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Like 7 years ago I just went to https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ and hit "Download". I got like a tar archive that I uncompressed into ~/firefox. Made a short cut to it on my tool bar. It has been auto updating fine ever since.

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I did that as well, but it also means that the binaries can be modified by an exploit (running as a regular user). It's not a huge difference with the deb, but still, it's a small additional layer of security.

That's a pretty lousy take. Obviously, stuff that executes as your user act on your user data. Why would you even have a line of code that you don't trust on your machine? `chown` it if you care that much.

Also, to the parent comment -- you should be putting stuff in ~/.local anyway, not in the top-level home directory.

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