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Mozilla announced today in a blog post that they are doubling down on offering a DEB package of their popular, open-source, and cross-platform Firefox web browser for Debian-based GNU/Linux distributions.
Back in April, I reported that Mozilla was offering a DEB package of the Firefox 113 release during the beta testing phase. Unfortunately, that was the only time a DEB package was available for download and, of course, it didn’t make it into the final release of Firefox 113, nor future releases.
It would appear that Mozilla needed more time to work on the DEB package for Debian and Ubuntu-based distributions, and it looks like it will finally become a thing starting with an upcoming Firefox release, like Firefox 121 or later.
However, for now, users of Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and other derivatives can install the DEB package only for the Firefox Nightly (development version) offering from a repository that you’ll have to first install on your distribution.
Mozilla says that the Firefox DEB packages are compatible with the same Debian and Ubuntu versions as their traditional binaries that you can download from Firefox’s official website.
Using the DEB package over Snap or the official binary package offers some benefits like better performance due to advanced compiler-based optimizations, hardened binaries with all security flags enabled, access to the latest Firefox releases as fast as possible, and you won’t have to create your own .desktop file anymore.
Check out the blog post linked in the first paragraph if you want to install Firefox Nightly from Mozilla’s APT repository. The repo also contains Firefox language packs in the DEB package format that you can install alongside the Firefox web browser.
Update 01/12/23: As of December 1st, 2023, Mozilla’s DEB repository also supports Firefox Beta and Firefox Developer Edition. Instructions on how to install them are available here.
Last updated 5 months ago
