Hacker News Reader

Comment by beefhash | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I should point out that Firefox won't be getting backported to Debian stable[1]. Until the next Debian stable, it seems that Firefox ESR 52 will be the only version of Firefox.

[1] https://mozilla.debian.net/

View on HN

I downloaded Firefox from mozilla.org and configured a ~/.local/share/applications/firefox.desktop file so that it appears in the GNOME Shell menu. It auto-updates and works great.

I do the same for Nightly, which I keep alongside the system-installed one in Ubuntu.

Thanks for that information. I use unstable and a part of me always want to go for a stable version. As a Firefox user, maybe not after all.

I guess there's a price in each choice.

I find it better to run stable/testing and install Firefox separately. It works great.

Doesn't Debian follow the ESR releases for their stable branches? E.g. when support for ESR 52 ends they'll upgrade stable releases to ESR 59?

Yes. Current stable did not have Firefox ESR 52 when current stable was released, but it has it now.

Debian is providing Firefox ESR 52 even in oldstable (check security upgrades) https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/firefox-esr

Normally, yes. However, something on that page concerns me:

"Jessie and Stretch backports of Firefox release and beta are gone because of the requirement of rust to build them, which is not available in Jessie or Stretch. Please update your apt sources to use Firefox ESR instead."

I'm not sure how that Rust requirement and ESR 59 will play together; I'll assume they won't play together very well.

> Firefox won't be getting backported

"won't" is a strong claim especially considered you didn't provide any source to back it. The page you've linked doesn't talk about such a possibility at all. This is only your wild guess right now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com