Mozilla treats Debian devotees to the raw taste of Firefox Nightly

Post by Sunspark » Wed, Nov 01, 2023, 4:35 PM UTC

Sander_Marechal wrote: post #55

r9295 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian regularly dispatches security patches in the form of updates for firefox/chromium. It's the same as running "apt upgrade"

Debian ships Firefox ESR, not Firefox stable. As a web developer I cannot work on just ESR.

Post by vorpalhex » Wed, Nov 01, 2023, 4:46 PM UTC

Almondsetat wrote: post #53

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.

> compose a 13-line firefox.desktop and put in ~/.local/share/applications/ And that’s where the problem lies. Apt has great documentation, creating .desktop files and their syntax? Not so much

Post by csdreamer7 » Wed, Nov 01, 2023, 5:01 PM UTC

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #62

Sunspark wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? I'm writing on ESR as I type this. The most current version of ESR is based on FF 115. The general release is 119. At this late date in web history, you shouldn't be dependent on some niche feature or implementation that only exists between 115 and 119.

Dev tooling moves pretty quick. I find a nice to have feature every other version release that makes life better. ESR's significant lag misses out on a lot of these.

Post by blacksmith_tb » Wed, Nov 01, 2023, 5:09 PM UTC

Sander_Marechal wrote: post #54

AnonCoward42 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I think OP meant switching to the Mozilla APT when they offer stable alongside nightly. Not switching to the snap-ed Ubuntu version.

Post by jancsika » Wed, Nov 01, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #28

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.