I upgraded Ubuntu Desktop to the latest LTS version a couple weeks ago but ran into some stability issues. I have since reinstalled 19.10 and have a question regarding Firefox. Will Firefox continue to be upgraded if it was installed along with the OS?


I know, typically, the Firefox releases can take time to show up via "apt update" but v77 (and 77.0.1) has been out for several days now and Ubuntu thinks my Firefox is current (76.0.1)


Can I expect that the Firefox that was installed with the OS will no longer receive updates unless I upgrade the OS now, or uninstall it and reinstall it from a different source?

It SHOULD get Firefox 77 most likely before it goes EOL next month, but it does go EOL next month, and will not get any further updates after that.

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Thank you. Yes, it looks like 77.0.1 just got released for Eoan today. Good to know about end-of-life. Hopefully the latest version plays nice with my hardware and I have no more stability issues - otherwise I guess I'll look into keeping Eoan for a bit and installing Firefox via Mozilla repositories, if that's possible.

You can always upgrade a program manually in Ubuntu using either the software center, or Synaptic package manager (I prefer the latter, it may not be installed on your system, however.) As to using a 6-month release instead of a LTS, you might consider using the previous LTS (18.04) if 20.04 doesn't play nice with your system. 18.04 will be supported through April 2023. 20.04 will be supported through 2025. 19.10 is already out of support. You can probably add the Ubuntu repositories for another release, such as a LTS release, which will have the latest releases of many programs such as Firefox. You would use the backports for say, 18.04, which should work fine on 19.10.
I had a few troubles upgrading from 16.04 to 18.04 but I also upgraded the Kernel to the HWE release (only available in Ubuntu on the LTS releases.) It's all stable now though, and I don't plan on upgrading for at least 3 years, though.

I wonder: how can you do that if that newer version isn't in the repositories (yet)? Which is what this question was about.

Well, I guess you could add the "nightly" and "beta" repositories. But unless you're testing, you wouldn't want to.
Firefox 77.0.1 / 78.0 Beta 2 / 79.0a1 Nightly (June 2020)
But I'd stick with whatever version came with the last LTS of Ubuntu in most cases.
Latest update I have is 76.01, with the software updater reminders set.

I have Firefox-esr deb package in my system,
but have an up to date firefox installation in my home folder,
security wise keeps it sandboxed and always up to date.
It is the downloaded tar.bz2, not the deb from firefox website.
I'm using the up to date install 77.0.1