The Firefox developers have announced a switch to using the XZ format, based on the LZMA compression algorithm, for distributing browser builds for the Linux platform. It is noted that compared to '.tar.bz2' archives, delivering builds in '.tar.xz' format will significantly reduce the size of the downloaded data and decrease extraction time. As of yesterday, the generation of nightly builds of Firefox in bz2 format has been discontinued, and release and beta builds will be transitioned to xz format in the coming weeks. Package maintainers in distributions are advised to make changes to their build systems to support downloading '.tar.xz' archives.
With the use of XZ, the size of Firefox builds has been reduced by an average of 25%, and extraction operations are performed more than twice as quickly. The option of switching to the Zstandard (.zst) format was also considered, but the choice was made in favor of the XZ format, which is slightly slower during extraction yet provides a higher level of compression and is more widely used in Linux distributions.
Source: opennet.ru
