Firefox Developer Edition on Ubuntu 16.10 Some great news for fans of distro-agnostic app distribution: Firefox Developer Edition is now available to install as a Flatpak! Yup, the dev-friendly flavour of the venerable open-source browser is available to install messing around with installers, RPMs or unpacking zip files to double-click on. Firefox is the default web browser in a number of Linux distributions and Ubuntu is one of them. Firefox comes preinstalled in Ubuntu unless you are using Ubuntu minimal version. In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to install the latest version of Firefox on Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution.
In this tutorial you will learn how to access the web development tools that are built into every copy of Firefox. You will also learn how to install the Firefox Developer Edition alongside your normal Firefox installation, allowing you to keep development work separate from your normal day-to-day browsing.
What you’ll learn
- How to access the developer tools
- How to use the inspector and console tools
- How to configure the user interface to show the tools you want
- Why you might want to install a second browser for development
- How to install Firefox Developer Edition
What you’ll need
- A computer running Ubuntu 16.04 or above
- The Firefox web browser (installed by default in Ubuntu desktop systems)
Although you don’t need any experience in web development to follow this tutorial, a little knowledge of how a web page is written might make some things a little more understandable. There’s a getting started guide on Mozilla’s web developer site, but if you’re the sort of person that would rather just jump right in and get going you should still be able to complete this tutorial even without that background knowledge. Whichever approach you prefer, there are links on the last page that will help you take your web developer skills to the next level.
Breaking things is easy… but so is fixing them When using the developer tools you can accidentally render a web page unusable in your browser. Don’t worry if you do break something as it will only affect the copy of the page that’s in your local machine’s memory. Just refresh the browser by pressing F5 to reload the page in its original state.
October 14, 2019
Firefox Developer Edition contains features not currently released to the regular version of Firefox. Its main attraction to me is Mozilla’s respect for my privacy and having an additional browser to segregate my life into. I use Firefox for my personal life and Firefox Developer Edition for work related accounts and activity. However, using the Webpack Dev Server I find that Firefox Developer Edition consumes increasing amounts of memory until my machine freezes. Therefore I also use Chrome for development. However, I often turn to Firefox Developer Edition for inspecting pages.
Here is how to install Firefox Developer Edition on Ubuntu. I’m using Ubuntu 18.04 but this same process should work on earlier and later versions.
Get Firefox Developer Edition
- Go to Firefox Developer Edition
- Click the ‘Firefox Developer Edition’ (currently a large blue button)
- Save the file to Downloads
Extract contents if the compressed file
Firefox Developer Edition For Ubuntu Download
Rename extracted folder to firefox-dev and move to /opt
Make a Desktop Entry
Download Firefox Developer Edition For Ubuntu
So that you can launch Firefox Developer Edition by pressing the Super/Windows key and typing ‘firefox’, make a desktop entry in: ~/.local/share/applications/firefox-dev.desktop
Past in the below contents into the file.
Save the file and launch Firefox Developer Edition
References
Technical blog byklequis
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