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.

Mozilla is transitioning their Linux package builds from .tar.bz2 to .tar.xz for producing smaller downloads, faster installations with speedier decompression, greater compatibility across Linux distributions, and an overall efficiency win.

In announcing their decision to use .tar.xz for their Linux package builds moving forward, 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.

Switching up their packaging format stems from a four year old bug report that suggested moving away from the Bzip2 packages to XZ (or Zstd) for greater compression and related benefits. More details on Firefox moving to .tar.xz can be found via this Mozilla nightly blog post.

This .tar.xz Linux packaging of Firefox also comes one year after Mozilla began offering an APT repository and Debian package builds of Firefox for further enhancing their Linux binary distribution experience.