fetchfox

Because life is too short to manually install Firefox

Fetchfox is a command line tool that helps you to download and install a binary copy of Mozilla Firefox to your Linux desktop. It uses official binary builds provided and hosted by Mozilla.

How does it work?

Fetchfox talks to Mozilla product API to determine the latest Firefox version available - it then downloads said version and extracts it in ~/.local/share/fetchfox directory. Fetchfox then creates a .desktop entry in /.local/share/applications to make your local installation visible to your desktop environment.

Fetchfox does not change your system and does not require root privileges - all files are stored in your home directory.

You can also install a specific version of Firefox instead of using the latest one using --pin argument and providing a specific version to install.

It is possible to install multiple Firefox release branches, for example, the latest stable and developer edition concurrently. However, you can only have one version of each branch at any given time.

Installation

sudo pip3 install fetchfox

Usage

fetchfox [-h] [--locale LOCALE] [--arch ARCH] [--pin PIN] [--force] version

Positional arguments

release

Release branch to install - stable, dev, devedition, esr or nightly.

Optional arguments

--locale LOCALE

Locale build of Firefox to download. Defaults to en-US.

--arch ARCH

Build architecture to install. linux for Linux i686, linux64 for Linux x86_64. Defaults to linux64.

--pin PIN

A specific version of Firefox to download, for example 78.0.2. By default will determine the latest available version using Mozilla Product API.

--force

Force (re)install, even if there is a locally installed instance with the same version.

External dependencies and compatibility

Fetchfox is not a package manager and does not manage external dependencies, and does not verify if your environment can run version of Firefox installed by the Fetchfox. It simply automates the download and installation steps to use a binary build already provided by Mozilla.

Fetchfox is developed and tested on Debian Stable.

License

Licensed under terms and conditions of Apache 2.0 license.

Not affiliated to Mozilla Corporation in any way. Mozilla, Firefox - trademarks of Mozilla Corporation.