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
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?
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?
But it makes finding a properly functioning official package more difficult for newer users, and really the etc. was superfluous. You only really need .deb, .rpm, and whatever arch uses. There is a flatpak, but it doesn’t work properly.
I think, you’ve answered your own question? There’s a lot of different formats for Linux. Getting them all correct and working on the different distributions is significantly trickier than just bundling a self-contained archive.
Having said that, they do actually provide a DEB repo since a few months ago: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w_install-firefox-deb-package-for-debian-based-distributions-recommended
They officially publish the snap, the flatpak and a deb in an apt repo.
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. 🙂
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.
