As of Firefox 60, the build environment for official Firefox Linux builds switched from CentOS to Debian.

As part of the transition, we overhauled how the build environment for Firefox is constructed. We now populate the environment from deterministic package snapshots and are much more stringent about dependencies and operations being deterministic and reproducible. The end result is that the build environment for Firefox is deterministic enough to enable Firefox itself to be built deterministically.

Changing the underlying operating system environment used for builds was a risky change. Differences in the resulting build could result in new bugs or some users not being able to run the official builds. We figured a good way to mitigate that risk was to make the old and new builds as bit-identical as possible. After all, if the environments produce the same bits, then nothing has effectively changed and there should be no new risk for end-users.

Employing the diffoscope tool, we identified areas where Firefox builds weren't deterministic in the same environment and where there was variance across build environments. We iterated on differences and changed systems so variance would no longer occur. By the end of the process, we had bit-identical Firefox builds across environments.

So, as of Firefox 60, Firefox builds on Linux are deterministic in our official build environment!

That being said, the builds we ship to users are using PGO. And an end-to-end build involving PGO is intrinsically not deterministic because it relies on timing data that varies from one run to the next. And we don't yet have continuous automated end-to-end testing that determinism holds. But the underlying infrastructure to support deterministic and reproducible Firefox builds is there and is not going away. I think that's a milestone worth celebrating.

This milestone required the effort of many people, often working indirectly toward it. Debian's reproducible builds effort gave us an operating system that provided deterministic and reproducible guarantees. Switching Firefox CI to Taskcluster enabled us to switch to Debian relatively easily. Many were involved with non-determinism fixes in Firefox over the years. But Mike Hommey drove the transition of the build environment to Debian and he deserves recognition for his individual contribution. Thanks to all these efforts - and especially Mike Hommey's - we can now say Firefox builds deterministically!

The fx-reproducible-build bug tracks ongoing efforts to further improve the reproducibility story of Firefox. (~300 bugs in its dependency tree have already been resolved!)