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Comment by vishnu_ks | Hacker News Reader

hmm. I upgrade my VSCode pretty much all the time they do a release because they provide a .deb file. Installing the upgrade is as simple as double-clicking on the file. I am sure pretty much all the users of Ubuntu and Debian are capable of doing a Firefox upgrade if they really wanted to. But no harm in making it easier.

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I have an older friend who used Ubuntu on his laptop, as he had never used Windows and just wanted a simple web browsing capable laptop (before the days of Chromebooks)

The number of times I've discovered umpteen copies of Firefox tarballs on his desktop, and every time he complains it's been a pain to 'upgrade Firefox'

Sure, I could have done more handholding, but yes, Firefox could certainly have made it easier back then and still today.

Also in my experience is always painful to have more than a version of firefox; a firefox-stable.deb and a firefox-nightly.deb would be appreciated

Yup I wasnt saying we shouldnt provide .deb files, I dont know why we dont and sounds like a perfectly reasonable request.

I was just replying to the comment making a point about being accessible to the average user, the average user of Firefox is not manually installing updates on Ubuntu

Hehe, point taken. That's the paretto principle too, spending a bunch of time on a small segment of your users wouldn't make much sense either, especially since most of them are fully capable of working with the system as it is.

Also, since it updates in place anyways, which is nifty, I guess this comment mainly applies to other software I've used which is a royal pain to install...

I think they should at least do some A/B testing on whether including a .deb package increases the downloads or upgrades significantly to justify the time and cost.

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