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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

I wish they had some better UX designers. Hit the download button and I get a .bz2 file with no install scripts whatsoever.

    $ tar jxvf firefox-57.0.tar.bz2
    $ cd firefox
    $ mkdir /usr/local/firefox
    mkdir: cannot create directory '/usr/local/firefox': Permission denied
    $ sudo su
    Password:
    # mkdir /usr/local/firefox
    # cp -rv * /usr/local/firefox/
    ...
    # ln -s /usr/local/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox 
    ln: failed to create symbolic link '/usr/bin/firefox': File exists
    # mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox.bac
    # ln -s /usr/local/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

Why couldn't they go the extra mile and give me a .deb file I can just click and install or dpkg -i, like Chrome does? Make it absolutely frictionless -- lubricate the whole process -- if you want people to use it instead of Chrome.

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This is kind of a strange complaint. You’re using Linux but you don’t want to use the version packaged by your distro, yet you’re uncomfortable opening a standard tarball and following the intructions within? Yet you’re complaining that Mozilla didn’t go the extra mile for your obscure situation.

I'm used to the assumption that my package manager is out of date. It usually is (e.g. it still has only OpenCV 2.4). I have a huge pile of PPAs to solve that ...

I on Fedora and the latest version is available via dnf. But still I use nightly, and all I had to do to j install it was untar it into my opt directory and symlink the binary.

> I on Fedora and the latest version is available via dnf. But still I use nightly, and all I had to do to j install it was untar it into my opt directory and symlink the binary.

What is your strategy with updates? Do you give yourself permission to write to opt or do you run Firefox Nightly as root once a day so it can update iself? I tried the latter for a few weeks and grew tired. I can't wait for containers to come to Firefox stable (which is the feature I am looking forward to the most in nightly).

I mean, it doesn't have to be in your /opt/ folder, you can put it anywhere and add it to your $PATH. I did however give myself permissions to /opt/nightly/, where my binary and the rest of its files are.

I think official deb and rpm repositories would still be nice.

On Ubuntu 17.10 I got the update to Quantum only a few days after the official release, works quite well, no need to look for a PPA.

Ubuntu ships Firefox updates independent of its normal release schedule, so you should always have the latest version there, shortly after the official Firefox release.

But you might want to consider a different distro with more up-to-date packages anyways.

It'll be consistently tested with those more up-to-date packages, so would most likely be more stable than your attempt to rejuvenate Ubuntu LTS or whatever distro you're using exactly.

Why not use your package manager?

Interesting! Didn't realize Ubuntu had included it already. I almost always assumed Ubuntu package manager is always behind by a few versions (like it is for everything else).

Ubuntu tends to keep Firefox up to date, although I haven't used Ubuntu for a few months already.

But regardless, this is the "official PPA" for the Beta channel: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/firefox-n...

for firefox there is really not any other way, because security updates are not backported. So either you have (ubuntu, ...) to pick latest or ancient ESR.

A .deb file would only work on certain distributions. Why wouldn't you use your distro's package manager to download Firefox? I guess it might be helpful to have a note on their site telling Linux users just that.

What I really want is for them to support Flatpak. A 3rd party is doing this work for Nightly and Developer, but I'd like to see Mozilla get on this train, and then the whole distro specific packaging thing is no longer a thing. They're already doing the heavy lifting with their own tarball.

https://flatpak.org/apps

Well, you're using linux, you should know how to go around this (the tar.bz2 used to have a run-firefox script though) or try the distro package manager

In Mac and Windows it's frictionless

Just add a PPA :

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa

sudo apt update

sudo apt install firefox

sudo apt install firefox-locale-[your language]

What does this have anything to do with UX?

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