[kwlug-disc] Running multiple versions of Firefox on Linux

[Paul Nijjar]

I ended up taking this approach. Thanks. 

(I will say that Nix has super-frustrating documentation overall. I
wish a small subset of the thirteen million nerds who love this
package manager would write a tutorial for us dumb-dumbs that (a)
reflected current best practices, (b) gave concrete information of
exactly WHERE the config files should live, and exactly WHAT they
should contain instead of jumping off into abstractionland
immediately. )

- Paul

On Wed, Apr 01, 2026 at 04:31:12PM -0400, Thomas McKee wrote:
> Having dipped my toes in the water with Nix, perhaps it can help you?
> 
> The `nix shell` command can construct a temporary environment with a given
> package installed. The trick[2] is to make sure you're using the right
> version of the nixpkgs repository that happens to include the version of
> Firefox that you care about. Linked from [2], there's a handy lookup site
> to track down such nixpkgs version hashes for a given package. It even
> links to shell snippets like
> 
> ```
> nix shell
> github:nixos/nixpkgs/e6f23dc08d3624daab7094b701aa3954923c6bbb#firefox ;
> firefox
> ``` [4]
> 
> which I just used to run Firefox at version 139.0.4 (I use Arch, btw 🙃).
> 
> I expect this would need a fair bit of network transfer so, beware!
>