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Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

theregister.com

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Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

#21

Post by linuxontheweb »

theblazehen wrote: post #16
linuxontheweb wrote: post #8

Ahh... my two favorite tech-related subject matters: Linux distros and the politics of browser choice. I'm currently trying to invert this entire discussion by putting a well-oiled Linux distro inside of the browser [1]. [1] For whoever doubts that a proper Linux distro can be created through pure Javascript running in a browser, you obviously haven't tried out https://linuxontheweb.github.io/ yet!

How does it work? What shell it is using? It doesn't seem POSIXy (eg I can't `echo $$` to see the shell pid), and the filesystem is pretty bare

Everything is mainly just my own handcrafted Javascript. There is only one wasm module included so far (binjgb) to allow for the playing of gameboy games.

I've previously tried to implement all of those sorts of POSIX-isms, but I've recently been wanting to make the tradeoff where code simplicity and understandability trumps all other considerations. Then, when others start coming on board the project, we can start making determinations about what kinds of "proper" shell functions to support.

So, at this point, "bare yet dependable" is what I'm going for! You can actually get more feedback about the filesystem through the desktop interface. You can show an icon cursor by pressing the 'c' key, and then move it over a file icon. Then, just press the 'p' key to show the properties of the file.

Help page here: https://linuxontheweb.github.io/www/docs/help.html

Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

#22

Post by cmrdporcupine »

lproven wrote: post #10
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #2

"Considering that it remains the dominant web browser for Linux" Is this actually true ? These days I use FF as my primary browser, but that's recent after a conscious (ethics driven) choice to switch. I kinda got the impression most people are just installing Chrome after install.

[Author/submitter here] I know of a handful of distros that bundle Chromium (e.g. Q4OS) or Chrome (e.g. Linux Lite) but almost every Linux that provides a browser provides Firefox as the default, AFAIAA.

Ok, but it being bundled isn't the same as actually being used.

Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

#23

Post by ploxiln »

I was running debian stable for the last few years (until a few days ago, due to a brand new laptop ...) and was perfectly happy with the Firefox linux build tarballs:

1. untar as root into /opt

2. symlink /opt/firefox/firefox to /usr/local/bin/firefox

3. compose a 13-line firefox.desktop and put in ~/.local/share/applications/

Only the first step needs to be repeated when there is a new release.

Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

#24

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

smallerfish wrote: post #4

Tangentially related, Firefox-from-snap completely broke for me recently in a way that I couldn't be bothered to diagnose ("error: cannot communicate with server: Post http://localhost/v2/snaps/firefox : dial unix /run/snapd.socket: connect: no such file or directory"). It prompted me to finally wipe Snap fully from my system and install Firefox from the Mozilla PPA. The only other Snap app I currently use is Intelli…

The Flatpak supposedly works fine, but I'm guessing if you had a Snap installed to begin with, you were probably on Ubuntu or one of its derivatives and getting both Snap and Flatpaks to coexist may have been untenable.

I've been meaning to switch, but I'm on a certain RPM-based distro where the Firefox package in particular goes through its own set of QA testing, so I'm happy to stay on that.

Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

#25

Post by qweqwe14 »

linuxontheweb wrote: post #21
theblazehen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it work? What shell it is using? It doesn't seem POSIXy (eg I can't `echo $$` to see the shell pid), and the filesystem is pretty bare

Everything is mainly just my own handcrafted Javascript. There is only one wasm module included so far (binjgb) to allow for the playing of gameboy games. I've previously tried to implement all of those sorts of POSIX-isms, but I've recently been wanting to make the tradeoff where code simplicity and understandability trumps all other considerations. Then, when others start coming on board the project, we can start m…

Sorry but what I think you've done is just emulating a shell, not an actual Linux system. For that, you need to emulate some architecture that Linux supports, like x86/RISC-V/ARM. With that you should be able to boot a real Linux kernel.

One guy even made a RISC-V emulator inside VRChat using a shader[1]. Doing it in JavaScript will probably be easier, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone has done that already.

Until you emulate a CPU architecture and boot an actual Linux kernel, it isn't quite fair IMO to call it "Linux".

[1] https://blog.pimaker.at/texts/rvc1/

Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

#26

Post by loeg »

lproven wrote: post #10
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #2

"Considering that it remains the dominant web browser for Linux" Is this actually true ? These days I use FF as my primary browser, but that's recent after a conscious (ethics driven) choice to switch. I kinda got the impression most people are just installing Chrome after install.

[Author/submitter here] I know of a handful of distros that bundle Chromium (e.g. Q4OS) or Chrome (e.g. Linux Lite) but almost every Linux that provides a browser provides Firefox as the default, AFAIAA.

Yeah, but while Windows makes Edge the default, I think Chrome is still more popular there. It would not be terribly surprising if that was also the case on Linux.

Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

#27

Post by dyingkneepad »

I think web browsers should be the exception to Distro's "stable" release rules. Browsers do not work at all like every other package. There are so many security implications, everything is so complex that I really think having whatever is the newest release is actually the most stable strategy. New releases tend to be pretty stable considering how much testing they get everywhere.

Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

#28

Post by jeroenhd »

ploxiln wrote: post #23

I was running debian stable for the last few years (until a few days ago, due to a brand new laptop ...) and was perfectly happy with the Firefox linux build tarballs: 1. untar as root into /opt 2. symlink /opt/firefox/firefox to /usr/local/bin/firefox 3. compose a 13-line firefox.desktop and put in ~/.local/share/applications/ Only the first step needs to be repeated when there is a new release.

I'm on Ubuntu so I'm also using the tarballs. I wouldn't want to have to update it manually every time, though. Instead, I've extracted Firefox into ~/.local/opt/firefox and the auto-updater works as expected.

I'll definitely switch to the apt distribution down the line, though. Package management is one of the main reasons why I use Linux in the first place.

Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

#29

Post by I_Am_Nous »

gottorf wrote: post #18

I use the "long-term support" version of any software whenever possible. On Debian, that's the firefox-esr package. I suppose I'm at the age where I no longer desire the bleeding edge.

Same, especially when the bleeding edge tends toward fun stuff like "We changed the way the engine works entirely so none of your browser extensions work anymore!"

RIP classic NoScript...perhaps it mostly works the same now, but when Mozilla updated Gecko (around Firefox 58 I think) they pared back what extensions were allowed to do for security reasons and NoScript had to change a lot before it could work.

Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

#30

Post by arun-mani-j »

Wow I really needed this! So far I have been using the tar file from the website. Very nice it comes with auto-updates but some dependency issues can be difficult to debug.

So a repository by Mozilla which ships the browser and integrates neatly into apt is a big "Thank you" from me. :)

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