Why is there no update for Firefox?

Firefox 85.0 was released 6 days ago and still there is no update.

Is something wrong?

I'm using Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS.

1 Answer

It seems that Canonical has been slow to package the update. You can check the current status of any official package at packages.ubuntu.com. For example,

It currently tells that the latest available package for 20.04 LTS is

84.0.2+build1-0ubuntu0.20.04.1

If you want to know why it's taking longer than expected, you probably have to search for it in launchpad.net. For example, according to version 85 has been in proposed state since 2021-01-18 but for some reason it has not yet entered main repository which you probably have enabled.

If you want Firefox updates faster than the usual Canonical QA process can handle, you probably want to add PPA:

However, note their description:

Staging PPA for Mozilla and other browser-related security updates. Unless you are testing updates, you should NOT install packages from this PPA.

After searching for "firefox 85" in bugs, I found this:

It seems that building new Firefox packages requires upgrading rustc and cargo, too, which requires those dependencies to be upgraded before Firefox can be upgraded. This is an another example where Ubuntu is getting hurt for not being rolling release distribution and at the same time still trying to keep Firefox updated to latest version. They end up requiring to upgrade some other packages, too, but because this is not officially allowed by no-rolling-release rules they get extra delays for cases like this because they need to coordinate all changes across multiple packages.

If there were some important security patches, those would be handled separately and backported manually if needed to avoid such stalls.