Firefox flatpak on flathub beta

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With h264 support

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Yay and hooray!

From some of the related tickets:

This adds the automation bits to build & package Firefox into flatpaks to be published to beta channel on Flathub. Plan is to iterate for the duration of 75.0 cycle to iron out all the other remaining issues and target 7th of April as the first official Firefox Flatpak.

In order to test the currently-shipped Firefox Flatpaks on the Flathub’s beta channel:

We still have a couple of issues to solve, like l10n and better building configuration, before we’re ready to publish to stable channel (and be available via the Flathub UI).

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I just installed it on Silverblue 32 and it works! I can finally watch Netflix without messing with packages!

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Will I be able to move my current sessions/config to flatpak version?

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Firefox could do that for you if you use Firefox Sync. Otherwise you might be able to do it manually by moving relevant data from ~/.mozilla to the one inside ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/.mozilla. Or perhaps by overwriting that entire .mozilla folder… Not sure, haven’t tested since I use FF Sync.

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I know about sync I use it, it’s more about Firefox containers and pages that I’m logged inside them :slight_smile:

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Interesting post today by Jiri Eischmann about this:

Localization support is not up to par yet. It also uses XWayland in stead of running on Wayland directly.

More annoying to me is that this Flatpak is not really going to help us Silverblue users. Even though Flathub just like Fedora has massive Red Hat support, apparently Fedora policy dictates that it cannot ship with packages that are not built by Fedora itself. So in stead of throwing their weight behind Flathub, we’re stuck with either layered Firefox or the crippled Firefox from Fedora’s own Flatpak repository.

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There are basically two methods to migrate your data to the Flatpak version. First is with sync (which supports containers), and the second is moving/copying the data over.

Container Sync

Firefox Containers now support Firefox Sync (as of Feb): Multi-Account Containers Add-on Sync Feature - Mozilla Security Blog — so using Sync is one method of switching to the Flatpak version and mostly keeping your data, including Containers.

Copy/Move

As far as moving profile information, you can find your profile directory by visiting about:support in each browser, then looking for “Profile Directory” (under “Application Basics”), then click on the “Open Directory” button or copy the path next to it.

You’ll want to shut down Firefox before copying your profile from one version to the other, of course. :wink: Also, if you do copy and intend to use both browsers, you might want to change the sync names (if you use sync).

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Thanks @garrett, I missed the info that containers are now supported in sync :slight_smile:

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Why it’s 76 version on the screenshot? I see only Firefox 75 in the beta channel.

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This is exciting! I alternate between Fedora and CentOS, and this will allow having a much newer Firefox on the latter

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Firefox 75 is now available on Flathub (stable).

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Is it possible to use ffmpeg instead of openh264 with this? I am getting poor performance with streaming services.

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I’m not sure about the version in Flathub stable. Some things seem off:

  1. There’s no mention of it being pushed to stable in the upstream ticket
  2. The upstream ticket hasn’t been closed
  3. The application description is a copy/paste mess, which seem very unlike Mozilla
  4. There’s no developer name set, which seem very unlike Mozilla
  5. The application icons are missing, while the beta release does have them
  6. The publisher link points to a non-existent github repository
  7. There’s no mention of it on any major tech news outlet, while this would be newsworthy for sites like phoronix

So this might be a fake, which might even mean it’s compromised. Seems risky. I’m sticking with the official one in beta until we get the official news!

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It is from Mozilla but there are a few things that need to be fixed like the Github URL and enabling Wayland support.

and the main ticket is this one:

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So does this mean Firefox can be removed from the Silverblue base image now?

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No. Fedora can only ship stuff built using its own infracstructure. I guess this would make it easier to improve the already existing firefox flatpak built by redhat on the fedora repository.

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Why it still needs to be shipped by Fedora at all?

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Performance seems improved for me today.

Does anyone know if there is difference is between Firefox and Firefox.BaseApp or is it a bug?

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Is there a way to do a hash of the flatpak to validate it is genuine?