14 DAY TRIAL // Red Hat's desktop engineering manager Jiří Eischmann proudly announced today, January 5, 2017, the general availability of Mozilla's Firefox Developer Edition web browser as a Flatpak package for various Linux distros supporting the technology.
According to the developer, whose team is responsible for the RPM packages of Mozilla Firefox for Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating systems, the most requested thing by users was a Flatpak package, which is a universal binary format allowing application developers to distribute their apps across multiple Linux OSes.
"Our team maintains Firefox RPMs for Fedora and RHEL and a lot of people have been asking us to provide Firefox for Flatpak as well. I’m finally happy to announce Firefox Developer Edition for Flatpak," said Jiří Eischmann. "We’ve tested the FDE flatpak on Fedora 25, OpenSuSE Tumbleweed, and Ubuntu 16.10."
Not sandboxed, Firefox Developer Edition has full access to user’s home
While currently ditching the standard Firefox web browser as a Flatpak because it doesn't bring a lot of benefit at the moment, they created a testing, unofficial Flatpak for the Developer Edition, which is not all that accessible to most Fedora Linux users. The Flatpak is built on Red Hat's internal build cluster and available at https://firefox-flatpak.mojefedora.cz/.
As you can see from the screenshot gallery below, the Firefox Developer Edition was successfully tested on the Fedora 25, Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), and openSUSE Tumbleweed distributions. However, before getting excited and installing it, you should be aware of the fact that it's currently not sandboxed.
This means that the web browser will have full access to your Home directory, which might compromise your system's integrity. They're working on a sandboxed version of the Flatpak for Firefox as we speak, but they need your help. If you want to test it, you'll need Flatpak 0.6.13 or later installed on your distribution.
