The one in the repos is laggy. Same thing when I used Linux Mint. The firefox in the official repos is just inferior period. Idk if it’s the way it’s complied or what. For example, I remember having tradingview opened and moving things around was laggy as hell. The slider with the previews on youtube also etc. etc. etc.
The flatpak version is much better, however it has another problem for me when I’m using bluetooth headsets, where when you skip forwards or backwards on a video, it does a little lag/delay thing (or whatever it is) so the video catches up with the sound.
Therefore, the one from the Mozilla site is the best option:
Extract it in ~/.local/firefox-standard
(I call it standard because I also have the dev edition which I don’t recommend cuz it’s beta, and because I don’t want to call it just firefox)
Then create file ~/.local/share/applications/firefox-standard.desktop
Here is mine that you can just copy paste. Replace my username “god” with yours everywhere that has it.
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Firefox Standard
GenericName=Web Browser
Comment=Browse the Web
Exec=/home/god/.local/firefox-standard/firefox %U
Icon=/home/god/.local/firefox-standard/browser/chrome/icons/default/default128.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml;text/mml;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https;application/pdf;
StartupNotify=true
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
Keywords=web;browser;internet;
Actions=new-window;new-private-window;profile-manager-window;
StartupWMClass=firefox
[Desktop Action new-window]
Name=Open a New Window
Exec=/home/god/.local/firefox-standard/firefox --new-window
[Desktop Action new-private-window]
Name=Open a New Private Window
Exec=/home/god/.local/firefox-standard/firefox --private-window
[Desktop Action profile-manager-window]
Name=Open the Profile Manager
Exec=/home/god/.local/firefox-standard/firefox --ProfileManager
Finally run command below so that the browser shows up in settings for default browser.
update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications/
You can also install it systemwide, by unpacking it in /opt/firefox-standard or /usr/local/firefox-standard and replace the paths with the proper ones in that desktop file above, which you will put in /usr/local/share/applications. The update-desktop-database command would change to:
sudo update-desktop-database /usr/local/share/applications/
As for updates, for me they happen automatically in firefox developer and in firefox-standard, it tells me there is a new update, I click download and it applies it on its own. Even without that, all you’d need to if you were to update manually would be to re-download it and extract to the folder it should be in.