1355116 - Establish a repository for Firefox on Linux (like Google does for Chrome)

Status: NEW

(Release Engineering :: General, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Greg]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/57.0.2987.133 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Install a linux distro that uses Firefox.


Actual results:

Firefox updates are often weeks behind because they are dependent on the respective linux distribution for updates. Modern day web-browsers are not like other software on systems today. Web-browsers are on the front line and need special consideration when it comes to updates and security.


Expected results:

If Mozilla maintained a Firefox repository (like Google does for Chrome), Linux users would always be up to date and would not have to rely on whatever distro they are using to receive updates for Firefox. If I install Google Chrome today (not the distro's version of Chromium), Google's Chrome repository is added to my distro. And as a result I always have the latest version of Chrome, usually receiving it the day it is released. With Firefox, I am dependent on the distro and that can take weeks for an update.

So is there something preventing Mozilla from running their own repository like Google does for Chrome?

Comment 1

[Chris AtLee [:catlee]]

This is something we've discussed very often. One big problem is: which distro(s) to support, and which versions of those distros? Who would be responsible for maintaining distro-specific integration issues?

We currently provide tarballs for Linux users, and Firefox will automatically update itself to the latest version. That is the best way to stay up to date currently.

Comment 2

[Greg]

(In reply to Chris AtLee [:catlee] from comment #1)
> This is something we've discussed very often. One big problem is: which
> distro(s) to support, and which versions of those distros? Who would be
> responsible for maintaining distro-specific integration issues?
> 
> We currently provide tarballs for Linux users, and Firefox will
> automatically update itself to the latest version. That is the best way to
> stay up to date currently.

How does Google handle this stuff you mention?

My experience with Tarballs is I end up with multiple versions of Firefox, cannot get the tarball-version to exist on my docker or launcher, have trouble specifying what the default browser is, and all kinds of other problems. It's not a "solution" IMHO at all. The end result is on distros like Debian, I just don't use Firefox. Hopefully in the future it won't matter as much but right now the Firefox ESR is laggy and frankly a terrible experience whereas the current Stable is usable.

Comment 3

[Mihai Tabara [:mtabara]⌚️GMT]

FWIW, in the past years, we 've added support for Firefox Flatpaks and Snaps.