Where can I find the exact modifications to Firefox ESR that makes the “pure” browser?
(and were they really necessary?)
My users are having all sort of problems. Addons from official mozilla site refuse to install. Common applications refuse to recognize it as a modern browser (e.g. whatsapp web refuses to run and says “must use firefox newer than 57”)
I don’t think there is a document which describes the changes from Firefox. You can get the source code (maybe most easily via apt source purebrowser)
I do think add-ons have some quirks, but I’m not familiar enough. For a while, I saw that one should install add-ons through the command line, and one could find add-ons with apt search webext* - but now I only see HTTPS Everywhere and UBlock Origin, which Purebrowser includes by default.
I think PureOS’s restructuring may have caused some confusion. As I was digging around repo.puri.sm, I first found the old green suite, which seemed to have Firefox 46.
However, the new amber suite I think is based on Firefox 68.
apt search purebrowser
Sorting... Done
Full Text Search... Done
purebrowser/now 68.1.0esr+really60.9.0esr-1~deb10u1pureos1 amd64 [installed,local]
web browser based on Mozilla technology
I don’t have a Librem laptop, so I can’t verify this, but I’d wager that if you can get a user agent switcher installed, and tell PureBrowser to identify as Firefox 70, most sites will work.
The version string you quoted reads “really60.9.0esr” after the first version number. This is because the Firefox version used in PureOS has been rolled back from 68 to 60, for an explanation see