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Comment by cyberlab | Hacker News Reader

> Firefox, OBS Studio and many applications built with Electron and Flutter take advantage of Wayland automatically, for smoother graphics and better fractional scaling.

I think it's great that Firefox is bundled with Ubuntu, but I have to manually update Firefox each time a new release comes out because the version that's installed is a canonical-controlled version that stays 'stuck' on a old version and doesn't have an auto-update mechanism.

Other than that, I love the OS. I use it as my daily driver since it has a good community around it, and if you're having trouble, there is a good community-powered Q&A site for it.

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I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Firefox (from the default Ubuntu repo) is updated frequently. It might lag behind the official release by a few days, but I can live with that. Currently at 87 [0], so I expect 88 (which Mozilla released a few days ago) any day now.

[0] https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/firefox

> but I have to manually update it each time a new release comes out because the version that's installed is a canonical-controlled version that stays 'stuck' on a old version and doesn't have an auto-update mechanism.

How so? I use the default Firefox on Ubuntu 20.04 and it's updated through apt like almost all other applications/libs I've installed and it stays pretty up-to-date. E.g. Firefox started offering version 88.0 on the general release channel three days and there ISN'T YET a corresponding update to the package repo, however I expect it'll most likely pop up there within the week.

> but I have to manually update Firefox each time a new release comes out because the version that's installed is a canonical-controlled version that stays 'stuck' on a old version and doesn't have an auto-update mechanism.

What? It is updated just like any other software by using the package manager

https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/firefox

I actively don't want random app-specific auto-updaters; I want one package manager.

Running nightly comes with tradeoffs, but I've had great experiences with firefox-trunk from https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-daily/+archive/ubuntu/... which is maintained by Ubuntu developers.

Firefox in Linux distributions is updated by the distributions, not by an app-specific updater. It may take few days after official release - distributions can start building after Mozilla announces release, they cannot prebuild it few days in advance - but it will be updated.

> I have to manually update Firefox each time a new release comes out because the version that's installed is a canonical-controlled version that stays 'stuck' on a old version and doesn't have an auto-update mechanism.

Doesn't Snap solve this?

Yes, but only if you submit your code to Snapcraft. There's no way to host your own repository.

How so?

https://ubuntu.com/blog/howto-host-your-own-snap-store

In fact, Bret Barker has published an open source (Apache License) SNAP store on GitHub. We’re already looking at how to flesh out his proof-of-concept and bring it into snapcore itself.

https://github.com/noise/snapstore/

"snapstore was a minimalist example of a "store" for snaps, but is not compatible with the current snapd implementation. As a result I have removed the contents here to avoid further confusion."

See, no self hosting possible anymore.

But this is the opposite of the principles Linux has been built on. How can Canonical hope Snap gains popularity if the very software powering up the Snapstore is closed?

I don't care since i don't use *buntu. But they are not what i would call an OpenSource Company...lots of closesource-selfmade software like Juju and Snapstore.

The Flatpak version of Firefox is official and created by Mozilla. I don't think the Snap version is. If that matters to you then you may want to go with Flatpak over Snap.

The snap is also from Mozilla.

The snap version of Mozilla is official and created by Mozilla.

Source: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/commit/e6b8e53803e10244...

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/04/21/firefox-d...

> I think it's great that Firefox is bundled with Ubuntu, but I have to manually update Firefox each time a new release comes out because the version that's installed is a canonical-controlled version that stays 'stuck' on a old version and doesn't have an auto-update mechanism.

This is par for the course on some distros. Fedora, for example, has its own repository for Firefox that is sometimes behind the mainline release of Firefox (although in my experience it's usually only a few days).

The advantage of the process is that the Fedora Firefox repo actually has its own QA testing, so they occasionally catch some things that might impact Fedora users specifically, that otherwise might go unnoticed if I were to switch to the Firefox flatpak.

I know it's not for everyone, but building your own Firefox binaries isn't hard.

Or the binary tar-ball from Mozilla included the auto-update. (I'm using Nightly so that's the best option for that)

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