On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:46:16 -0800
Yasha Karant <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> My university network security unit requires that the latest
> production releases of particular network applications be installed
> in order to minimize security compromises on systems attached to the
> university LAN. These applications include typical web browsers and
> IMAP email clients, such as Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera, Chrome, and
> MS Internet Explorer (the latter I personally only run within MS Win,
> currently MS Win 7, under VirtualBox under Linux).
> 
> Opera and Chrome install from the respective source vendors.
> However, both Firefox and Thunderbird are provided by TUV and thus
> SL, but at release versions considerably lower than the current
> release from Mozilla.   I have found a work around that allows the
> use of the tar.bz2 installation from Mozilla on X86-64 SL6x, but one
> of our technicians mentioned the use of a repository (Remi) that
> evidently ports the current Mozilla production products to EL,
> including X86-64 EL6.  The relevant URLs appear below.
> 
> Is anyone using this repository and these RPMs, and if so, what is
> the experience of such use (e.g., are these faithful ports of the
> Mozilla production applications that perform the same as current
> production from Mozilla)?
> 
> http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2011/install-firefox-on-fedora-centos-red-hat-rhel
> 
> http://dev.antoinesolutions.com/remi-repository
> 
> Yasha Karant


TUV provides ESR (10.x) versions of Firefox and Thunderbird, so these
packages are also getting security updates. Stability is rather
important on EL, so always getting the latest version couldn't be
considered a good choice, hence the ESR branch.

Chrome can be installed from Google that creates a repo for it, so it
can also be kept up-to-date easily. I have no experience with Opera
under SL.

Andras