Great news for Linux users, after months of testing, Mozilla released today a new package for Firefox on Linux (specifically on Ubuntu, Debian, and any Debian-based distribution). If you’ve heard about Linux, which is known for its open-source software and an alternative to traditional operating systems (OS), and are curious to learn more, here are four reasons why you should give our new Firefox on Linux package a try.
↫ Gabriel Bustamente and Johan Lorenzo
It’s a ppa and .deb package straight from Mozilla itself, so you don’t have to to rely on your distribution’s maintainers (as long as you use a Debian-based distribution, that is). Do note, however, that some distributions actually make changes to the default Firefox code, such as Fedora enabling things like Wayland-by-default and hardware-accelerated video decoding long before those became default in Firefox-proper. By using Mozilla’s package, you’ll lose all of these changes.
As a sidenote, Mozilla’s instructions for enabling the ppa and installing the .deb are a bit… Dubious, though.
I wish you’d have said “Debious”…haha.
It’s a fair criticism though. Working with .deb files is old fashioned and using them outside of repos isn’t user friendly. Those that don’t coordinate with distro maintainers can suffer from dependency problems. Other modern package managers that bundle dependencies tend to be better with 3rd party software IMHO.
Well, you’re not dealing directly with the .deb files. The instructions are on installing the source including apt repository signing key.
I don’t think they’re too bad, although could use improvement around the checking of the key retrieved. Also I hope they keep that updated, because eventually it’s going to expire and they need to issue a new key.
Drizzt321,
In some ways this is even harder for users to grasp and manage than being able to directly install a package, which is conceptually simple (ala flatpack, appimage). Being able to install debs directly is conceptually simple as well, but extremely unpleasant outside of the repositories if there are any dependencies involved.
In any case, as Thom points out, having users enter mysterious sudo commands as is done here…
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w_install-firefox-deb-package-for-debian-based-distributions
…should be relegated as a bad practice from the past IMHO.
Modern package managers are superior in regards to improving the user experience IMHO.
For Ubuntu users, getting rid of the firefox snap and installing real, native firefox is pretty much a tedious necessity. Why Ubuntu think that the snap version is ready for people to actually use I’ll never know. Having that as your default browser can only sour perspective users on your distro.
Jeeves,
I would not use snap versions myself since centralized proprietary stores violate my open philosophy.
However since I haven’t tried it your post makes me wonder what’s actually wrong with the snap version of FF?
Basically everything. The big one that gets me is that dragging and docking tabs is hilariously broken, but there’s a whole load of things around launching helper apps, opening files, etc. that just don’t work.