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
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?
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
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. 🙂
