Hacker News Reader

Comment by evrflx | Hacker News Reader

Is there an alternative source for non-snap Firefox? snapd is the first thing I nuke on fresh installs. I would like to stay with Ubuntu, if possible.

View on HN

In the release notes (https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/impish-indri-release-notes/21...):

The deb package remains available in the archive and will continue receiving updates for the lifetime of Ubuntu 21.10.

You can also use the Flatpak version:

https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.mozilla.firefox

Unfortunately the container breaks certain extensions (e.g. keepassxc-browser). And that's ignoring the fact that, at least on my machine, the flatpak fonts look terrible for some reason and I often run into issues with the Gnome theme not being properly inherited.

I've been using the Debian packages supplied by Ubuntuzilla (despite their being hosted on gag Sourceforge): https://sourceforge.net/projects/ubuntuzilla/

Try flatseal and see if you can tweak the permissions.

Re: terrible look, I face the same thing with Telegram (the mouse reverts to whatever is the default in Qt and ignores the system settings). I haven't been able to fix that.

This is what fixed the cursor for me (Linux Mint Cinnamon, HiDPI):

  sudo flatpak override --env XCURSOR_THEME=DMZ-White
  mkdir -p ~/.icons/default/cursors/
  cp -R /usr/share/icons/DMZ-White/cursors/. ~/.icons/default/cursors/

I had some weird performance issues. Tried it side by side and flakpak version ran significantly worse. Not sure why

When installing distro, I usually remove some included packages and install newest Firefox, LibreOffice, Gimp, Inkscape etc from Flatpak, because Flatpak has newest versions. Many packages do not update .deb anymore, they have moved to Flatpak.

I uninstalled the snap, then did apt install firefox, worked fine. In principle I am all in favor of more sandboxing for my browser, but when I opened FF on the machine I'd upgraded to Impish, it didn't import anything, open tabs, bookmarks, nada. Not what I'd call friendly onboarding...

Possibly getting Firefox from Debian Sid (unstable). Will require some advanced apt configuration to make sure that nothing else accidentally comes from sid, and might break or require further apt configuration changes if it starts requiring library versions that aren't in Ubuntu.

I use Ubuntu and I sometimes install Debian Sid packages by downloading them in a browser and installing them with dpkg.

Mozilla's own tarballs.

You can migrate to Debian if possible. Ubuntu was a derivative from it.

You can try Debian, from which Ubuntu was derived. No snap.

you can always just download it from the website, unpack it and make a .desktop file or put a symlink under ~/bin or whatever

Reply on news.ycombinator.com