Mozilla Making Progress With Offering Firefox As A Flatpak On Linux

[Hibbelharry]

Maybe there they could finally enable graphics acceleration by default on Linux, when it's more contained.

It's getting near, if you use wayland.

[Britoid]

Number one problem and critical blocker for me, flatpak doesn't, and currently can't support, web browser 2FA for USB devices like Yubikeys and other U2F devices unless something changed very recently.

Yeh. This is a pretty big deal breaker, I would hope that the existance of the Firefox flatpak would encourage more work in that area.

[Britoid]

To save y'all some effort:

flatpak install --user https://flathub.org/beta-repo/appstream/org.mozilla.firefox.flatpakref

And it worked good enough to sync all my plugins, play a video on Hulu, and post this from my F31 SB Gnome 3.34 Wayland desktop.

H264 works? Sweet.

I might get rid of SIlverblues built-in Firefox (although, you wouldn't save any space) and switch to this.

[You-]

Apart from that I'm also eager to see Fedora Silverblue shipping more flatpak apps from their official repos - with upstream flatpak support for firefox they will hopefully provide their own builds as well, soon.

Fedora already has its own flatpak firefox build and it works quite well. Unless you want to use video - firefox uses ffmpeg which cant be extended by plugins and the fedora version of ffmpeg is very limited.

This future official build however should be able to provide a fuller ffmpeg with same level of viseo support as other OS's

[Britoid]

Great to see this. I do hope they will host their own repo independently of Flathub though - apparently Flathub does not yet have the security standards most people would want for a source of software they trust their data with. What I mean here is for example that I contributed two small MRs to one Flathub repo and the maintainer simply gave me write permissions to the repo (I didn't ask for it). It's a open github repo so hopefully I couldn't do weird stuff without anyone noticing, but it still surprised me. To me it indicates little man power and, well, "pragmatic" handling of permissions, rather than strict guidelines.

Apart from that I'm also eager to see Fedora Silverblue shipping more flatpak apps from their official repos - with upstream flatpak support for firefox they will hopefully provide their own builds as well, soon.

There's Firefox in the Fedora flatpak repo. Unfortunately, it doesnt support non-free codecs and is compiled with flags that make it slower than its non-flatpak counterpart.

But on the issue of security, yep. It's awesome that Flathub is completely open source, but some of the quality of the packages is pretty meh. To begin with, they should ban macOS and Windows screenshots.

[skeevy420]

thanks, so does this Firefox 75 beta have all the wayland goodies that a Firefox from Fedora repo would have?

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

[Danny3]

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.

[tildearrow]

Snap vs Flatpak flamewars in 3, 2, 1...

...0!

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*

[ernstp]

It's getting near, if you use wayland.

I don't know... layers.acceleration.force-enabled is closing in on 10 years old soon (see https://askubuntu.com/questions/3350...in-the-browser and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594876 ). And I've been using it for probably 5-6 years at least, and it's been rock solid.

That new Wayland stuff though, I tried it out. With basic opengl and webrender, with and without dmabuf. It was somewhat of a mess, I saw a bunch of bug reports were opened immediately... So I won't hold my breath, but I think it would be great if they enabled it by default in either environment (X11 or Wayland)!

[starshipeleven]

Wake me up when they release a .AppImage version like Ungoogled-Chromium does.

appimage is dead