Better Flatpak Support For Firefox Appears To Be Coming

One of the best and most practical use-cases for sandboxed Linux apps via Flatpak or Snaps is certainly web browsers. There has been unofficial Firefox Flatpaks offered to this point but it's looking like better support for a Flatpak'ed Firefox could be coming down the pipe soon.

A Phoronix reader pointed out to us some new happenings on the Firefox Flatpak front. In particular, this one year old bug report about running tasks under unique OS user accounts on Linux is now resolved. That bug was against Mozilla's Taskcluster task execution service. Similar to the support on Windows for running tasks on a different dedicated local user account on the system, the support is now in place for doing so as well on Linux systems.

Addressing that helps the official Flatpak cause and has now unblocked the work on generating a multilocale Firefox Flatpak package in an official capacity, unlike the unofficial Firefox Flatpak packages to this point. With the Taskcluster bug now resolved being their most recent blocker, hopefully seeing official Flatpak'ed Firefox isn't too far out now. Mozilla's Mihai Tabara did confirm this week that they are back to working on it now in the Flatpak bug report.

For those wanting a Flatpak'ed Firefox today, the unofficial packages can be found at firefox-flatpak.mojefedora.cz.

In other Flatpak news, a new FreeDesktop-SDK update is also available now for this commonly used minimal Linux run-time for Flatpaks.