We’ve been preparing to upgrade Firefox’s base snap from core20 (built from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS) to core22 (built from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS), and after much testing and fixing any issues we encountered, we think the core22-based Firefox is in good shape and the work is ready to be merged into stable. In fact, Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster) shipped with core22 Firefox out of the box, and the current development series Ubuntu 23.10 (Mantic Minotaur) defaults to core22 Firefox as well.
We are now calling for you to try the core22-based Firefox, especially if you are currently using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish). To help with the testing, you can run the following command in a terminal to switch to core22 Firefox:
snap refresh --channel=candidate/core22 firefox
Then use Firefox as you normally would, and report any issues you encounter here or on Bugzilla, Mozilla’s bug tracker. Please include in your reports the output from these commands:
snap info firefox
snap --version
Finally, you can switch to ‘stable’ Firefox (currently based on core20) at any time if you wish to:
snap refresh --stable firefox
Thanks in advance for your help with testing,
-bandali
Can I suggest a core22 channel for the beta series? I would love to test this, but I don’t want switch from beta to stable/candidate series. I would guess many users of the beta channel would welcome this, since they already choose a pre-release version!
Ack. We now have a beta/core22 channel for core22-based beta builds, which you can switch to by running
snap refresh --channel=beta/core22 firefox
But a general heads-up that this one might end up being much shorter-lived than candidate/core22, as we might transition the beta series to core22 even sooner than stable.
Quick update: beta has moved from core20 to core22. I’m preparing patches for Nightly (edge) next. Afterwards, if all looks good we’ll switch stable to core22 shortly after as well.
Another quick update: we’ve merged the changes for moving Nightly from core20 to core22 as well, and the next Nightly to be built and uploaded to the edge channel will be based on core22.
As mentioned earlier, next up will be stable, and we hope to update its base from core20 to core22 within the next ~2 weeks.
Qquick update: the switch to core22 for stable has been temporarily postponed and hasn’t happened yet, but we still hope and plan to do it soon in the coming weeks.
Reading this from core22 on Jammy. Zero issues thus far. Is there an article or something describing the difference between FF on UC20 vs UC22 for everyday home users? Or is performance meant to be the same?
I arrived here because of the improvements to hardware acceleration, but I’m sure there are other advantages to the new package (see my original comment on GitHub). I’m happy to report that YouTube hardware acceleration appears to work now for all their codecs on my Intel TigerLake (Gen12) GPU.
Sadly, Google Meet still appears not to use hardware acceleration, but at least it’s some progress. Thanks to the team!
To my knowledge we don’t have an article about it, but the upgrade of Firefox snap’s base from core20 to core22 should address some important issues on the Raspberry Pi thanks the new mesa in Jammy, namely enabling accelerated video playback in Firefox on the Pi. I believe the upgrade to core22 will similarly add support for hardware-accelerated video decode/encode on some newer Intel graphics cards and improve support for some Nvidia GPUs as well, along with other small overall improvements.
Awesome! How can those of us who have moved to candidate/core22 know when the stable branch has been updated?
By the way, I don’t know if it’s psychological, but the UX is so much better. Seems much less of a CPU and memory hog, super-snappy (pun intended) and stable. Thanks!
We now have a 