When Debian Bookworm comes out I'm going to, as an experiment, give it a go paired with Distrobox. I'll install my CLI and GUI applications via an Arch Distrobox. Stable base, rolling and portable apps.
https://www.ypsidanger.com/toolboxes-are-not-just-for-specia...
Tried in a VM. Seems to work, but needs more evaluation to see how it works in real life. You can even make a Distrobox the default in your terminal.
Just checking: you mean the unpackaged tarball, not a .deb or anything?
The only minor catch is, if you want a pretty icon, you might have to create a menu entry with alacarte by yourself with the following config:
Name: Firefox Command: /where/you/untared/firefox/firefox --name=firefox %u
And pick the icon from /where/you/untared/firefox/browser/chrome/icons/default/, there are multiple pngs.
Do you keep it in your home directory?
Or do you run with root permissions all the time? (Scary!)
Do you have problems with the packaging system thinking you don't have a browser installed, as I described here?
https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/10/debian_firefox_issues...
Or do you have some other browser(s) installed as well?
I'd probably recommend the first config though, testing with unstable pinned on. It's definitely nowhere near as fresh as unstablr, but still often much better. And you can install fresh versions of things you care about, via apt-pinning.
Unstae has never caused a real problem. Sometimes a dependency might not be resolvable, and you have to either wait a bit while a dependency makes its way to availability (days or sometimes rarely weeks), or you can go dig up slightly-older unstable versions of packages on the website, or you just apt-pin testing on (at low priority) and install the significantly older version.
All in all Sid (unstable) has been quite lovely and I'd never switch back. But being unable to install something has been an issue I see a couple times a year. Testing, with Unstable pinned on gives you a nice position of getting what you want fresh & everything else being pretty dammed reliable. I also wouldn't discourage anyone from running Sid either, but it has some pretty small caveats.