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Comment by ploxiln | Hacker News Reader

I was running debian stable for the last few years (until a few days ago, due to a brand new laptop ...) and was perfectly happy with the Firefox linux build tarballs:

1. untar as root into /opt

2. symlink /opt/firefox/firefox to /usr/local/bin/firefox

3. compose a 13-line firefox.desktop and put in ~/.local/share/applications/

Only the first step needs to be repeated when there is a new release.

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I'm on Ubuntu so I'm also using the tarballs. I wouldn't want to have to update it manually every time, though. Instead, I've extracted Firefox into ~/.local/opt/firefox and the auto-updater works as expected.

I'll definitely switch to the apt distribution down the line, though. Package management is one of the main reasons why I use Linux in the first place.

Yeah, that's a fine choice, to also get the Windows/Mac self-update experience ... as a somewhat philosophical matter, I don't like apps that self-update, I prefer if it's mostly impossible for the app to modify itself, and reserved for some separate privileged mechanism. (So the apt package repo way is also good, given a trustworthy source providing the desired versions.)

Why switch? You're currently already using Firefox's own auto-updater. Since you've already done the manual set up, Debian's package manager would add nothing AFAICT.

I have two users on my system so I have two auto-updating Firefoxes which is slightly annoying. I also use Timeshift to take snapshots every time I update software, so the more software I can integrate into that, the better.

The auto-updater is better than Snap, but I'd rather use as few alternative package management solutions as possible.

Beware that on Ubuntu the apt version is actually only a shim to the snap install. (Edit: at least on latest LTS and above and default repositories)

I think OP meant switching to the Mozilla APT when they offer stable alongside nightly. Not switching to the snap-ed Ubuntu version.

They do offer the beta channel[1], if that's not too edgy.

1: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/firefox-n...

Yeah, the switch was super apparent to me because the snap version is painfully slow to open and sluggish in general. Switching back to binaries was night and day.

Indeed, that's why I switched to extracted binaries now and why I'm hoping to go back to Mozilla's own repo soon.

> compose a 13-line firefox.desktop and put in ~/.local/share/applications/

And that’s where the problem lies. Apt has great documentation, creating .desktop files and their syntax? Not so much

> creating .desktop files and their syntax? Not so much

This took me less than 2 seconds to find.

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/de...

You have an entire computers worth of example .desktop files. Copy one and change the relevant fields.

Setting Firefox as the default browser will force it to generate a .desktop in "~/.local/share/applications/".

I downloaded the tar to my user account Downloads dir, unpack and run from there. Created a launcher in KDE. I use Help > About and it checks for updates, pulls any and updates and tells me to restart Firefox, works great. Wish Mozilla would put Firefox in Ubuntu repos like Thunderbird. Makes me wonder if Mozilla gets a kickback from Canonical to diss Ubuntu users and make them think snap is the only way to run Firefox.

There used to be a not-inconsiderable speed benefit to building your own binaries, which I don't remember being that hard. Don't know if that's still true.

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