Mozilla's new Firefox Linux package for Ubuntu and Debian derivatives • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by bee_rider » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 7:00 PM UTC

MaKey wrote: post #78

bee_rider wrote: post #52

I wonder if they’ll keep this up permanently. Tempted to switch (maybe I can remove my system’s Snap infection), but redoing bookmarks and extensions (and getting my ublock config and OneTab bookmarks) is a pain. And I’ll have to figure out how to not lose my passwords this time. What a pain.

You can just use your old Firefox profile. Copy it from ~/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla/firefox to ~/.mozilla/firefox/

Oh dang, nice.

I ended up exporting everything and then re-importing. But it was not as annoying as I expected. I think I was mostly dreading it because I’d lost passwords in the past to this sort of thing, because I wasn’t expecting it, so I didn’t export beforehand. Just bad associations in my brain.

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

#82

Post by mardifoufs » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 7:01 PM UTC

sylvestre wrote: post #80

mardifoufs wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but that's not necessarily a good thing. Packaged browsers from a package repo don't have the best track record. I mean they are fine but there's a reason why some want their packages to come from the people who actually made the software especially in this case. Does the ESR Debian package support updates without asking for restarts? Granted it matters less for esr but if it avoids the issue , why not.

Feels like an excellent track record to me: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/firefox-esr ;) And Mike is also a prolific Firefox developer.

Ahhh I wasn't familiar with this package in particular. I just have had a bunch of ... weird issues dues to some quirks in some packaged browsers. Basically it was never a standard install, and it sucked for ironing out issues. Glad to hear the Debian packages are doing great, not surprised either!

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

#83

Post by Dylan16807 » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 7:02 PM UTC

vetinari wrote: post #14

lolinder wrote: post #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 ann…

The tar.gz build has exactly the same problem (it just doesn't complain about it): it needs to close the files from the old package and open the ones from the new package. Hence the restart. You can minimize the downtime by just restarting the browser and then using History | Restore previous session. The flatpak build avoids this problem by keeping both versions on the disk, up until you stop the app. Only at this t…

> The tar.gz build has exactly the same problem (it just doesn't complain about it)

You're mixing up two problems here. There's "please restart to update" that you can ignore/postpone, and there's "I have already updated and now going to sites is mostly broken" that you can't.

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

#84

Post by eduction » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 7:05 PM UTC

Debian/Ubuntu is also the sole chosen distro for Spotify and Signal first-party native packages.

I try to use Fedora whenever possible so have noticed that Debian tends to be the first choice, even for "client" type software, which makes sense considering the popularity and cross compatibility of Ubuntu+Debian.

(You can generally still get stuff on Fedora - they do their own Firefox package of course, Signal is a flatpak, etc)

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

#85

Post by Gabrys1 » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 7:07 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #52

I wonder if they’ll keep this up permanently. Tempted to switch (maybe I can remove my system’s Snap infection), but redoing bookmarks and extensions (and getting my ublock config and OneTab bookmarks) is a pain. And I’ll have to figure out how to not lose my passwords this time. What a pain.

Why would you do that? Your firefox config should be kept in .mozilla/firefox (or is it .config/mozilla now?) and simply picked up by the new firefox binary. The only time this doesn't work is when you install an older version whose configuration "format" is not compatible with the newer version's one.

Edit: a sibling commenter just made me aware of the config for the "snappy" version actually resides in another directory. That said you can manually copy the files to the standard place

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

#86

Post by wolverine876 » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 7:10 PM UTC

declan_roberts wrote: post #71

This is a great update from the Mozilla team! Please continue the hard work. The only thing missing is a continued commitment to privacy and liberty. What has changed since the infamous “We Need More Deplatforming (2021)”[1] article by CEO Mitchell Baker? I absolutely can not move past this and I think Mozilla needs to make a strong commitment to our civil rights. 1. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-t…

Why do you think it has changed?

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

#87

Post by Gabrys1 » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 7:11 PM UTC

Timber-6539 wrote: post #57

Takes 7 steps to install Firefox this way as opposed to apt-get install.

1. Add the apt repo

2. Add the repo's public key

3. apt-get update

4. apt-get install firefox

What 3 steps am I missing?

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

#88

Post by ndriscoll » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 7:11 PM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #69

p4bl0 wrote: post #55

Is there really a point these days in having the very last release rather than the ESR version packaged by Debian? If so what are the benefits for end users?

In case of security fixes, you will stay unpatched for a bit less time. ESR is intended for places that really don't like any form of change like rigid enterprises and banks and such. End users should probably steer clear of that unless they have a good reason not to; which they generally don't. Except for a false sense of security. I personally don't see a good reason to opt out of security changes for any longer th…

End users also have plenty of reason to dislike change. Change tends to mean things like exciting new spying and UI regressions. Meanwhile, security concerns are often overblown. If you're just using your browser for e.g. email, news, facebook, youtube, netflix, amazon, and your bank, and not venturing out into the seedier parts of the web, you're probably at ~0% risk of some RCE exploit. In any case, an adblocker is probably better protection than auto-updates.

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

#89

Post by amarshall » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 7:16 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #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 ann…

> it has had this annoying habit of requiring me to restart my browser whenever it updates in the background

This happens because Firefox detects that its files have changed underneath it while its running—this can cause problems due to, I guess, the multi-process architecture and sandboxing not liking mismatches between what is running and what it might start. The built-in updater performs updates in a way that doesn’t cause this. Package managers that do not update Firefox in-place (e.g. Nix) do not have this problem either.

As noted in a sibling comment, this new package does not seem to have the issue either. I wonder what they changed.

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

#90

Post by b5n » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 7:16 PM UTC

I just use whatever is in debian testing or unstable, but it's trivial to download firefox _directly_ from mozilla which will then keep itself updated to the latest version.

This just chucks firefox in /usr/local but its straightforward to edit and use ~/, opt, etc., just make sure the created symlink is somewhere in $PATH. Desktop integration will depend on your DE/WM, but should be pretty simple to figure out if not automatic.

    wget -O firefox-latest.tar.bz2 \
      "https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-latest-ssl&os=linux64&lang=en-US"
    tar xjf firefox-latest.tar.bz2
    sudo rm -rf firefox-latest.tar.bz2 /usr/local/bin/firefox /usr/local/firefox
    sudo mv firefox/ /usr/local/
    sudo ln -s /usr/local/firefox/firefox /usr/local/bin/firefox