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Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Available To Download; Mozilla To Offer 0-Day Firefox Releases Via Snaps
Reader prisoninmate writes: The latest, and hopefully, the greatest version of Ubuntu is now available to download. On the sidelines, Mozilla today announced the availability of future releases of its popular Firefox web browser in the snap package format for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Earlier today, Canonical unleashed the final release of the highly anticipated Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, bringing users a great set of new features and improvements. Also today, it looks like Canonical has renewed its partnership with Mozilla to offer Firefox as the default web browser on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and upcoming releases of the Linux kernel-based operating systems. As part of the new partnership, Mozilla is committed to distributing future versions of Firefox as a snap package. Having Firefox distributed in the snap format means that you'll have 0-day releases in Ubuntu 16.04. Yes, just like Windows and Mac OS X, users are enjoying their 0-day releases of Mozilla Firefox and don't have to wait for package maintainers of a particular GNU/Linux distribution to update the software in the main repositories. For Mozilla, having Firefox as a snap package means that they'll be able to continually optimize it for Ubuntu.
The constant usage of "zero-day" is annoying enough already without taking it and applying it to something completely different.
Unless literally Mozilla is going to release builds of Firefox to exploit unpatched vulnerabilities in Ubuntu...
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
The problem with this announcement is that Firefox where already available in the Ubuntu repositories practically at the same day that they released binaries for Windows and OS X. A long long time ago Firefox where frozen just like the rest of the software but since then you got the newest version even if you used 12.04LTS so this only means that Mozilla will now do what Ubuntu have been doing but with a snap instead of a .deb
It's a regression, and a bad one. You can push 0-day updates via the standard ubuntu/debian package repository. Firefox doesn't even really have that many dependencies (it has an amazing amount of shit compiled into it. libjpeg, libpng, gzip..it links to the system libraries for almost nothing). This is for stability, but it also increases the risk of security holes quite a bit. A researcher at RMIT did a talk at Ruxcon one real about tools he wrote to scan manjor software projects to find vulnerable versions of embedded libraries.
In any case, snappy are a regression. Linux package management was always way superior to Android/Apple monolithic self contained apps. Linux now has svchost (systemd) and monolithic packages (snappy). How else can we fuck it up even more?