I think they're releasing nightly first as that's the newest and obviously pre-beta. Once that version is tested, they'll release a Deb for beta, then for the regular version. No big deal IMO.
Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly
41–50 of 105 posts
Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Unt…
Fabrice Bellard has JSLinux to boot actual Linux in a web browser: https://bellard.org/jslinux/
Cool stuff
Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Unt…
Well, there is technically no such thing as an "actual Linux system." There are mainly GNU/Linux systems. If one is using the word "Linux" from a high-level systems theoretical perspective, the they are speaking about a certain philosophy related to how they approach the question of performing general computations. So, it is from the "Unix philosophical" point of view that I use the word "Linux." This also seems to b…
At the most basic level, Linux means "Linux kernel", which you clearly don't have here. You can't run ELF files, you can't create processes, you can't load kernel modules, in fact the only things you can do are those that you directly emulated in JavaScript, which is a very different experience than interacting with a real Linux distro.
Your project has none of the capabilities that are very much expected when someone mentions "Linux", even in a broader sense.
In fact, I'm pretty sure your shell doesn't have some most basic abilities that a POSIX shell has (as another comment mentioned). See the manual page of e.g. dash shell and see what I'm talking about.
Emulating a shell can be fun, but it's clearly not the same as running an operating system. You should probably clarify that in the project README to avoid misinformation. Because otherwise, your project claims to be what it's obviously not.
Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly
#44Ahh... 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!
I don't know that anybody doubts this, but until you can run a browser as a UEFI boot option, you've just created a third layer of choice without doing anything to solve the first two.
Wouldn't launching a browser within a bare-bones X11 session in some kind of kiosk mode during system initialization be a proper solution?
Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Unt…
Well, there is technically no such thing as an "actual Linux system." There are mainly GNU/Linux systems. If one is using the word "Linux" from a high-level systems theoretical perspective, the they are speaking about a certain philosophy related to how they approach the question of performing general computations. So, it is from the "Unix philosophical" point of view that I use the word "Linux." This also seems to b…
> There are mainly GNU/Linux systems
And yours contains neither GNU nor Linux, or as I’ve taken to calling it -(GNU+Linux).
It would be one thing if you had implemented a binary compatibility layer similar to WSL1, but what you’ve created seems to be a POSIX-like environment on the web.
Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly
#46I 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.
Yeah, that's a fine choice, to also get the Windows/Mac self-update experience ... as a somewhat philosophical matter, I don't like apps that self-update, I prefer if it's mostly impossible for the app to modify itself, and reserved for some separate privileged mechanism. (So the apt package repo way is also good, given a trustworthy source providing the desired versions.)
Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly
#47I 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.
I recently accidentally triggered a years old vuln in my Firefox, because ESR is shit and Debian is shit and why on earth would people want to use outdated software? I regret installing Debian :D
Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too bad the ppa doesn't seem to work on Debian proper. Yesterday I configured a new laptop with Debian Bookworm but I don't want Firefox ESR, I want the latest stable. Snap sucks, the Flatpak version has some limitations that the real version doesn't, I don't want to run a mixed stable/sid distro and the only 3rd party repository I found was hosted on sourceforge, which I just plain don't trust. So it's 2023 and I'm…
> So it's 2023 and I'm still stuck manually downloading and unpacking .tar.bz2 files into /opt every other week. You should have to do that only once, then Firefox updates itself just like on Windows or MacOS. I ran this setup (Debian stable + Firefox installed by unpacking a tar) for years and never had an issue. Maybe you should unpack it in a directory where your normal user can write files to let Firefox handle t…
I very much don't want that. My regular user not being able to modify the firefox files is a feature to me.
Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly
#49I 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.
Beware that on Ubuntu the apt version is actually only a shim to the snap install. (Edit: at least on latest LTS and above and default repositories)
Re: Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly
#50Certainly agree it's not intended to be for everyone, but I haven't noticed many crashes running nightly. Would be nice to go to print with numbers
I've done that as well. These days I run on the beta channel. Haven't had a lot of crashes with either. With the beta channel, I tend to click the restart to update button once a week or so.
On Arch linux, I ended up installing the tar.gz from mozilla and I let the browser update itself. Arch packaging is kind of redundant for this. It just adds time and middlemen that I don't want anyway. If there's a critical security update, it just increases the amount of time it takes for that fix to get to you. Regardless of whether you use stable, beta, or nightly. It does add a bit of hassle for e.g. getting a menu item with the correct icon in Firefox. I do the same with a few other things that know how to self update.
That should work on Debian as well. But a .deb package from Mozilla is nice of course.