Installation issue

Robsbib
They replaced my cpu at work, and I tried to reinstall Zotero. I click on Download, it tells me it will be installed when I restart Firefox, but I do not see it on the browser, in Add-Ons, or in the download folder. I checked the documentation but haven't had any luck. Any ideas? I am using Firefox 21 (as mandated by our Info Tech folks -- that is what I had on my old computer.)

Rob
  • dstillman
    Firefox 21 is over a year old and likely insecure, and no responsible admins should be mandating its use. You'll need to use either the latest version of Firefox (currently 32) or the latest Extended Support Release (currently 31).
  • dstillman
    edited October 8, 2014
    (And Firefox 21 wasn't even an ESR release. If anything they should've been mandating 17 or 24 ESR, but those are both unsupported by Mozilla now as well (or will be in a few days, in the case of 24).)
  • Robsbib
    I work at a state uaniversity of over 30,000 students -- those admins are not listening to me. Plus, I had Zotero on the same version working just fine yesterday.
  • dstillman
    Then you were likely using an out-of-date version of Zotero as well. You can try going back to an earlier Zotero release by consulting the changelog and altering the download URL accordingly on the download page, but we obviously don't recommend running an out-of-date version, and you may run into trouble in various places (particularly with saving from websites, since some site translators may depend on more recent versions of Zotero).
  • Robsbib
    Interesting idea, though I did just start using Zotero this past summer. Our student lab computers are running Firefox 24.4 (I just checked), and so I have contacted our local admin (library systems folks) I will try the changelog.
  • Robsbib
    Yup, I see you upgraded Sept. 2.
  • dstillman
    So just to explain this further, Mozilla provides Extended Support Release versions for this very purpose, and those come with a year of security updates. We try to keep Zotero compatibility with the latest version of Firefox and the latest ESR version. We don't maintain compatibility with other versions since, among other things, they're dangerous to users and the rest of the Internet and nobody should be running them.

    I'm not sure if it was the September Zotero release or one of the late-June ones, but yes, we made a change that would've broken compatibility with Firefox versions before 24 recently. Firefox 24 ESR was released in September 2013, so it was well past the point when all ESR users should have been running 24. And anyone not on an ESR release should be running the latest main version of Firefox.

    Anyway, the current version of Zotero should work on 24 ESR, so if you can upgrade to that you're OK for now, but since Mozilla will stop supporting that in a week there's no guarantee how long that will continue. 31 ESR is the next ESR release.
  • Robsbib
    Not sure why they install out-of-date software, but to my surprise I was able to update, and there Zotero was. Thanks -- this will help me assist the students as well.
  • Robsbib
    So many universities seem to run behind the times -- the NEW image on our public computers is running Firefox 24.4. Supposedly they will now be able to push upgrades to software in sections or layers -- I will have to monitor Firefox to see if they are doing so. Thanks for your help.
  • dstillman
    (Well, 24.4 isn't terrible — that's at least an ESR release. But 31 ESR has been out since July 22, 2014, so if the image is from after that, it should be using that.)
  • dstillman
    Just as a warning for others finding this, we did end up dropping declared compatibility with Firefox 24 in Zotero 4.0.23, though it probably mostly still works if forced.
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