Robin
@caprea Many thanks for your reply. I do know how to downgrade to 78.15 manually. I managed to downgrade by using
sudo apt-get install firefox-esr-l10n-de=78.15.0esr-1~deb11u1
but it complained about being downgraded not allowing to use my original profile anymore. And it came up still in English language. Something must be wrong with the language packs also. Localisation only worked from within firefox preferences, there is a section which allows to select the language of firefox gui, after which it downloads the localisation again from somewhere. Then after restart localisation works again.
Don’t ask me about security but it’s also still used in buster.
Exactly this is what concerns me most when setting it to hold. Firefox is one of the programs in direct contact with the open internet. So it is never a good idea to have unpatched security holes left open when setting it on hold (or use an outdated version as brian had proposed some posts above).
Being used in buster doesn’t mean the 78.15 gets the security patches in bullseye also. They have switched to 91 series, so probably they don’t give a damn about whether 78 still gets patched or not in bullseye.
Unfortunately no other browser in recent version (recent for security reasons) would install. And from my experience I noticed most browsers won’t get accepted by the webpages. Even Universities won’t accept non mainstream browsers. So theoretically there might be some other browsers, put practically it boils down on either making firefox-esr run in recent version with all security patches, or stop using this PC for internet access due to this arbitrary design decision they have taken at mozillas. There is obviously no striking technical reason why a browser should not work anymore on this class of machines with modern internet pages, since 78.15 does still work, and nobody can tell me my PC with more than 3300 bogmips is not good enough anymore from one day to the other. No, it is a clear decision to let us sit in the rain simply. Wouldn’t have thought to see something like this happen in open source linux world, but everything is possible, obviously.
Still hoping there will come a fix for this for debian ff 91 esr versions…
Windows is like a submarine. Open a window and serious problems will start.