14 DAY TRIAL // About a month ago, we told you that Red Hat's desktop engineering manager Jiří Eischmann was working on packaging the Mozilla Firefox Developer Edition web browser as a Flatpak for various GNU/Linux distros supporting the sandboxing technology.
Five weeks later, the developer wrote today a new blog post to inform the Linux community that he managed to also package the Firefox Nightly and Firefox Wayland builds as Flatpak packages for distribution on Fedora 25 and Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating systems, as well as other OSes that offer Flatpak support, of course.
"With Nightly, you can closely follow the development of Firefox. Due to Flatpak you can easily install it and keep getting daily updates via our flatpak repo. As a bonus, we’re also bringing a Firefox build that runs natively on Wayland," said Jiří Eischmann. "This way, you can install and run multiple variants in parallel."
Firefox Wayland is very experimental
The developer warns those who want to use the Wayland build of Firefox Nightly that it's very experimental and it could crash quite often. Also, you should know that you need to run the next-generation Wayland display server (not X11) on your GNU/Linux distribution before even attempting to install the Flatpak.
It also looks like the copy/paste functionality is missing from the Firefox Wayland build, so treat it like an early development version. However, when the final release of the Mozilla Firefox for Wayland sees the light of day, it will be a huge step in security for Firefox on Linux because Wayland isolates the input and output of every app.
If you're still not a Flatpak believer, nor a Snap or AppImage one, you should at least be aware of the fact that using these universal binary formats, you can run multiple versions of an application simultaneously. In this case, you can have Firefox Developer Edition, Firefox Nightly, and the standard Firefox web browser at your fingerprints.
Detailed installation instructions are provided at https://firefox-flatpak.mojefedora.cz.