Using Firefox on Debian 9 is a little frustrating as the packages available from default APT sources are older “ESR” releases (firefox-esr, 52.0 at the time of writing). Getting the Dev or Nightly builds is pretty straight forward but if you use Gnome you probably want a launcher, and it might not be very obvious how to do this.
First grab the sources or prebuilt binaries:
$ curl -LO "https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-devedition-latest-ssl&os=linux64&lang=en-US"
Extract them into /opt/firefox-dev:
$ tar -xjf firefox-57.0b12.tar.bz2 && sudo mv firefox /opt/firefox-dev
Open up a text editor and create /use/share/applications/firefox-dev.desktop as follows
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Firefox Dev
Comment=Browse the World Wide Web
GenericName=Web Browser
X-GNOME-FullName=Firefox Dev Web Browser
Exec=/opt/firefox-dev/firefox %u
Terminal=false
X-MultipleArgs=false
Type=Application
Icon=firefox-dev
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/xml;application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml;application/rss+xml;application/rdf+xml;image/gif;image/jpeg;image/png;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https;
StartupNotify=true
Copy the icon and run gtk-update-icon-cache so that the icon appears as expected.
$ sudo cp /opt/firefox-dev/browser/icons/mozicon128.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/firefox-dev.png
$ sudo gtk-update-icon-cache -f /usr/share/icons/hicolor
And that's it! You should have a nice desktop icon for Firefox Developer Edition you can use. I also did the same for Firefox Nightly:
For updates you can clean out the directory and repeat the process with the latest tar.bz2 file ... or you can change the permissions in the firefox-dev directory so you have write access, and auto-updates will work.