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Announcing Faster, Lighter Firefox Downloads for Linux with .tar.xz Packaging!
(blog.nightly.mozilla.org)
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this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024
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Why do they not just ship normal packages (.deb, .rpm, etc.) or an official flatpak that functions properly?
The Flatpak is official.
But it doesn't work properly.
How doesn't it work properly for you?
Doesn't go full screen on media correctly. Leaves the media the same size and adds massive grey bars to the receiving screen space. Interestingly, the flatpaks of every Firefox-based browser I've tried do the same.
Certainty, this is a you problem.
All this under wayland?
Yeah
Has no filesystem sandbox whatsoever. They just pretend it is fine, causing uBlue devs and others to think it is okay to remove native Firefox
I think the "etc" shows how f***ed up it might be to package for every single distro. Releasing a tar with no extra bloat and letting each community doing its own things over it is probably one of the best approaches?
But it makes finding a properly functioning official package more difficult for newer users, and really the etc. was superfluous. You only really need .deb, .rpm, and whatever arch uses. There is a flatpak, but it doesn't work properly.
I think, you've answered your own question? There's a lot of different formats for Linux. Getting them all correct and working on the different distributions is significantly trickier than just bundling a self-contained archive.
Having said that, they do actually provide a DEB repo since a few months ago: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w_install-firefox-deb-package-for-debian-based-distributions-recommended
They officially publish the snap, the flatpak and a deb in an apt repo.