Up until a week ago I have had a smooth running linux box using both the yast installed firefox and firefox nightly. About a week ago I noticed that the bookmarks disappeared in regular firefox and I was not able to use the book mark library and restore bookmarks even though I could see them, nor was I able to restore a bookmark.html file. I complained 'unable to process the backup file'. I could resolve the issue by making a new profile in firefox and install my bookmarks, however, the bookmarks disappeared if the new profile was the default profile. If I made a new profile with bookmarks and did not make it the default profile, then everything was ok. Also, I noticed when in a google.com webpage, all the fonts were funny looking squares as if something happened to the fonts. Other web page fonts appeared ok. Then I noticed the font problem with firefox nightly with google.com. So I used bleachbit and did a thorough cleaning and that seemed to cure the font problem. I am a little bit unnerved by this a would like to know if what I described is something more that I need to check into?

Look at the version number!!
There has been a big new release that you just may not want!

The Firefox team seems to think that it should put out "a new release" every fifteen minutes, and they simply don't check them very well anymore. "If this one doesn't work," they seem to say, "just wait another fifteen minutes." I feel like I'm direct-wired into some developer's personal repo, and maybe I am.

This one is a major change and I am certainly going to back up my whole system just before updating to it so that I can back out easily. From the bit of reading I have done, I rather suspect I will be using that back-up and looking at a different browser.

I installed it without thinking, I'm usually a lot more discerning and review the changelog notes of everything I install, but Firefox has been a name I generally trust with "security updates." I wasn't aware this was a major overhaul of the browser itself, my mistake for being out of it for 5 minutes, I guess. This thing is not good, so far. 56 had problems with Mint's dark schemes, which I use because I'm photosensitive, 57 seems to completely break things. Most importantly, it has broken NoScript, which I don't leave home without. Feel honored, LQ!

Could you elaborate on what reading you have done or what the general consensus on this is? I will be surfing mint forums in the meantime. I don't want to use another browser. I have been using this browser for almost 20 years, and because they are tied to Tor, I tend to have a more open web-of-trust attitude towards them, as naive as that may sound. The creepy pocket stuff and the compatability issues are shaking that foundation a bit. Save me, Giorgio.

I guess I'll be reverting to 52, the organizational release, as recommended on noscript.net, even though that is a security problem. I'd post the urls to said links but LQ won't let me yet.

I'm going to look at Waterfox and if that doesn't suit, stick with an older version for now.
If it does what I want I don't see why I should be expected to change to a version that doesn't.

I suspect they could well end up losing a lot of supporters.

I uninstalled firefox ver. 50 and performed a manual refresh of the mozilla repository in yast, then reinstalled firefox with the current release of version 52 esr. Now I have my bookmarks back, however, firebug is gone due to incompatibility with version 52. My surprise was in finding out that a manual refresh of an individual repository in yast will still work for some repositories at this point in time for opensuse 13.1 which makes me happy since 13.1 is my favorite and most used release.

I also want to add to my post that the strange font issue is now gone as well.

An update on firefox 52.5 esr. Firebug is running well in this version.