Just watch out that Mozilla has disabled updates in these builds so you have to manually download for each new version/security fix.
The normal Firefox releases (except for the unstable alpha/aurora/developer version) don't allow you to edit your extensions without getting permission for each change from Mozilla's security theater automated signing portal.
Those that "aren't monitored by Mozilla so be careful" (pretty much all of them) which obviously means one should build it from the published sources oneself rather than downloading a pre-built package.
All the popular ones are all Mozilla monitored, so I don’t agree that pretty much all of them aren’t.
Personally I don’t touch unmonitored addons anyway. There have been incidents of developers selling their Addon to some dodgy buyers who then started abusing it.
Is there a clear guide as to what differs between Developer Edition and regular Firefox? The home-page for the Developer Edition project seems to mostly cite the inclusion of devtools, though these are of course present in the standard version.
Originally it was called the "alpha" build if that wording makes more sense to you. Over the years it's been renamed to "aurora" and now finally "developer". But the gist is that it is an alpha with all that implies. I would not use developer for my daily driver.
I really wish Firefox had the equivalent of Chromium's profile manager instead of having to rely on passing in command line parameters to force the profile selector to appear on start.
Easily selecting an entirely separate profile from within the browser just seems like the right way to handle this from a UX perspective.
I don't know when it appeared, but navigating to about:profiles shows
- Create a New Profile
- a list of the existing profiles
- - for each one of those, a "Launch profile in a New Browser" button for any one that isn't already running
along with "Rename" and "Remove" buttons, so that feels about as full-featured a management screen as one could ask for. The only(?) user-hostile behavior is having to know that about: URL
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.
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.
Does this work? Coworker of mine tried to replace the snap and said that Ubuntu removed the non-snap and installed the snap again. Or does it work because it's beta/dev?
(To add to this: Snap can go and die in the deepest layers of hell. What an awful "we have to be special" piece of 'technology')
Though you'll have to convince Ubuntu to prefer that instead of the snap. It's not hard, certainly easier than installing Debian which is probably still what I should have done. I think I used this guide: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/04/how-to-install-firefox-d...
Though what that doesn't tell you is that the snap install has its own profile folder location. So before you switch to one of the other install variants, note the location in about:support and make a copy of the folder. Running snap remove firefox will actually create a backup of the folder (unless you add --purge, so don't), which really saved my ass.
Or use one of the 500 linux distros out there or build your own.
Linux doesnt force you to use one path. My reply is not meant to sarcastic I am just bringing to your attention that you absolutely have alternatives, because linux is cool - ubuntu included.
Just watch out that Mozilla has disabled updates in these builds so you have to manually download for each new version/security fix.
The normal Firefox releases (except for the unstable alpha/aurora/developer version) don't allow you to edit your extensions without getting permission for each change from Mozilla's security theater automated signing portal.