Mozilla makes Firefox Beta available on Flathub

I’m glad to see that Mozilla has made a significant process with offering Firefox as a flatpak. Having Firefox as a flatpak was one of our long-term goals.

Three years ago we started a testing flatpak repo with Firefox Developer Edition and soon after that we added Firefox Nightly. For a long time it was the only source of Firefox for Flatpak out there. The user base grew into thousands, a level our hosting could barely deal with. Lately we haven’t had much time for its maintenance and at least the nightly builds were often broken.

That’s why from the very beginning we worked with Mozilla to make official Firefox builds available as flatpaks. The effort was later on picked up by Endless.

Now it brings first fruits, Mozilla is already shipping Firefox Beta in the beta channel on Flathub. You just need to enable it by installing this file: https://flathub.org/beta-repo/appstream/org.mozilla.firefox.flatpakref

I think it may already be useful for Silverblue users who have relied on our testing repo if they didn’t want to use package overlay.

There are still a few things to polish before making the stable Firefox available in the stable channel. One of them is localization files which has always been a difficult thing with Firefox. Mozilla has traditionally provided official localized builds for each language. This is not how localizations are typically handled in Flatpak or even in Linux distro packages.

For Fedora Firefox RPM we had to write a script that on startup automatically loads a particular localization file in the form of an addon. I suppose the official Firefox flatpak will work in a similar way.

Last year we also started providing Firefox flatpak built from Fedora packages. That has been the only stable Firefox for Flatpak around. And even after Mozilla releases their official Firefox for Flatpak, we will stay committed to it because there is demand among Fedora users for Firefox that is verified and built by the Fedora Project and it’s also a requirement for software included in Fedora anyway. So if we want to have Firefox as a default, pre-installed browser e.g. in Silverblue we’ll have to build the flatpak ourselves. It also gives us flexibility to ship crucial fixes and features important to our users faster than upstream (e.g. Firefox in Fedora already runs natively on Wayland by default, not on XWayland like upstream Firefox).

In the future, users will have a choice. They can either stick with the default Firefox provided by us, or switch to the one provided directly by Mozilla in a more convenient and secure way than the current tarballs with binaries are. We will also keep maintaining our testing repo for those who are interested in Nightly and Developer Edition. And we’ll see if there is sufficient interest in it to continue.