Mozilla Firefox 122 Is Now Available for Download, Here’s What’s New
For Linux users, Firefox 122 looks like will finally ship with a DEB package for Debian-based distributions, such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc., that don’t want to use Firefox in a containerized bundle like Snap or Flatpak.
For example, Linux Mint devs didn’t want to ship Ubuntu’s Firefox Snap so they had to create their own DEB package. With the official Firefox DEB package created by Mozilla, they won’t have to maintain yet another app.
OMG Ubuntu:
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Firefox 122 Released with Official Deb for Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc
Yes: there’s now an official Firefox Deb package for Debian-based distros, including Ubuntu. This gives users a safe, reliable way to get the latest version of their browser should they (for whatever reason) not want to use a repo build, Snap, Flatpak, PPA, etc.
Last year Mozilla launched their own dedicated apt repo to make it easier for Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc users to install Firefox Nightly builds and, more recently, Developer Edition and Beta versions. Then adding a stable build feels like a logical end point to the effort.
Does this mean Ubuntu users shouldn’t use the Firefox Snap?
How-To Geek:
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Firefox 122 Has Better Search Results and New Linux Packages
Mozilla is still pumping out new Firefox update at a rapid pace, and right on schedule, Firefox 122 is starting to roll out to desktop and mobile platforms today.
The most significant change in Firefox 122 might be images and descriptions for search suggestions, similiar to what Google Chrome and Safari have supported for a few years now. The more detailed search suggestions can help you figure out if a given result is the right one, but Mozilla notes it only works "when provided by the search engine." It seems like Google might be the only supported search engine—it didn't work for me with Bing, DuckDuckGo, or Wikipedia set as the default search.
LWN:
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Firefox 122.0 released
Version 122.0 of the Firefox browser it out. Changes include improved search suggestions, improvements to the in-browser translation feature, better line-breaking compatibility, and a shiny new .deb package.
Linux Magazine:
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Firefox 122 Release Includes Official DEB for Ubuntu Distros
Firefox 122 has arrived and, to the relief of many Debian and Ubuntu users, it comes with an official DEB installer.
With this release, you can now install Firefox via .deb, Snap, Flatpak, or run it from source. To install Firefox via DEB, you'll need to follow the instructions found on this support page.
According to Mozilla, the benefits of installing via DEB include native packaging can do some things the sandboxed version can't, they are 100% built and supported by Mozilla, compiler-based optimizations for improved performance, and faster updates.
Even with these benefits, Mozilla still recommends using the Firefox provided by their distribution's package manager.
The Register:
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Firefox 122 gets even more competitive with Chrome on translation
The latest Firefox has a raft of modest but desirable improvements for everyone, and a more significant change, external to the app itself, that will be helpful for most Linux users.
Firefox 122 is not an especially big release, but the tweaks within the browser itself are all good. The more important shift is not part of the program itself at all: it's in how it's packaged, but it marks a quite sigificant change that will affect the majority of Linux users, where Firefox is the default browser in almost every distribution.
Some more:
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Mozilla releases version 122 of the Firefox browser with support for passkeys
Mozilla Firefox version 122 is now available for Windows, macOS and Linux. In addition to several security fixes, users can look forward to new features, including support for passkeys.
Now on POWER::
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The Talospace Project: Firefox 122 on POWER
Right now during our relocation I'm not always in the same ZIP code as my T2, but we've still got to keep it up to date. To that end Firefox 122 is out with some UI improvements and new Web platform support. A number of changes have occurred between Fx121 and Fx122 which improve our situation in OpenPOWER world, most notably being we no longer need to drag our WebRTC build changes around (and/or you can remove --disable-webrtc in your .mozconfig).