Mozilla Hacks

Firefox Developer Edition and Beta: Try out Mozilla’s .deb package!

By Johan Lorenzo (Mozilla)

Posted on November 30, 2023 in Featured Article and Firefox

A month ago, we introduced our Nightly package for Debian-based Linux distributions. Today, we are proud to announce we made our .deb package available for Developer Edition and Beta!

We’ve set up a new APT repository for you to install Firefox as a .deb package. These packages are compatible with the same Debian and Ubuntu versions as our traditional binaries.

Your feedback is invaluable, so don’t hesitate to report any issues you encounter to help us improve the overall experience.

Adopting Mozilla’s Firefox .deb package offers multiple benefits:

  • you will get better performance thanks to our advanced compiler-based optimizations,
  • you will receive the latest updates as fast as possible because the .deb is integrated into Firefox’s release process,
  • you will get hardened binaries with all security flags enabled during compilation,
  • you can continue browsing after upgrading the package, meaning you can restart Firefox at your convenience to get the latest version.
To set up the APT repository and install the Firefox .deb package, simply follow these steps:
<code># Create a directory to store APT repository keys if it doesn't exist:
sudo install -d -m 0755 /etc/apt/keyrings

# Import the Mozilla APT repository signing key:
wget -q <a class="c-link" href="https://packages.mozilla.org/apt/repo-signing-key.gpg" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-stringify-link="https://packages.mozilla.org/apt/repo-signing-key.gpg" data-sk="tooltip_parent">https://packages.mozilla.org/apt/repo-signing-key.gpg</a> -O- | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/packages.mozilla.org.asc > /dev/null

# The fingerprint should be 35BAA0B33E9EB396F59CA838C0BA5CE6DC6315A3
gpg -n -q --import --import-options import-show /etc/apt/keyrings/packages.mozilla.org.asc | awk '/pub/{getline; gsub(/^ +| +$/,""); print "\n"$0"\n"}'

# Next, add the Mozilla APT repository to your sources list:
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/packages.mozilla.org.asc] <a class="c-link" href="https://packages.mozilla.org/apt" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-stringify-link="https://packages.mozilla.org/apt" data-sk="tooltip_parent">https://packages.mozilla.org/apt</a> mozilla main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mozilla.list > /dev/null

# Update your package list and install the Firefox .deb package:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install firefox-beta  # Replace "beta" by "devedition" for Developer Edition
And that’s it! You have now installed the latest Firefox Beta/Developer Edition .deb package on your Linux.
Firefox supports more than a hundred different locales. The packages mentioned above are in American English, but we have also created .deb packages containing the Firefox language packs. To install a specific language pack, replace fr in the example below with the desired language code:
sudo apt-get install firefox-beta-l10n-fr
To list all the available language packs, you can use this command after adding the Mozilla APT repository and running sudo apt-get update:
apt-cache search firefox-beta-l10n

About Johan Lorenzo (Mozilla)

More articles by Johan Lorenzo (Mozilla)…