Michael A. Peters wrote:
I'm already running FF2 on the laptop. The issue is the laptop has a 700MHz CPU (550 MHz on battery) and 384MB of ram, and unfortunately it seems that many of the new gnome libraries aren't very conservative when it comes to ram and CPU, causing gnome to be a dog.
Wow, that's a tiny RAM. You should consider running XFCE instead of Gnome.
My only gripe with FF2 is that it has a tendency to sometimes crash when opening a dialog window, but I'd rather have that happen then a desktop that just isn't usable because of code bloat on older hardware.
You can always install any FF version you want in /home/${USER}/firefox and put that directory at the beginning of $PATH in .bash_profile Voila, instant FF "upgrade" and you don't even have to remove the original FF package.