Mozilla Launches Firefox Nightly RPMs for Linux Users

If you can't wait to get the bleeding-edge version of Firefox, we have good news. Mozilla is offering native RPM packages of Firefox Nightly for Linux distros in the greater Red Hat and SUSE families. Mozilla's Firefox remains the dominant browser in the worlds of Linux and the BSDs – and now the company has started offering native RPM packages of the development version, known as Firefox Nightly. This makes it easy to install Firefox directly from Mozilla onto distros that use RPM packages, including the Red Hat, SUSE, and Mandriva families. While Mozilla has traditionally offered native Linux binaries for Firefox, until recently, it delivered them in the form of a tarball. In other words, this is the Unix equivalent of a Zip file, which you must manually uncompress somewhere and run, as opposed to packaged software that can be installed or removed with any particular distro's packaging tools. Tarballs have a number of drawbacks compared to native packages, not least that their use requires more Linux competence than many a container-slinging Kubernetes contraption-captain can muster. Tarballs work, but because they are not managed by the OS's package manager, they won't get automatically updated along with the rest of the OS – although in our testing, Firefox and its many offshoots are adept at automatically upgrading themselves when installed this way, as is normal for macOS applications. Conversely, native RPM packages have several advantages. They integrate with the OS, so apps appear in app launchers, with the proper icons. It's easier to set them as the default too (we reported on a related issue in Debian way back in 2021.) This will be welcome in some quarters. The big enterprise vendors seem to be pulling away from the desktop and workstation Linux market slightly. One sign of this was when Red Hat stopped packaging LibreOffice for RHEL 10. It's not alone: SUSE announced SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 last October, but neglected to mention that this doesn't include a corresponding version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. SUSE's evaluation downloads page maxes out at SLED 15 SP7. Just the Browser claims to tame the bloat without forking Waterfox browser goes AI-free, targets the Firefox faithful Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up Mozilla takes pity on Firefox extension developers Mozilla's packages will make life a little easier if you're running one of the free RHELatives, and other less-related distros too. When the CentOS team announced the inclusion of Firefox ESR packages at CentOS Connect last year, it was met with applause. Now, something newer than the Extended Support Release will be easier. The same packages should also work on Alma Linux and Rocky Linux. There are other RPM-based distro families out there other than Red Hat and CentOS. This vulture ran openSUSE as his daily driver for four years, and, in our experience then, if there was no native openSUSE RPM package of something, the chances of a Fedora package working fine were quite high. This is not an unexpected move: Mozilla started offering Debian packages of Firefox Nightly in October 2023, launching an online APT package repository, ahead of Firefox 122's release almost two years ago. This time, Mozilla launched the binary and the repo at the same time. We will not be surprised if RPM packages of official releases follow not far behind the developer-focused Nightly builds – and probably of subsidiary MZLA's Thunderbird messaging client, as well.