Firefox Developer Edition flatpak

[sonny]

Please make the Firefox Developer Edition available as a flatpak on flathub.

[R0rspaws_moz]

I Realy Want This On My Steam Deck

[romulasry]

All editions on flathub would be great.

[ffffff]

I go to great lengths to keep my $HOME directory clean, so I wish it was possible to avoid littering it with ".mozilla". Installing Firefox as a flatpak solves that issue for the stable version, but there's no Developer, nor Nightly flatpak. Really hope we get those, one day.

[kxra]

Sadly, there hasn't been an update on the bugzilla ticket in years.

The only blocking bug is "[flatpak] runme.sh should allow to use custom app id for other release branches"

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1633361

and it appears stalled until a new person takes it up

[Ponda]

Please let me test new features please?

[KhalidD]

We need this!

[JorgeO3]

We need this

[tilwiti]

Hello, @Jon! Good to see you here again.
Please clarify the status of this idea. It's quite an essential feature for those who are on Linux and would like to help Firefox regardless of the distribution.
I appreciate any help you can provide.

[nullptr]

Installation is a roadbump for many devs. If firefox is serious about market share, they need to offer a fast way for devs to install their tools and test it.

I can understand maintenance is an issue, so a flatpak seems like a good middle ground over having deb+rpm+arch repos.

I had the time and patience now, but I don't think I'm going to spend the time to download a tar and update it next time. Sorry, I'll just use my installed chromium the next time.

[kxra]

Also crosslinking discussions from Mozilla discourse

https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/flatpak-developer-edition/126782/2

as well as Flathub's

https://discourse.flathub.org/t/firefox-developer-edition-flatpak/1395/4

[2mustange]

So does Bug 1623591 indicate that this item will be developed at some point?

[Anonymous]

Hope that all versions will be available to install as flatpaks soon.

[mununki]

We all need this.

[kxra]

There are now some different blockers listed which make more sense. It is actually due to an upstream problem with Flatpak only allowing one additional channel (`beta`), per application, and the ticket to resolve this was closed as 'Not planned':

https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/4192

There is a proposal to use per-branch app id’s, but a better idea IMHO is what I proposed in the comments there:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1633361#c9

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Since there are actually four channels (Stable, Beta, Developer, and Nightly), and beta is already the official Flathub ‘beta’ channel for Firefox main, what if we instead just released Firefox Developer Edition on Flathub, with Nightly as the so-called ‘beta’ channel for it? This makes sense because Dev edition is based on beta, and nightly a version ahead of it.

It also has the benefit of exposing the stable edition for most users, and the developer edition for developers, while making the least stable versions not as prominently advertised to general audiences.

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