Install Firefox Nightly Ubuntu

[Manases Yatnalkar]

Everyday, Mozilla developers write code that is merged into a common code repository (mozilla-central) and every day that code is compiled so as to create a pre-release version of Firefox based on this code for testing purposes, this is what we call a Nightly build. Once this code matures, it is merged into the Beta stabilization repository where that code will be polished until we reach a level of quality that allows us to ship a new final version of Firefox to hundreds of millions of people. This development process used to ship a new version of Firefox every 4 weeks is called the Train Model.

Of course, Nightly does not have the polish, quality and stability of the Release channel as this is a work in progress but we are doing our best through automation, QA and community to provide you the best nightly builds possible.

If you are a power-user, that you want to have access to features in developments months or years before they become mainstream, have tolerance for occasional functional regressions and are looking for an easy way to help Mozilla and Firefox development, you should use Nightly (ideally as your main browser but you can also use it alongside Firefox on the release channel or another browser).

Unlike Firefox on the Release channel, Nightly sends by default anonymized usage statistics, called Telemetry which helps us improve Firefox and track regressions on a daily basis. Just using Nightly and sending telemetry data is already of great help to all Mozilla developers as it allows them to get usage statistics on the features they work on.

Of course, Nightly may be more likely to crash than a final release and sending your crashes to our engineers is also of considerable help as it helps us catch instabilities and identify issues long before end-users are exposed to them.

Nightly is available for all the platforms we support officially (Windows 7 and later, MacOS, Linux) and we provide both 32 and 64 bits for Linux and Windows. We also support a large range of languages ranging from Albanian to Vietnamese.

Nightly gets an update twice a day (or night, depending on your timezone), building starts at 10:00 and 22:00 UTC, usually builds are available one hour or two later. That means that there is an update in the morning for The Americas and another one for EMEA/Asia

The update is downloaded in the background, when this is done, there is a small green badge that appears on the hamburger menu which indicates that if you restart your Nightly, an update will be applied.

If you don't apply this update within 12 hours, a dialog box will pop up asking you to do so. If you want this dialog to show up later than 12h, in about:config change the app.update.promptWaitTime value from 43200 to a higher value, 86400 for 24 hours for example.

Sometimes, we will issue more than two updates per day, typically this is because we found out we introduced a major regression (a spike in crashes for example) and we don't want our users to have a broken browser for 24h.

This activity has great potential to make an impact by increasing overall involvement in Nightly, simply by introducing community to tasks that they can engage in related to Nightly. Finding and filing issues early in the cycle means by the time Firefox gets to release, the code is in good shape.

First of all, thank you for doing that! Bugs reported early are also more easy to fix or back out than bugs reported weeks or months after the code was written, simply because developers just wrote it and have all of it fresh in their memory.

Don't hesitate to ask experienced Nightly users (staff or employees) to help you file the bug in the #nightly channel on Matrix if you are unsure about the process or if English is not your native language and want to make sure your bug description is understandable.

Once you have filed the bug, you may get questions from bug triagers (people that enrich existing bug reports with useful metadata and try to get the right dev in front of the right issue) or developers that are trying to reproduce your bug using your configuration or the steps to reproduce what you experienced - watch your mailbox for such messages!

Some websites do not work in Firefox not because of a Firefox bug but because the site is restricting (intentionally or not) their audience to users of a specific browser. This is what we call a Web Compatibility issue. Since these issues can also affect other browsers than Firefox, web compatibility reports are filed in a separate bug tracker at

Firefox does not support downgrades, even though this may have worked in past versions. If you install Firefox Nightly and later downgrade to an earlier version, you may experience issues with Firefox if they share the same profile of data.

Download Firefox Nightly.As for any Mac OS app, open it either from Firefox or by double-clicking it in the folder, then drag and drop the icon into the application folder and you're done for the installation part. For detailed instructions, see here.

You don't have to compile anything, just unarchive the tar.bz2 file into your /home or your /opt folder if you want to make it available to all the accounts on your machine and launch the firefox file from your shell. If you decide to install Firefox Nightly outside of your Home, such as in /opt/firefoxnightly, don't forget to give this folder the same rights as your user otherwise it won't auto-update:

Canonical provides Snap binaries of Firefox and will probably propose also them for Nightly at some point, but this is not yet the case. The tracking bug is Automate generation of Firefox snap packages.

There is an unofficial Firefox Flatpak repository created by the Fedora/RedHat maintainers for testing purposes: -flatpak.mojefedora.cz/With this FlatPak repository, your profile is stored in $HOME/.var/app/org.mozilla.FirefoxNightlyWayland/.mozilla

If Open Source guerrilla community marketing is something you would like to get involved with and Nightly works great for you, maybe you could promote it to other power-users in your personal or professional networks, getting more users across the globe would help us catch more regressions, get more technical feedback and would allow us to ship a better browser.

Some of them are very easy, such as retweeting interesting tweets from our @FirefoxNightly or sharing them on other social networks, some represent more work such as participating to a local open source convention and presenting Nightly or organizing QA activities through Nightly via your local Mozilla community or Mozilla Club.

Note: these commands will download and install the en-US version, if you need a different version, copy and paste the download link from the firefox website into the terminal for the following wget command URL but be sure the URL is within single quote marks when you run the command or the download won't work.

If you're a web developer or power user, you may have heard that you can try out new features in Mozilla Firefox by installing Firefox Nightly. You might worry that you'll have trouble installing or updating it.

A post on Mozilla's Nightly blog announced the .deb repository for Firefox Nightly. It simplifies installation of the nightly build by automatically updating it when a new version releases. It also separates the nightly version from any other versions, such as the stable ESR version of Firefox, included by default in many Linux distros.

I've tried this with 1password, and 1password beta.

I know has a browser authentication failure on firefox-nightly,

and I've tried firefox-trunk (I didn't specifically check the addon logs for trunk),

(using both the 1password addon, and it's beta variant).

Though I'm unsure of the real differences between the firefox versions there.

Hey @RickKraut, we greatly appreciate you bringing this to our attention. I'm glad to hear you were able to get things working on Firefox Nightly by adding firefox-trunk to the custom_allowed_browsers list.

The situation is I must unlock each browser extension or the desktop app independent of all the others, even though the settings in each one are turned on to integrate with each other. In the browsers, I get "Problems connecting. (yellow dot) Please ensure the 1Password app is unlocked." It definitely is, and I've tried all kinds of combinations of turning off, restarting browser, unlocking, turning back on, unlocking in different order, etc. Soon the possible combinations grow beyond what I am willing to sit and try, so there's gotta be a better way to fix or troubleshoot.

As far as I see in the ongoing development for 22.04 Jammy, Firefox is a Snap package.The related Deb package in apt is just a shortcut/link to the that snap version.

Are there alternative ways to install Firefox on Jammy?

My favourite option would be an Apt repository or PPA. I will test the Flatpak version with my test virtual machine in the meantime.

Now, the package firefox is provided by both the Ubuntu repos and the Mozilla PPA. The version provided in the Ubuntu repos is a transitional package that actually installs the Snap version of Firefox behind the scenes, which in this case, we don't want. Check that you can see both firefox packages by running:

To prevent the installation of the Snap version of Firefox through the firefox package provided by Ubuntu, we need to modify this file as root, using gnome-text-editor or whichever text editor you prefer:

This is the result of cooperation and collaboration between the Desktop and Snap teams at Canonical and Mozilla developers, and is the first step towards a deb-to-snap transition that will take place during the 22.04 development cycle.

A lot of volunteers have been testing the Firefox Snap, discovering/filing/fixing bugs since the 21.10 cycle to sand down the rough edges and document the corner-cases. (It's been my daily driver since then)

Use the Snap. The Snap comes from Mozilla upstream, and is designed to be cross-distro and cross-platform. You should not find it "Ubuntu-specific." The Firefox Snap will be included in stock installs of Ubuntu Desktop.

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