Description of problem: It would be nice if firefox on x86_64 had a mechanism whereby individual users could select if they used the 64 or 32 bit version of firefox when they had both installed. This would allow for the use of 32 bit only plugins on 64 bit systems without having to repoint desktop icons at the 32 bit specific variant of firefox.
Created attachment 289775 [details] patch to /usr/bin/firefox to allow MOZ_ARCH to be overridden
*** Bug 208819 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 221765 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 295411 ***
I really don't think this is a duplicate of the bug that you marked it a duplicate of. 295411 indicates that the devel repositories don't have both x86 and x86_84 variants of firefox, but that doesn't seem to be true: http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/development/x86_64/os/Packages/firefox-2.0.0.10-5.fc9.i386.rpm http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/development/x86_64/os/Packages/firefox-2.0.0.10-5.fc9.x86_64.rpm So, contrary to bug 295411 we have both arches in the x86_64 repository. And while nspluginwrapper is nice, it really doesn't always work sufficiently well. While we obviously need to make that the way forward, it really would be nice to have a way to switch back to 32 bit firefox transparently. Perhaps 295411 needs to be the place to do that, I'm not sure
setarch i386 firefox
yes, thats rather the point. Our repositories allow us to have both firefox arches installed on an x86_64 distribution, but we don't offer any easy way to switch between the two without directly specifying the version we want to run. Whats the argument against including this ability?
setarch i386 firefox That IS the way to do it. We allow you to have multiple binaries of many other items in the distro, and that is ALSO the way to switch the bitness. Firefox is not going to get special behavior here. Either you don't know about bitness because you just are a normal user that doesn't concern themselves with such things, or you are geeky enough to know what bitness you want, and are able to type 'setarch i386'. Feel free to make a launcher if you want for your personal machine.
my misunderstanding. I thought you were referring to the setarch command in yum during package installation.
Okay, so "setarch i386 firefox" is the way to do it. Did you actually try it? Not from a terminal, but by setting the default browser in GNOME. It is buggy. When Firefox is selected from the list, the custom command entry says "firefox %s" and is greyed out. Pressing the browser button on the upper panel brings up firefox and my initial pages, it's ok. When I set the default browser manually to a custom browser (no matter if it's "/usr/bin/firefox %s" or "setarch i386 firefox %s") then pressing the browser button on the panel brings up firefox with the correct bitness, that's ok. But it doesn't bring up my initial pages, instead it goes to search for "www.s.com". Perhaps "%s" gets misinterpreted. Pressing the "home" button brings my initial pages but it's annoying that I need another mouseclick.
*** Bug 465436 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***