 8.0 at present. CentOS 6.9 is from early 2017 so is now 2.5 years out of date and has a list of security problems as long as your arm.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

emcclure
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Re: Latest version of Firefox supported by CentOS 6.9?

Post by emcclure » 2019/10/03 18:06:55

Hi TrevorH,

I understand, but I'm not the one who makes those decisions. I can take this up with the other people on the team and let them know, but if our products still support those older OSes and customers still use them then there's not a whole lot I can do about that. You can always encourage customers to upgrade, but maybe they have something that they haven't tested on a newer version, are lazy, incompetent, whatever the case may be.

kpedersen
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Re: Latest version of Firefox supported by CentOS 6.9?

Post by kpedersen » 2020/05/11 13:41:53

I encountered the same problem and decided to stop lurking and make an account to share my solution (my first post is a necro-post... sorry!).

The overall idea is to create a small Debian chroot within Centos 6.x which runs the latest Firefox (76.x at the time).

The following should do it after first installing debootstrap from EPEL.

Code: Select all

NAME=firefox_stretch
DIST=stretch
SOURCE=http://deb.debian.org/debian
ARCH=i386
JAIL_USER=jailuser

#
# Make and populate the jail if it doesn't already exist
#
if [ ! -e "/jails/$NAME" ]; then
  mkdir -p "/jails/$NAME"

  debootstrap --foreign --no-check-gpg --arch "$ARCH" "$DIST" "/jails/$NAME" "$SOURCE"

  echo "deb http://deb.debian.org/debian $DIST main" > "/jails/$NAME/etc/apt/sources.list"
  echo "deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ $DIST/updates main" >> "/jails/$NAME/etc/apt/sources.list"
  echo "deb http://deb.debian.org/debian $DIST-updates main" >> "/jails/$NAME/etc/apt/sources.list"
fi

#
# Mount the required locations in dev, etc.
#
mount --bind /dev/pts "/jails/$NAME/dev/pts"
mount --bind /dev/shm "/jails/$NAME/dev/shm"
mkdir -p "/jails/$NAME/dev/dri"
mount --bind /dev/dri "/jails/$NAME/dev/dri"
mount -t proc proc "/jails/$NAME/proc"
mount -t sysfs sys "/jails/$NAME/sys"

#
# Perform second stage of jail population. Upgrade packages. Add a user.
#
chroot "/jails/$NAME" debootstrap/debootstrap --second-stage
chroot "/jails/$NAME" apt-get update
chroot "/jails/$NAME" apt-get upgrade
chroot "/jails/$NAME" adduser "$JAIL_USER"

chroot "/jails/$NAME" su -l "$JAIL_USER"

# wget firefox package
# tar -xf firefox package
# run firefox from the extracted directory

A few extra things:

You could install firefox from Debian's repos, but that is around version 70.x. You are better off grabbing the latest build directly from the firefox website and extracting it, i.e into /opt.

I could only seem to get Debian userland as high as stretch working. Buster seemed to have an issue extracting. Perhaps it requires a newer kernel. Since I only wanted firefox, I didn't look much into it.

Remember to give the jail privilege to your X11 session via xhost:

Code: Select all

$ xhost +local:
or (less secure)

Code: Select all

$ xhost +
Other things I looked into was Chromium in RHEL 6 repos seems to be quite current, including GTK 3 (which is the biggest issue).

The above could possibly work using a CentOS 7 chroot but I didn't quite manage. I believe it needed a newer kernel (similar issue to why Debian Buster didn't quite work).

Hope this helps!
Last edited by kpedersen on 2020/05/11 14:41:54, edited 1 time in total.

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TrevorH
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Re: Latest version of Firefox supported by CentOS 6.9?

Post by TrevorH » 2020/05/11 14:06:18

Again, CentOS 6.9 is out of date and obsolete. The current version is 6.10 and already ships an up to date firefox ESR version.

Code: Select all

firefox.x86_64                          68.8.0-1.el6.centos                     updates
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

kpedersen
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Joined: 2020/05/11 13:23:33

Re: Latest version of Firefox supported by CentOS 6.9?

Post by kpedersen » 2020/05/11 14:39:56

Ah, I guess my solution was for CentOS 6.10 and if you needed Firefox 76.

My need was due to sodding Microsoft Teams and our internal web conference software. Seems like their developers like to use all the latest gimmicky web browser features.

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TrevorH
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Re: Latest version of Firefox supported by CentOS 6.9?

Post by TrevorH » 2020/05/11 15:32:05

I have teams working - well, _had_ it working on CentOS 7 last week but just upgraded all my hardware which is now too new to be efficiently used on CentOS 7 so I now have Fedora 32 instead. I installed the same Microsoft supplied teams rpm package on both though and both seem to work. Never tried on CentOS 6 but really, if you expect a 9.5 year old o/s to work with the latest stuff ...

Edit: confirmed, no chance of teams on el6, it requires a newer glibc than is shipped with CentOS 6. Not to mention gtk3
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

kpedersen
Posts: 3
Joined: 2020/05/11 13:23:33

Re: Latest version of Firefox supported by CentOS 6.9?

Post by kpedersen » 2020/05/11 18:39:26

TrevorH wrote:
2020/05/11 15:32:05
if you expect a 9.5 year old o/s to work with the latest stuff ...
Ironically, if I couldn't make Teams play ball with my CentOS 6.x, my next most convenient option would probably have been Windows 7 which is 11 years old!

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