diff --git a/pkgs/top-level/aliases.nix b/pkgs/top-level/aliases.nix
index d5a3f7d4fa9b1..4514772b69353 100644
--- a/pkgs/top-level/aliases.nix
+++ b/pkgs/top-level/aliases.nix
@@ -662,6 +662,8 @@ mapAliases ({
   youtubeDL = youtube-dl;  # added 2014-10-26
   zdfmediathk = mediathekview; # added 2019-01-19
   gnome_user_docs = gnome-user-docs; # added 2019-11-20
+  # spidermonkey is not ABI upwards-ompatible, so only allow this for nix-shell
+  spidermonkey = spidermonkey_78; # added 2020-10-09
 
   # TODO(ekleog): add ‘wasm’ alias to ‘ocamlPackages.wasm’ after 19.03
   # branch-off
diff --git a/pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix b/pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix
index 900fef7564c91..f4707a7a0370e 100644
--- a/pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix
+++ b/pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix
@@ -10389,7 +10389,6 @@ in
   spidermonkey_60 = callPackage ../development/interpreters/spidermonkey/60.nix { };
   spidermonkey_68 = callPackage ../development/interpreters/spidermonkey/68.nix { };
   spidermonkey_78 = callPackage ../development/interpreters/spidermonkey/78.nix { };
-  spidermonkey = spidermonkey_68;
 
   ssm-agent = callPackage ../applications/networking/cluster/ssm-agent { };
   ssm-session-manager-plugin = callPackage ../applications/networking/cluster/ssm-session-manager-plugin { };