autotldr@lemmings.world
on 30 Oct 2023 10:30
nextcollapse
This is the best summary I could come up with:
While Mozilla has always produced Firefox Nightly builds for Linux as traditional binaries, they have finally decided to offer up an APT repository of Firefox Nightly builds to make it easy to stay up-to-date with new Firefox Nightly releases on Debian and Ubuntu Linux based distributions.
Mozilla announced today they have setup an APT repository as an easy option for using Firefox Nightly on Ubuntu/Debian-based platforms.
The Firefox Nightly Debian packages will also see better performance thanks to extra compiler optimizations, additional security hardening with extra security-related compiler flags, and easily stay up-to-date now via the APT package management.
Eventually the packages will become available for Beta, ESR, and release branches of Firefox from this APT repository too.
More details on this long overdue Firefox APT repository via Mozilla.org.
The original article contains 129 words, the summary contains 129 words. Saved 0%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
otl@lemmy.sdf.org
on 30 Oct 2023 10:55
nextcollapse
Good to see development effort going towards actual Firefox and not those random Mozilla products that I can’t keep track of
Do you mean products like their VPN? They really need the revenue to try and become more independent from Google. Right now something like 90% of their income comes from a deal with Google to make Google the default search engine.
They should make a search engine. If Kagi can do it, why can’t Mozilla? Because it would upset Google…
There is no real competition. Google has mozilla in a strangehold and they are fine for mozilla to do privacy stuff, but not fine with them competing for real.
Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space
on 31 Oct 2023 06:30
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They should make a search engine. If Kagi can do it, why can’t Mozilla?
The biggest provider of Kagi’s results is Google. They are unique in that they have their own Tinygem and Teclis indexes to augment results, though. Mozilla could certainly operate a plain Google proxy like Mullvad does with Leta, but I don’t think they’d be making more money out of it than just agreeing to Google’s exclusive terms.
Building a search engine with an independent index is hard. Mojeek has done the best job of it, but you can tell there’s a disparity in result quality even if they’re improving.
Yes I know, but users may pay mozilla for added privacy, just like they are paying Kagi now for privacy and extra features on top of Google.
But you are right, they are still depending on the monster that is Google.
Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space
on 31 Oct 2023 07:01
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I would be interested in seeing Mozilla invest in making Mojeek better. I think they could be a good match. An independent browser engine and an independent search engine. On the other hand, I don’t want Mozilla to acquire them and kill them a few years later. Their short attention span is one quality I wish they hadn’t cribbed from Google.
A search engine is an interesting idea, but:
it needs to be independent. Mozilla can’t be depending on Google or Bing. After Bing got what they wanted, they started choking their proxies by pushing prices up substantially. Depending on Google is a similar folly.
they need to be committed to it. This isn’t some project Mozilla can cook up in three or four years and abandon two years later. It needs to be a long-term strategy with hundreds of millions of dollars invested.
That’s why I think Mojeek could be a shortcut. But either way, I don’t think Mozilla has the bandwidth (or guts, frankly) to commit to this sort of project.
But you are right, they are still depending on the monster that is Google.
And as long as you’re depending on them, you might as well take as much as you can.
pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org
on 30 Oct 2023 11:11
nextcollapse
Would to see them publish stable releases via this apt repository as well.
Following a period of testing, these packages will become available on the beta, esr, and release branches of Firefox.
pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org
on 30 Oct 2023 11:25
nextcollapse
I read that, but I don’t know if that means they will publish stable releases via the same repository. That just sounds like the packages themselves will end up being in those channels (which makes sense, nightly becomes beta, which becomes a release, which ends up as esr). It doesn’t necessarily mean this apt repository will be a release channel itself.
Hehehe. What about RPM users? This fragmentation in Linux packaging robs users of choice.
Would rather have Firefox setup a repository for the nightly channel, after all they official maintain the stable channel on Flathub.
That way everyone benefits from the utility.
TCB13@lemmy.world
on 30 Oct 2023 15:07
nextcollapse
Does it include unique IDs for each installation as well? What snitching to Mozilla every single time you launch the browser and a 3rd party analytics company even after disabling everything that can be disabled via settings and config?
snitching to Mozilla every single time you launch the browser
It’s only for the first run, to track downloads and installations. Pretty much every mobile app on both Android and iOS, and a lot of desktop apps, do the same thing as they want to know how many people install (and uninstall) their app.
It’s also only if you download the installer from the Firefox site, so Linux repos are unaffected.
Dude, fire Wireshark, launch Firefox and then come back here. Just because others do it, doesn’t mean it is decent nor should Mozilla do it and no, its just not once, Firefox is constantly going for their servers for multiple reasons, not all requests include the ID that’s true, but calling 3rd party analytics companies… from a browser… kind of questionable. We all know there are other ways to fingerprint a browser.
Stop believing on the narrative of the all savior Mozilla. They’re full of shit, less than others indeed, but still shit.
All I was saying was that the unique download ID is only used once, not every time you start Firefox. I wasn’t making any other claims as to what other analytics they use.
Having said that, Telemetry is important to making a good product. The developer needs to know about crashes and what causes them (to fix bugs), which features people are using the most and least (to know what to work on and what to potentially deprecate), etc. As long as it’s anonymous, I don’t see a problem in that?
Sure, but a lot of systems don’t actually store it. Even if they do, erasing the last octet (for IPv4) or the last 32 bits (for IPv6) is sufficient to de-identify it.
You can’t guarantee it is isn’t stored somewhere or checked by someone between you and Mozilla and used against you. Even your ISP can use Mozilla’s calling home against you.
OK, but what do you expect companies to do about this? There’s literally no way to browse the web without revealing your IP address. Are you saying that every single company online is collecting PII?
Even just checking for updates (which happens in the background with all modern software) would connect to Mozilla’s servers.
I except things to be kept on a reasonable level and that doesn’t include the amount of connections Firefox does, nor contacting a 3rd party analytics company.
What I also expect is to have simple toggles instead of having to spend half an hour going over advanced config, disable everything that can be disabled and still having it making connections to 3rd parties. Is it that hard to be transparent and make things right?
Telemetry is important to making a good product. The developer needs to know about crashes and what causes them
Telemetry is the new age bullshit excuse and alternative to proper in-house software testing and money cuts. Why hire testers and have public testing programs if you can just deploy to the end users, let it break and then collect logs. You’ll get tons of PII as a bonus :)
ante@lemmy.world
on 31 Oct 2023 14:34
nextcollapse
No amount of in-house testing is going to catch everything that can be experienced on a nearly-infinite amount of hardware/software configurations that are tested once a large userbase gets a hold of a product.
Yeah I guess NASA, Lockheed Martin and Airbus all use analytics for testing instead of actual testing. You seem to be very unware of the current corporate trend of replacing in-house testing by analytics as a cost cutting strategy.
russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net
on 31 Oct 2023 15:32
nextcollapse
I do wonder why billion dollar companies (or in the case of NASA, an organization that AFAIK is still funded directly by the government) can afford to do this.
I’d also argue that extremely rigorous testing is a bit more important in terms of life-or-death scenarios for the companies that you mentioned, rather than Mozilla - but hey, that could just be me.
I mean come on, your comparison might work for a company that can hold a candle to the ones you mentioned (ie, Google or Apple) but how large do you think Mozilla (who still has to take handouts from Google essentially) is? Even then, I’d still say it’s probably a bad comparison given my second point.
Have you ever noticed that when stuff was sold on CDs and internet updates weren’t a thing software was properly tested and mostly bug free while today the end user has to be the beta tester and report bugs / have telemetry?
Software should be approached as engineering not as the shit show it is today.
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 31 Oct 2023 21:03
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tell me you’re not a decent software developer without telling me you’re not a decent software developer
PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 30 Oct 2023 15:52
nextcollapse
Take that Ubuntu and your PPA that use to not drive people to your snap package!
i also don’t like snaps but mozilla said that the official version of firefox on ubuntu is the snap version, so that’s why canonical pushes it on people
PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 31 Oct 2023 19:43
collapse
And you think no money changed hands to make that the official stance? Because that’s the only reason them taking such a stance would ever make sense.
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 31 Oct 2023 21:02
nextcollapse
donate to them and they won’t have to seek funding elsewhere
i agree with you that canonical is all to happy to deliver firefox as a snap, but what evidence do you have? money changing hands is definitely a possibility, but snaps do have advantages over debs.
PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 31 Oct 2023 23:28
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That they would do something against the good of the people, tis all the proof you need.
ok, so i’m not arguing with you because i also don’t like snaps. i’m just asking if you have proof so that i can use that info to make a more convincing argument about why snaps suck
1984@lemmy.today
on 31 Oct 2023 05:51
nextcollapse
Whilst I agree that that’s a nice option to have (more options are usually better!) I’ve come to love the linux way of distribution via repositories. These days I barely use the cli too: GNOME software and KDE’s Discover are great. Perhaps an official nightly flatpak would be best?
dino@discuss.tchncs.de
on 01 Nov 2023 09:54
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Appimage? So we go behave like windows users?
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 31 Oct 2023 21:01
nextcollapse
kinda wish they would put nightly on fdroid too instead of just google play or through the website
threaded - newest
This is the best summary I could come up with:
While Mozilla has always produced Firefox Nightly builds for Linux as traditional binaries, they have finally decided to offer up an APT repository of Firefox Nightly builds to make it easy to stay up-to-date with new Firefox Nightly releases on Debian and Ubuntu Linux based distributions.
Mozilla announced today they have setup an APT repository as an easy option for using Firefox Nightly on Ubuntu/Debian-based platforms.
The Firefox Nightly Debian packages will also see better performance thanks to extra compiler optimizations, additional security hardening with extra security-related compiler flags, and easily stay up-to-date now via the APT package management.
Eventually the packages will become available for Beta, ESR, and release branches of Firefox from this APT repository too.
More details on this long overdue Firefox APT repository via Mozilla.org.
The original article contains 129 words, the summary contains 129 words. Saved 0%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good to see development effort going towards actual Firefox and not those random Mozilla products that I can’t keep track of
Do you mean products like their VPN? They really need the revenue to try and become more independent from Google. Right now something like 90% of their income comes from a deal with Google to make Google the default search engine.
.
I mean, the alternative to the Google deal is to not have money to operate, which isn’t ideal.
Ah yes, in the same way I choose to eat food rather than starve.
.
You seem confused.
.
They should make a search engine. If Kagi can do it, why can’t Mozilla? Because it would upset Google…
There is no real competition. Google has mozilla in a strangehold and they are fine for mozilla to do privacy stuff, but not fine with them competing for real.
The biggest provider of Kagi’s results is Google. They are unique in that they have their own Tinygem and Teclis indexes to augment results, though. Mozilla could certainly operate a plain Google proxy like Mullvad does with Leta, but I don’t think they’d be making more money out of it than just agreeing to Google’s exclusive terms.
Building a search engine with an independent index is hard. Mojeek has done the best job of it, but you can tell there’s a disparity in result quality even if they’re improving.
Yes I know, but users may pay mozilla for added privacy, just like they are paying Kagi now for privacy and extra features on top of Google.
But you are right, they are still depending on the monster that is Google.
I would be interested in seeing Mozilla invest in making Mojeek better. I think they could be a good match. An independent browser engine and an independent search engine. On the other hand, I don’t want Mozilla to acquire them and kill them a few years later. Their short attention span is one quality I wish they hadn’t cribbed from Google.
A search engine is an interesting idea, but:
That’s why I think Mojeek could be a shortcut. But either way, I don’t think Mozilla has the bandwidth (or guts, frankly) to commit to this sort of project.
And as long as you’re depending on them, you might as well take as much as you can.
Would to see them publish stable releases via this apt repository as well.
Looks like that will happen later. From Mozilla’s original article:
I read that, but I don’t know if that means they will publish stable releases via the same repository. That just sounds like the packages themselves will end up being in those channels (which makes sense, nightly becomes beta, which becomes a release, which ends up as esr). It doesn’t necessarily mean this apt repository will be a release channel itself.
That said, there is the Mozilla Team PPA.
Ah yes good point. Fingers crossed.
Brilliant
Deb monoculture is a sick plague
WAT?
I can not make sense of this comment at all. Can you explain what it is you mean?
Ask ChatGPT
He’s complaining that only Debian packages were released, which are compatible with most of popular distros.
I am sure there will be a aur package soon bundling this deb into a arch package. So nothing to worry about (for the good package managers)
Hehehe. What about RPM users? This fragmentation in Linux packaging robs users of choice.
Would rather have Firefox setup a repository for the nightly channel, after all they official maintain the stable channel on Flathub.
That way everyone benefits from the utility.
Does it include unique IDs for each installation as well? What snitching to Mozilla every single time you launch the browser and a 3rd party analytics company even after disabling everything that can be disabled via settings and config?
It’s only for the first run, to track downloads and installations. Pretty much every mobile app on both Android and iOS, and a lot of desktop apps, do the same thing as they want to know how many people install (and uninstall) their app.
It’s also only if you download the installer from the Firefox site, so Linux repos are unaffected.
Dude, fire Wireshark, launch Firefox and then come back here. Just because others do it, doesn’t mean it is decent nor should Mozilla do it and no, its just not once, Firefox is constantly going for their servers for multiple reasons, not all requests include the ID that’s true, but calling 3rd party analytics companies… from a browser… kind of questionable. We all know there are other ways to fingerprint a browser.
Stop believing on the narrative of the all savior Mozilla. They’re full of shit, less than others indeed, but still shit.
All I was saying was that the unique download ID is only used once, not every time you start Firefox. I wasn’t making any other claims as to what other analytics they use.
Having said that, Telemetry is important to making a good product. The developer needs to know about crashes and what causes them (to fix bugs), which features people are using the most and least (to know what to work on and what to potentially deprecate), etc. As long as it’s anonymous, I don’t see a problem in that?
.
.
Sure, but a lot of systems don’t actually store it. Even if they do, erasing the last octet (for IPv4) or the last 32 bits (for IPv6) is sufficient to de-identify it.
You can’t guarantee it is isn’t stored somewhere or checked by someone between you and Mozilla and used against you. Even your ISP can use Mozilla’s calling home against you.
OK, but what do you expect companies to do about this? There’s literally no way to browse the web without revealing your IP address. Are you saying that every single company online is collecting PII?
Even just checking for updates (which happens in the background with all modern software) would connect to Mozilla’s servers.
I except things to be kept on a reasonable level and that doesn’t include the amount of connections Firefox does, nor contacting a 3rd party analytics company.
What I also expect is to have simple toggles instead of having to spend half an hour going over advanced config, disable everything that can be disabled and still having it making connections to 3rd parties. Is it that hard to be transparent and make things right?
Telemetry is the new age bullshit excuse and alternative to proper in-house software testing and money cuts. Why hire testers and have public testing programs if you can just deploy to the end users, let it break and then collect logs. You’ll get tons of PII as a bonus :)
No amount of in-house testing is going to catch everything that can be experienced on a nearly-infinite amount of hardware/software configurations that are tested once a large userbase gets a hold of a product.
Yeah I guess NASA, Lockheed Martin and Airbus all use analytics for testing instead of actual testing. You seem to be very unware of the current corporate trend of replacing in-house testing by analytics as a cost cutting strategy.
I do wonder why billion dollar companies (or in the case of NASA, an organization that AFAIK is still funded directly by the government) can afford to do this.
I’d also argue that extremely rigorous testing is a bit more important in terms of life-or-death scenarios for the companies that you mentioned, rather than Mozilla - but hey, that could just be me.
I mean come on, your comparison might work for a company that can hold a candle to the ones you mentioned (ie, Google or Apple) but how large do you think Mozilla (who still has to take handouts from Google essentially) is? Even then, I’d still say it’s probably a bad comparison given my second point.
Yeah, embedded systems for military applications is exactly the same as consumer software. You’re right.
Have you ever noticed that when stuff was sold on CDs and internet updates weren’t a thing software was properly tested and mostly bug free while today the end user has to be the beta tester and report bugs / have telemetry?
Software should be approached as engineering not as the shit show it is today.
tell me you’re not a decent software developer without telling me you’re not a decent software developer
Take that Ubuntu and your PPA that use to not drive people to your snap package!
i also don’t like snaps but mozilla said that the official version of firefox on ubuntu is the snap version, so that’s why canonical pushes it on people
And you think no money changed hands to make that the official stance? Because that’s the only reason them taking such a stance would ever make sense.
donate to them and they won’t have to seek funding elsewhere
i agree with you that canonical is all to happy to deliver firefox as a snap, but what evidence do you have? money changing hands is definitely a possibility, but snaps do have advantages over debs.
That they would do something against the good of the people, tis all the proof you need.
ok, so i’m not arguing with you because i also don’t like snaps. i’m just asking if you have proof so that i can use that info to make a more convincing argument about why snaps suck
Good :)
After the disaster with colorways, mozilla has picked up the pace and started being sane again.
Sorry for commenting on my own post, won’t happen again.
:)
You don’t even build from source?
What kind of Linux users are you?
Never built Firefox from source but Chromium takes way longer than the kernel for me. Like half an hour on a 5800x3D. Bit much for nightly updates.
It’s called Nightly cause you let it compile over night.
Ok Gentoo Police now go back to ricing
Some day they will offer linux version that you can download from from the website and install without using terminal.
Whilst I agree that that’s a nice option to have (more options are usually better!) I’ve come to love the linux way of distribution via repositories. These days I barely use the cli too: GNOME software and KDE’s Discover are great. Perhaps an official nightly flatpak would be best?
Appimage? So we go behave like windows users?
kinda wish they would put nightly on fdroid too instead of just google play or through the website
Doesn’t Firefox use GCM? I think fdroid doesn’t allow apps that use that
So how many debian packages with firefox are now available? debian sid, stable, testing & firefox nightly?