Install Firefox Developer Edition alongside the default firefox ESR on Debian and update it with a simple bash script coupled with a bash alias.

Make sure the wget dependencie is installed on your machine. Log yourself using your root password first.

$ su -
$ apt update && apt install wget

Clone or download this repo.

Copy the ffdeved-updater to the local sbin folder as root

$ su - -c "cp /path/to/ffdeved-updater /usr/local/sbin"

Make an alias into your user .bash_aliases file

touch .bash_aliases
echo 'alias ffdevupdate="su - -c ffdeved-updater"' >> .bashrc_aliases

If you use something else like zsh put it in your .zshrc or whatever alias file you use. I have setup mine to be called .aliases and shared beetween bash, zsh & others.

Restart your terminal or source the file for immediate effect.

$ source ~/.bashrc

Replace with .zshrc if you use zsh.

Run the program to download and install firefox.

$ ffdevupdate

Firefox Developer Edition is now installed on your machine.

Make a symbolic link of the Firefox Developer Edition binary into the /usr/local/bin directory.

$ ln -s /usr/local/src/firefox/firefox /usr/local/bin/firefox-dev

You should now be able to start Firefox Developer Edition from the command line using the command firefox-dev.

Add Firefox Dev Edition to your desktop environement (use root).

$ su - -c "cp /path/to/firefox-dev-edition.desktop /usr/share/applications/firefox-dev-edition.desktop"

Verify that Firefox Developer Edition is now installed and listed in your Desktop Environement alongside the default Firefox ESR.

Whenever Firefox Developer Edition warns you about an update use your alias command as a regular user to update. Don't forget your root password !

$ ffdevupdate

Bonus trick: type ff press tab and enter to update Firefox like the hackerman you are.

Go into the /usr/local/src directory by default to Download the latest Firefox Dev Edition build with wget and name it firefoxdev-latest.tar.bz2. Finally Decompress the archive with tar in a folder called firefox.

Git pull and move the file again to the local sbin folder again. If you download the repo without git check here from times to times if this code as been updated

$ su - && cp /path/to/ffdeved-updater /usr/local/sbin