Firefox Has an Official Flatpak App, Here’s How to Install It

Firefox Flatpak

Mozilla has finally managed to package its awesome open-source and free Firefox web browser in the Flatpak universal binary format for Linux-based operating systems.

After already being available as a Snap app in the Snap Store, the Mozilla Firefox web browser is now also installable as a Flatpak app from Flathub.

Senior software engineer Mihai Tabara announced earlier this week that his team over at Mozilla managed to successfully build Flatpaks of the upcoming Firefox 75 release.

Early builds have been published in the Flathub store into the beta channel for early adopters who want to install the web browser on their favorite GNU/Linux distribution using this universal binary format.

However, please keep in mind that this is still a pre-release version. Some known issues are present, such as localization files, which are a bit hard to implement in the Flatpak version.

“Mozilla has traditionally provided official localized builds for each language. This is not how localizations are typically handled in Flatpak or even in Linux distro packages,” explains Fedora developer Jiri Eischmann.

How to install Firefox as a Flatpak

Installing the Firefox web browser as a Flatpak is as easy clicking this link if you’re using a GNU/Linux distribution that supports installing remote Flatpaks using GNOME Software or KDE Plasma Discover package managers.

Alternatively, users can run the command below in a terminal emulator to install Firefox beta. To run it, use the second command.

flatpak install --user https://flathub.org/beta-repo/appstream/org.mozilla.firefox.flatpakref 
flatpak run --branch=beta org.mozilla.firefox

Once all the issues are resolved, Mozilla will publish its awesome Firefox web browser to Flathub’s stable channel. This will make it installable directly from the web interface, without running any command, except for setting up Flatpak support if it isn’t already available in your distro.

Last updated 4 years ago

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