How do I get email notifications for Firefox updates?

Question

As Mozilla shut down their mailing lists some years ago, is there a way to still get notifications about Firefox updates via email? Maybe by a third party?

Screen-scrape their download servers?

Answer 1

Yes. You can use the open source WebChangeMonitor (WCM) to send you an email (or perform any function you like) when Internet/network-accessible content changes.

WCM is cross-platform and works on Linux, Raspberry Pi, macOS, Windows, and more.

To have WCM check for Firefox updates, create a WCM item pointing to:
https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/releases/

Then set the item's Start Tag to data-latest-firefox and the item's End Tag to data-gtm.

You can schedule WCM to check automatically at user-specified intervals, or manually on-demand.

That's it. WCM will now detect whenever there is an update to Firefox or Firefox ESR released.

Answer 2

Looks like https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/notes/ redirects to the actual release notes:

location: /en-US/firefox/127.0.1/releasenotes/

So I can just call this curl wrapper from cron and get a mail:

#!/bin/sh

URL='https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/notes/'
FOLD="ff.old"

v0=$(cat $FOLD)

l=$(curl -s -D - "$URL" | grep "location:")

#l='location: /en-US/firefox/127.0.1/releasenotes/'

v1=$(echo $l | sed -En 's#^location:.+/.+/firefox/([[:digit:]\.].+)/releasenotes/#\1#p')

if [ -z "$v1" ]
then
   echo "could not parse Firefox version: $l"
fi

if [ "$v1" != "$v0" ]
then
  echo Firefox old: $v0  new: $v1
  echo $v1 > $FOLD
fi