Use Mozilla's official DEB instead, please!

[Pentaphon]

According to Mozilla, the Firefox DEB package promises better performance due to Mozilla’s advanced compiler-based optimizations, hardened binaries with all security flags enabled during compilation, access to the latest updates as fast as possible, and continuous browsing as you don’t have to restart Firefox after upgrading the package.

https://9to5linux.com/mozilla-firefox-122-is-now-available-for-download-heres-whats-new

@leviport @jacobgkau This is a no-brainer for saving you time and giving us these no-restart updates! Please!

[leviport]

Is the request just to update to version 122.0? If so, that will be done in #74

The .deb packages already come from Mozilla, so that article has me a little confused about what exactly changed.

[jacobgkau]

It looks like our makefile currently grabs a .tar.gz from Mozilla, rather than a .deb: https://github.com/pop-os/packaging-firefox/blob/master_jammy/Makefile

Switching to the deb wouldn't save us any time on the maintenance side, but we might consider switching if it would bring other improvements (no-restart updates sound nice, if that actually works).

[jacobgkau]

It does look like their .deb might be designed to work with Mozilla's apt repository. We may still need to unpack and repack it (like we currently do with the .tar.gz) in order to provide it from our repo and not have users getting auto-updated directly from Mozilla. (We can continue to disable auto-update checking with the Firefox preference like we currently do, but we don't want Mozilla's repo being installed on everyone's systems and overriding our own.)

[Pentaphon]

@jacobgkau thanks for looking into this. I wasn't sure what the solution for Pop! would be with these new .debs but I thought I'd bring it to your attention anyway to see what can be done. Figured it didn't hurt to try. The no-restart updates would be worth it, IMHO.

The .deb packages already come from Mozilla, so that article has me a little confused about what exactly changed.

Here's some more info straight from Mozilla's blog. https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2023/10/30/introducing-mozillas-firefox-nightly-deb-packages-for-debian-based-linux-distributions/

[jacobgkau]

Ok, reading that blog post:

Edit (November 8, 2023): Following community discussions, we have updated the post to highlight that Firefox can continue browsing after an APT upgrade, allowing people to restart at their convenience.

It sounds like Firefox can't actually update without restarting. It just avoids the "please restart Firefox to continue" that you can get after installing a Firefox update, allowing you to continue using the old version until you restart. That would still be nice. I wonder what about the .deb is different from the .tar.gz that allows that to happen.

[jacobgkau]

Looks like the Firefox preference dom.ipc.forkserver.enable is what allows the continued use of the old version after installing the new version to disk, using a fork server: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1850026

We could set that to true with our default settings in https://github.com/pop-os/default-settings if we wanted to. It's simply not enabled by default in the generic Linux builds: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1609882

The reason it's not enabled yet is due to some remaining quirks with the feature: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1752638

It's enabled by default in the nightly .deb, though. Not sure if it is in the release .deb or not. (That Mozilla blog post is talking about Firefox Nightly.)

Edit: It does look like it's also enabled in the release .deb:

I'm unclear why Mozilla decided the feature was suitable for the .deb build when they don't think it's suitable for the generic .tar.gz build yet.

[Pentaphon]

New blog post about it: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/4-reasons-to-try-mozillas-new-firefox-linux-package-for-ubuntu-and-debian-derivatives/