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Mozilla's new Firefox Linux package for Ubuntu and Debian derivatives

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla's new Firefox Linux package for Ubuntu and Debian derivatives

#3
post #2

As a user of the PPA packages ( https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/ppa ), now I'm confused. Are these the same packages? Should I switch? I'd have appreciated at least a mention in the article.

From what I can tell, the “Ubuntu Mozilla Team” does not consist of people from Mozilla but rather just people packaging Mozilla software for Ubuntu. The latest packages in that PPA have been uploaded by Rico Tzschichholz, who does not appear to be affiliated with Mozilla.

Re: Mozilla's new Firefox Linux package for Ubuntu and Debian derivatives

#8

[flagged]

What anti-features do Debian's maintainers remove from Firefox, in practice? (Meaning the one they've already been maintaining for a while, a firefox-esr package. There's also an upcoming one for the normal release cadence).

edit: Answering my own question,

https://wiki.debian.org/Firefox#Disabling_automatic_connecti... ("Here is a table of the above parameters and how Debian diverges from the upstream default:")

Looks to me like a fairly small, unimportant delta.

edit #2: I didn't mean to criticize your comment overly strongly! I hope I wasn't the reason you got flagged—I tried to vouch you but I regret that wasn't enough.

Re: Mozilla's new Firefox Linux package for Ubuntu and Debian derivatives

#9
post #3
post #2

As a user of the PPA packages ( https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/ppa ), now I'm confused. Are these the same packages? Should I switch? I'd have appreciated at least a mention in the article.

From what I can tell, the “Ubuntu Mozilla Team” does not consist of people from Mozilla but rather just people packaging Mozilla software for Ubuntu. The latest packages in that PPA have been uploaded by Rico Tzschichholz, who does not appear to be affiliated with Mozilla.

This is confusing because it’s posted on Mozilla’s official site

Re: Mozilla's new Firefox Linux package for Ubuntu and Debian derivatives

#10
> Getting the latest version with features and security fixes is key to having a good experience whenever you use Firefox. Now, our new APT repository is directly connected to the Firefox release process, so you will receive the latest updates whenever we make them available. Tip: you will still need to restart Firefox for the latest version.

In the past when I've installed Firefox through a .deb, it has had this annoying habit of requiring me to restart my browser whenever it updates in the background. I'll be going about my day and all of the sudden every URL will redirect me to about:restartrequired [0] and I'll have to shut everything down to keep going.

It's not clear from this announcement if they've fixed that or not. If they haven't, I'll probably just continue to install Firefox from the .tar.gz files they provide [1]. If you drop them in a directory you have write permissions to, Firefox can auto-update itself the same way it does on Windows, without any forced interruptions.

[0] https://otechworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/restart-fi...

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w...

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