Of my three distros, two are source-based. But compiling FF from source is becoming increasingly difficult. Not only does it take forever (and I have a twin-core processor and 2 GB of RAM, which I used to consider ample) but nowadays it has a huge list of dependencies (for example rust, which is also very large and slow to build).

I've given up using FF on LFS, replacing it with Pale Moon, though I dislike the attitudes of the PM developers. I am now thinking of giving it up in Crux too. But I do actually rather like the new Quantum version, which runs nice and fast on my machine. So I am playing with the idea of downloading the official Mozilla compiled version for both Crux and LFS.

The LFS book is rather sniffy about precompiled FF, because it doesn't link to your system libraries but has its own internal versions, which are usually older. This, according to the book, is a security risk.

I'd be interested to know if other people use the Mozilla versions and what their experience has been.

I'm using the precompiled version Firefox Quantum 62.0.2 on my LFS 8.0 here.
The only annoyance I've seen here is sometimes clicking a link in the bookmarks
takes me to a wrong page. Sometimes videos won't play but I run Adblock Plus
and Privacy Badger and think those sometimes inadvertently block some videos.
I don't worry about figuring it out. Youtube videos play fine.
I agree FF has just become too hard to compile. I like compiling stuff to make
it work but no longer want to spend hours figuring out what's wrong.

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Thanks. I don't watch videos so that wouldn't be a problem for me.

btw your LFS needs updating. The current book is 8.3.

I've used binaries of Firefox for years without much trouble, most times from my distro, but at other times from their site.

I certainly wouldn't want to compile it myself.

When I started out it was quite doable. In those days we used to think that software bloat was purely a Windows problem!

Distro binaries are a different kettle of fish altogether. They are built from source by the distro devs and are therefore linked to system packages, not local ones.

I've used the self-contained tars for years. I find firefox quantum better than it's been for some time. My personal pref has always been to extract it to /usr/share/ and create a link in /usr/bin. You can check for updates from within firefox and the doenload and extract take minutes with no hassle.
I've never had a problem with mismatched dependencies since doing it this way.

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Good! That settles it. I keep Pale Moon in /opt, so Firefox had better go there too. I certainly wouldn't put it in /usr/share because that is for fixed data, not programs.

Same here: precompiled on my distro with no issues. I have built FF, Chromium and many other packages on my box (takes about 1 hour each) but not sure that is going to help you because it's a completely different distro, and as you mentioned, might be lib issues.

I'm sure I used to download it to my /home & run it from there without problems, just added it to my (fluxbox) menu.

Thought people might like an update. I was notified of a pending Crux update to FF so I bit the bullet, downloaded the compiled version (which seems to be much smaller than the source code package) from the Mozilla site, installed it in /opt and removed the native version. I had to copy a few libraries from /opt/firefox to /usr/lib (and of course remake the /usr/bin/firefox link) but it works just fine.

I then ran prt-get listorphans and was able to get rid of no less than four compilation tools: autoconf-2.13, yasm, rust and clang. Only FF was using them. I was particularly glad to see the back of rust, because that's another huge download and I have a monthly bandwidth limit.

While I prefer to use software packages, I didn't have any issues the last time I done it (before CentOS updated it's repo's for the new Firefox versions).

The only thing with that way (apart from not using the package manager instead), is that Mozilla seems to expect you to install it to your home folder. I'd prefer it's installed to the /usr/ folder, so it's protected by file permissions. I installed to the /usr/local/ folder when I manually downloaded it from Mozilla's site.

I don't like installing stuff to my home folder, forget it.

+1 to that. I use /opt for that kind of thing.

/opt is also recommended by FHS https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org...0/fhs-3.0.pdf:

Personally I store a number of cross-compilers in /opt.