Mozilla Making Progress With Offering Firefox As A Flatpak On Linux

[ireri]

appimage is dead

It's pretty alive actually, latest release was less than a month ago.

[elatllat]

Everything not using a normal repository should state exactly why, otherwise people are just going to view it as bloatware.

[theriddick]

I do agree, the reasons and benefits need to be detailed and exampled.

For example HOW exactly does this increase security? and what type of security concerns can using this flatpak protect you from? If it was a FULL virtual machine I'd understand a little bit better.

[Mario Junior]

>firefox flatpak
Let me guess... 2GB flatpak?

[CommunityMember]

It's pretty alive actually, latest release was less than a month ago.

The question is not whether the appimage project is alive (it certainly is), but whether (significant) applications that (a significant number of) people want to use are being packaged in that format. And on that front it would appear snaps and flatpak are in the (far) lead. No matter what one believes as to the technical advantages of one format over the other, ease of use and mindshare matters.

[Ananace]

Snap is made by Canonical and you know what Canonical does... it must die in-

-*insert Snap defenders here* "but we have Spotify and other proprietary apps"-

-" Flatpak will have them too-"

"the sandboxing is too extreme and Snap is eas-"

"-it looks Ubuntu-speci-"

*insert AppImage guy here*

*insert more noises here*

*insert Weasel and oiaohm here hurling insults to each other about the global namespace*

Amusingly enough - and yes, I know this is responding to satire - Flatpak actually got its working Spotify package years before Snap, yet people keep using Spotify in particular as an argument in Snap's favour.

[Britoid]

I don't know what all wayland goodies Fedora brings to know if they're here...but it's X11 in about:support...

I believe Fedora includes Wayland-by-default and a symbolic icon patch.

You could override the Flatpak to use Wayland and drop the symbolic icon into your local icons folder.

[finalzone]

>firefox flatpak
Let me guess... 2GB flatpak?

Installing unofficial Firefox Nightly version result:

org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly permissions:
ipc network pulseaudio wayland
x11 dri file access [1] dbus access [2]
bus ownership [3] system dbus access [4]

[1] xdg-download, ~/.config/dconf:ro
[2] org.a11y.Bus, org.freedesktop.FileManager1,
org.freedesktop.Notifications, org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver,
org.gnome.SessionManager
[3] org.mozilla.firefox.*
[4] org.freedesktop.NetworkManager


ID Branch Op Remote Download
1. [/] org.freedesktop.Platform.ffmpeg 1.6 i flathub 1.0 kB / 2.9 MB
2. [ ] org.gnome.Platform.Locale 3.28 i flathub < 188.9 MB (partial)
3. [ ] org.gnome.Platform 3.28 i flathub < 481.8 MB
4. [ ] org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly master i org.mozilla.FirefoxRepo < 122.5 MB

As noticed, the actual size of Firefox (nightly in this case ) is less than 122.5 MB. The rest are just dependencies.

[Britoid]

Wake me up when they release a .AppImage version like Ungoogled-Chromium does.
When it comes to Mozilla I really don't trust them anymore seeing their greediness to get my data and I want a solution that doesn't auto-update to the latest version.
I want to be able to get a version that is good and use that until another one comes.

Flatpak doesn't auto update.

AppImage isn't even comparable, it has a flawed design that will never allow it to run everywhere or gaurantee it runs on the same system after an OS update.

[Britoid]

Installing unofficial Firefox Nightly version result:

org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly permissions:
ipc network pulseaudio wayland
x11 dri file access [1] dbus access [2]
bus ownership [3] system dbus access [4]

[1] xdg-download, ~/.config/dconf:ro
[2] org.a11y.Bus, org.freedesktop.FileManager1,
org.freedesktop.Notifications, org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver,
org.gnome.SessionManager
[3] org.mozilla.firefox.*
[4] org.freedesktop.NetworkManager


ID Branch Op Remote Download
1. [/] org.freedesktop.Platform.ffmpeg 1.6 i flathub 1.0 kB / 2.9 MB
2. [ ] org.gnome.Platform.Locale 3.28 i flathub < 188.9 MB (partial)
3. [ ] org.gnome.Platform 3.28 i flathub < 481.8 MB
4. [ ] org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly master i org.mozilla.FirefoxRepo < 122.5 MB

As noticed, the actual size of Firefox (nightly in this case ) is less than 122.5 MB. The rest are just dependencies.

The Flatpak on flathub-beta is only 79.2MB

flatpak install https://flathub.org/beta-repo/appstr...fox.flatpakref

org.mozilla.firefox permissions:
ipc network pulseaudio x11 dri
file access [1] dbus access [2] system dbus access [3]

[1] xdg-config/dconf:ro, xdg-download, xdg-run/dconf
[2] ca.desrt.dconf, org.a11y.Bus, org.freedesktop.FileManager1, org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver, org.gnome.SessionManager, org.gtk.vfs.*
[3] org.freedesktop.NetworkManager


ID Arch Branch Remote Download
1. [✓] org.mozilla.firefox x86_64 master flathub-beta 77.8 MB / 79.2 MB

Then to force it to use the Wayland backend.

sudo flatpak override --socket=wayland --env=GDK_BACKEND=wayland org.mozilla.firefox

.

Set layers.acceleration.force-enabled in about:config to fix a few other issues

and fix the symbolic

curl https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/firefox/raw/master/f/firefox-symbolic.svg -o ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/symbolic/apps/org.mozilla.firefox-symbolic.svg