Linux Mint and Mozilla have announced a new partnership that means Firefox will continue to be the default web browser for the Linux Mint distribution, but the key point is that the new version no longer comes with Mint-specific customizations.
Don’t panic unnecessarily; Mint says Firefox will continue to be distributed as .deb packages through the official Linux Mint repositories. But the way browsers are built will change — and soon. Currently, Linux Mint has Mozilla Firefox as its default web browser, but this is a customized version of Firefox, including settings, search engine and start page, unlike in vanilla Firefox, and Linux (Mac or Windows) user Both can be downloaded from the Firefox website.
With this deal, most of these changes will be removed and replaced
- The start page will no longer point to linuxmint.com/start
- Google becomes the default search engine
- Other search engines are partners of Mozilla, not Mint.
- Default settings are now set by Mozilla
- No patches other than upstream
- The application will use the default Firefox icon
Why is there such a change?
On the surface it should be for money, for licensing, to reduce the technical burden on Mint developers. Linux Mint leader Clement Lefebvre said: “For Mozilla, the goal is to make Firefox work the same way across all platforms to ease maintenance, simplify development and bug fixing. With these changes, the Firefox experience in Linux Mint will be the same experience as in other operating systems”.
All Ubuntu-based Linux distributions that do not wish to ship the Firefox Snap app (the default on Ubuntu 21.10 and above) will need to research alternatives. So while this “commercial and technical” collaboration may annoy the most ardent Mint fans, it does nothing for Mint itself — they’re good for all users in the long run.
It remains to be seen whether other Mint modifications, such as support for download progress bars in the task switcher, will make their way upstream, though. Also, the browser needs some tweaking to better support the rounded corners introduced in the new Mint Y theme.