Firefox Snap as Default in 21.10

[VMC]

As a test I downloaded "firefox-92.0.tar.bz2", purged installed FF. Then expanded the bz2 file into a folder, and ran it. Don't need a deb file. Don't need no Stinking Snap!

[monkeybrain20122]

I was trying to find out if there was going to be a deb packaged version of Firefox in the 21.10 repository?
It was clear that Mozilla would offer a deb but it looked like you would have to go to their website.

Yes, right at the top and under "What does this mean and who does it affect?"

This will only impact users of Ubuntu Desktop installing 21.10 or upgrading to 21.10. If you run one of the flavours, you won’t be affected - yet. The deb will continue to be supported through the life cycle of 21.10, and the deb to snap transition is scheduled to be completed in 22.04.

There will probably be a ppa when 22.04 lands.

[monkeybrain20122]

I agree with this remark by ajgreeny. Also, no one has yet mentioned that Firefox comes as a Flatpak as well. I have been using that version in a number of installations for quite a while.

Other distros, like Fedora, Arch and Manjaro, are unlikely to go with a snap version of Firefox as default. Fedora is pro Flatpak - they even have their own Flatpak repository.

does hardware acceleration (vaapi) work with the flatpak? With the .deb it works beautifully on my old intel netbook here. How about installing extensions? Does it work?

[Dennis N]

does hardware acceleration (vaapi) work with the flatpak? With the .deb it works beautifully on my old intel netbook here. How about installing extensions? Does it work?

Yes, you can install Firefox extensions, like ublock origin for example.
But, like Firefox Snap, Firefox Flatpak cannot use the gnome-shell integration provided by chrome-gnome-shell package to manage gnome-shell extensions. So you either use the Ubuntu repository to install shell extensions, or else download them and install manually which is pretty easy. But this would not be an issue with Ubuntu flavors like Xubuntu which don't use gnome-shell.
Sorry, I don't know about the hardware acceleration. Where is that set?

[VMC]

Hardware acceleration is still there under Performance , and you can still change "Content process limit". Also vaapi is still an option at about:config.

[TheFu]

Snaps AREN'T a terrible idea, but the implementation has no method of local control over the constraints WHICH IS A TERRIBLE problem.
Flatpaks allow local overrides.

Two different philosophies at work. Power to the users, which is the typical Unix philosophy, or power to the packager. Those are the choices here.
I love the idea of being able to constrain applications and sets of applications - provided the constraints are under my control.

Snaps need more years of maturing based on the failures I've seen. On 5 systems, all ubuntu-based, only 1 has consistently had snaps that work ... most of the time. The other 4 refuse to even start a snap - any snap - program. Both desktop apps and server tools fail and refuse to work. That's far from the behavior of a "production" tool.

$ /snap/bin/wormhole
Sorry, home directories outside of /home are not currently supported. 
See https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/11209 for details.

$ /snap/bin/lxc list
Sorry, home directories outside of /home are not currently supported. 
See https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/11209 for details.

not currently supported? When will they be supported? The location is specified in the damn passwd DB!!! It isn't like a getent passwd {userid} command can't validate that - or the C call getpwent().

NFS support anytime - ever? If Canonical wants desktops in a corporation, they need to support both NFS and HOME directories outside /home/. They also need to let local admins set additional network storage locations via NFS for every snap to have data read AND written. In every corporate environment I've worked that wasn't 100% Windows on the desktop, NFS was used for all data storage. Our HOME directories were sized small (quota limits) and we were require to store all project data on the NFS mounts. Easier for the professional IT people to backup server storage than 50K desktops.

[monkeybrain20122]

Sorry, I don't know about the hardware acceleration. Where is that set?

Hardware acceleration is still there under Performance , and you can still change "Content process limit". Also vaapi is still an option at about:config.

I don't know if you can just enable vaapi on about:config, maybe someone with a flatpak can check this

I do it by changing layers.acceleration.force-enabled to be true in about:config and start FF with (I made a wrapper script so can start FF with .desktop file)

LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=i965 MOZ_X11_EGL=1 /usr/bin/firefox

You can check that it is using vaapi by monitoring cpu usage with the top command and if using intel gpu

sudo intel_gpu_top

and see that the "video/0" row is not 0.00%

To get intel_gpu_top

sudo apt install intel-gpu-tools

[kurt18947]

Yes, you can install Firefox extensions, like ublock origin for example.
But, like Firefox Snap, Firefox Flatpak cannot use the gnome-shell integration provided by chrome-gnome-shell package to manage gnome-shell extensions. So you either use the Ubuntu repository to install shell extensions, or else download them and install manually which is pretty easy. But this would not be an issue with Ubuntu flavors like Xubuntu which don't use gnome-shell.
Sorry, I don't know about the hardware acceleration. Where is that set?

It would suck hugely for me if I couldn't install shell extensions. I just checked Vivaldi on 20.04 and it looks like I can install, delete and modify extensions there if Firefox chooses to be difficult. I presume that will continue to be the case. I keep a chromium based browser installed as secondary for the few sites that don't seem to play well with Firefox.

[TheFu]

I'm curious.

Has anyone had trouble free use of snaps?

[corradoventu]

Does not seems worse on my Impish...

corrado@corrado-n3-ii-0919:~$ time snap run firefox

real	0m8,013s
user	0m6,477s
sys	0m1,932s
corrado@corrado-n3-ii-0919:~$ time firefox

real	0m5,132s
user	0m6,504s
sys	0m1,263s
corrado@corrado-n3-ii-0919:~$