Mozilla Firefox Switches To .tar.xz For Linux Packaging

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mozilla Firefox Switches To .tar.xz For Linux Packaging

It's not any shiny new web browser feature but Mozilla announced they are moving from .tar.bz2 packages for their Firefox Linux binaries over to using .tar.xz for a faster and lighter experience...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mozilla-Firefox-Linux-Tar-XZ

[ahrs]

Why not Zstd? It should have the same compression benefits but much faster decompression speeds.

EDIT:

they noted they are using XZ compression rather than Zstandard (Zstd) due to .tar.xz being more widely supported across Linix systems and for better compression.

I glossed over this.

Is there a distro not on this list that matters?

https://i.imgur.com/6OhjZZx.png

https://repology.org/project/zstd

[avis]

Guess who filed the bug report

Actually I wanted them to switch to ZSTD but they ultimately decided to stick to XZ for the reasons mentioned in the article.

Why not Zstd? It should have the same compression benefits but much faster decompression speeds.

Mozilla is just being conservative.

[ahrs]

Mozilla is just being conservative.

Conservative for what reason is what I'm trying to figure out? Are you somebody that is not Debian, Ubuntu, Suse, Arch, Red Hat, etc, that does not have Zstd and also has a lot of users? Because all of those distros have it. Compatibility wise it should be on par with Xz. Maybe Mozilla knows something I don't though.

[pkese]

Why not Zstd? It should have the same compression benefits but much faster decompression speeds.

For one time software downloads, the size of the file is more important for cumulative software update time (download+decompress+install) than just decompression speed.

[Anux]

Whoever names a distro (from 2024) without zstd support wins.

Well what else is there to say, Mozilla being Mozilla I guess.

[jabl]

Guess who filed the bug report

Jia Tan, is that you?

[avis]

Jia Tan, is that you?

I'd be glad to be so famous. Sadly, only known among a handful of Linux fans.

[filbo]

Let's look at some actual data.
I took the data.tar.xz out of my system's recent Firefox update package and recompressed it with a few compressors I'm familiar with.

Running `xz` with no flags produced a file identical to the one out of the .deb I started with, so I know that's what was used.

`zstd` with no flags was fast -- but the output was huge. I ran it with `-19` and then even `--ultra -22`, and the outputs were still significantly larger than `xz`, while also much slower. `lrzip` with no flags was comparable to `xz`. `xz -9e` was much slower, for a ~3% gain in file size. `lrzip -z` gained another 4% file size and was only twice as slow (still vastly faster than `zstd`) -- but decompression took just as long. And `lrzip` was using all cores; installs based on it would leave the system rather hot!

Table sorted by output size. Sorry, don't know how to format it better.

Compressor T-z T-u size
lrzip -z ......... 34 36 64228419
xz -9e ......... 106 2.0 67272804
xz ................ 17 0.5 69250616
lrzip ............ 17 1.6 69879595
zstd -22 .... 147 0.4 72142410
zstd -19 .... 125 0.5 74016120
bzip2 ......... 15 7.0 84933534
zstd ............. 1 0.4 93623216

`xz` definitely has the best balance of size, compression time, and decompression time in this list. `zstd` had a poor showing and would not appear in further rounds of testing if I were working on this issue.

[Volta]

`xz` definitely has the best balance of size, compression time, and decompression time in this list. `zstd` had a poor showing and would not appear in further rounds of testing if I were working on this issue.

It's also the only one that was compromised and it's under maintained.