Firefox Nightly as a daily driver
I've got a soft spot for Firefox and it's always been my browser of choice. Recently however, I've been using Google Chrome as I was experiencing issues with Firefox's hardware acceleration and my system's NVIDIA driver under Debian. The issue was causing my system to completely lockup and the only way to recover was to hold my finger on the power button and wait for the system to switch off.
I should really have attempted to debug the issue, but the lockups would happen a couple of times during my working day and I was under a deadline to get some actual work done, so I simply installed Chrome and got on with it.
I've since stopped using that system with its NVIDIA hardware and I'm now using a Lenovo T14s with an Intel Iris X GPU, so I think it's time to switch back to using Firefox.
Interestingly, since I stopped using Firefox and began using Chrome, Mozilla have set-up a new Debian package repository deploying Firefox Nightly. So that's what I'm going to be using as my daily driver.
I normally download the Firefox binary from Mozilla and create my own .desktop file, so I think it's fab that Mozilla have set-up this new repository. The install script for Firefox Nightly:
#!/usr/bin/bash
# Create a directory to store APT repository keys if it doesn't exist:
sudo install -d -m 0755 /etc/apt/keyrings
# Import the Mozilla APT repository signing key:
wget -q https://packages.mozilla.org/apt/repo-signing-key.gpg -O- | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/packages.mozilla.org.asc > /dev/null
# The fingerprint should be 35BAA0B33E9EB396F59CA838C0BA5CE6DC6315A3
gpg -n -q --import --import-options import-show /etc/apt/keyrings/packages.mozilla.org.asc | awk '/pub/{getline; gsub(/^ +| +$/,""); print "\n"$0"\n"}'
# Next, add the Mozilla APT repository to your sources list:
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/packages.mozilla.org.asc] https://packages.mozilla.org/apt mozilla main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mozilla.list > /dev/null
# Update your package list and install the Firefox Nightly .deb package:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install firefox-nightly
exit
I believe that it's really important to support and use Firefox. Not only do I think that Mozilla understand/support user's privacy more than Google, but I also think it's important for the health of the web that more than one option exists when it comes to rendering engines. Also, it's a really good web browser.