Yes, use the format that was almost backdoored a few months ago! I’m sure it has a very strong development team behind it! /s
I would call it the format that has the most eyes on it now.
My point is that it had an overworked maintainer who was easily persuaded into giving the project to someone else. I highly doubt it has gotten a solid team behind it now.
It wasn’t “easy” at all, they had to put in over 2 years of useful contributions before there was chance to insert the malware. If you’re worried just stay on an older version, it should still open new files perfectly fine.
What? More compression?
Here I am wondering why in 2024 we don’t have the option to automatically decompress downloaded files like Apple users supposedly can.
Ahh well, I guess that’s why these designers don’t work for apple. They’re not good enough.
Who’s not using a package manager? Except for LFS, for which you should compile it yourself.
I highly suggests all Ubuntu users to use the vanilla Firefox version downloaded from Mozilla. It’s way better because it’s not a Snap package.
On Ubuntu I use the tar.bz2 version to not have to deal with snaps or extra repositories. Also on Debian Stable to get the latest version.
I use the flatpak on Fedora but have used the tar version in the past because the package managed version is hijacked with stupid Redhat bookmarks and homepage that loves to return after being removed randomly.
Most normal users do not do this. But there might be special packages with special setups, like scripts downloading and installing from Mozillas download links. Or package creators themselves might use it. Or maybe you are a developer, in which case such direct downloads would be helpful for testing and comparing stuff. I also assume most people do not care or notice any difference with this change. Still its an improvement without much drawback and thats always good, even if its only a few people benefiting of it.
Yeah, particularly for downloading Firefox Nightly, these self-contained archives are extremely helpful.
NixOS packaging pipeline will benefit from this
The .tar.xz format decompresses more than twice as fast as .tar.bz2, allowing you to get up and running in no time
$ time tar xjf firefox-134.0b3.tar.bz2 real 0m9.045s user 0m8.839s sys 0m0.450s $ time tar xJf firefox-135.0a1.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.xz real 0m4.903s user 0m4.677s sys 0m0.510sNice! Presumably it’d be twice as fast if disk was infinitely fast or something. Unfortunately by testing this I’ve already used up a hundred times more time than I’ll ever save as a result of it.
Wow, they are going to zip it with a different algo. That’s fucking amazing!
Faster installation, I don’t know what I will do with all that extra time!
Plus, faster downloads, that’s even more free time.
Mozilla really know how to innovate.
Best company evvvvaaarrr
It’s a little boring but not bad news. Why the hate?!
Give 2 millions bonus to that CEO!
Well, now you mention it, the motivation here may be to reduce their bandwidth costs? Probably not 2 million, but every € counts…
Why do they not just ship normal packages (.deb, .rpm, etc.) or an official flatpak that functions properly?
The Flatpak is official.
I think the “etc” shows how f***ed up it might be to package for every single distro. Releasing a tar with no extra bloat and letting each community doing its own things over it is probably one of the best approaches?
🤷
Fixing their damn sandbox would be something truly useful.
Implementing a fork server so Flatpak AND Android Firefox can stop being fucking insecure for no reason.
Interesting, I always assumed they would be using a pretty optimal algorithm with their
.tar.bz2format, because they obviously benefit quite a bit from smaller downloads. Good to know that.tar.xzis actually better.XZ is quite slow for compression when single threaded. When run in parallel it uses a significant amount of RAM. It creates some of the smallest files and is fast to decompress compared to other well-compressed alternatives.
Source: https://linuxreviews.org/Comparison_of_Compression_Algorithms
Thanks. 🙂
