Safest way to get current Firefox on Leap?

[holden87]

Hi,

Could anyone tell me what would be the safest and recommended way to get current Firefox on Leap?

Thanks!

[hcvv]

Maybe not to much on-topic, but you choose LEAP 42.3 as your title prefix and your signature says "Running openSUSE Leap 42.2".

A bit confusing

[holden87]

Fixed Thanks!

[hcvv]

Fixed Thanks!

Fine.

You are aware of the fact that now all your old posts about earlier versions of openSUSE show Leap 42.3 in your signature?

[hcvv]

BTW, you may want to explain what you mean with the current version of Firefox.
I would say that the current version of Firefox for Leap 42.3 is the one offered in the official Leap 42.3 non-OSS repository and the belonging Update repository. But it is so obvious to install that (and it is probably already done at installation and updated with your regular YOU or zypper patch), that I guess you mean something different.

[nrickert]

Could anyone tell me what would be the safest and recommended way to get current Firefox on Leap?

As far as I know, I am running current firefox on Leap.

Specifically, I am running firefox-esr 52.5.2. And, as far as I know, that is current.

I assume you are really asking about the non-esr release. I have temporarily enabled the mozilla repo

 http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/mozilla/openSUSE_Leap_42.3/

I'll note that firefox 57.0.1-3.1 is available in that repo. However, I've decided to stick with the "esr" version for now. So I can't report experience with installing 57.0.3. For now, I'm disabling that mozilla repo.

There's a similar mozilla repo for Tumbleweed. When I last checked, that did have the firefox-esr version available. However, for now, my practice is to only run "firefox" on Leap, though I have experimented with the 57.0* version in a VM.

[dcurtisfra]

I'll note that firefox 57.0.1-3.1 is available in that repo. However, I've decided to stick with the "esr" version for now. So I can't report experience with installing 57.0.3. For now, I'm disabling that mozilla repo.

I did a short Firefox version 57 "install and see" on a Leap 42.3 system -- to be perfectly honest, from my view of the world, it didn't perform as well as the default "ESR" version and, wasn't quite the same as Firefox "latest" (version 57) on Redmond systems.

I have noticed that, the Mozilla Firefox folks are planning to offer version 59 as an "ESR" version -- which I suspect means that, for happy Firefox browsing we should be patient and wait . . .

[I_A]

as nrickert said you can get Firefox 57 from the mozilla repo
you should do a full vendor change to that repo (if you already have firefox installed)
the only issue I found is with a java package so be careful or java might get uninstalled the solution is to ignore the java dependencies as java support has been removed from Firefox 57
the easiest way to get Quantum on 42.3 LEAP would be

zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/mozilla/openSUSE_Leap_42.3/ mozilla
zypper dup --from mozilla

when you get a warning regarding java headless chose ignore dependencies as the other 2 options would be to remove java or to keep Firefox-esr
I'll say it again Quantum does not have java support so ignoring java dependencies has no issues on either Firefox or java

ps.
I did some tests on my old system and Firefox quantum did preform only slightly better then ESR so I'm not sure the addon loss is worth the speed gain
the people behind PaleMoon forked Firefox 55 and are offering a browser based on pre-Quantum Firefox code they're calling their new browser Basilisk they do have a static Linux build but it's in a tar ball no rpm package
http://basilisk-browser.org/
it does have a build-in update capability and should go in your home dir and while it's profile format is based on FF55 it does not use your Firefox profile dir so you can have both Quantum and a pre-Quantum based browser running in your system
you can copy your Firefox profile in your Basilisk profile dir or use Firefox sync and sync-up both browsers so you can share your bookmarks and logons

[I_A]

I should add that you can get Quantum as a binary blob from Mozilla
https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/.../linux-x86_64/
and unpack it somewhere in your $HOME but the mozilla build lacks opensuse's kde integration and the profile format used in esr changed and is not compatable with quantum and as mozilla's build will upgrade and use your current profile from ~/.mozilla you will experience issues with ESR so you can't run both ESR and Quantum on the same device the only way arround this would be to use multiple profile folders (using the -p switch) or use Basilisk instead of ESR as it will use a different profile dir

[karlmistelberger]

1. Download from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
2. Unpack: cd /home/karl/Downloads; tar xfv firefox-57.0.2.tar.bz2
3. Close installed Firefox
4. Invoke: /home/karl/Downloads/firefox/firefox
5. If not satisfied revert to installed version
6. If OK modify your program starter: Properties > Application > Command: /home/karl/Downloads/firefox/firefox %u