Feature Freeze Exception: Seeding the official Firefox snap in Ubuntu Desktop

Basically I think that snap is a bad idea: Code will be duplicated, since very app will package its own dependencies, themes do not work (I’ve create some…) - linux will get bloated as windows. The startup time of an app will increase. I’ve switched over to Linux (and Ubuntu) because I’m using older hardware (keep the old stuff alive- remember that climate problem?) - snap will be a good way to prevent it.

I was apprehensive about this move, having had bad experience with slow snaps before. But I am very pleasantly surprised. On my HP Omen I didn’t see or feel any difference between the .deb and the snap versions. Good job! What is next? A Thunderbird snap? I feel like that could be a good step, as Thunderbird is rarely updated in the course of a cycle, while it’s as important an application as Firefox or LibreOffice.

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We already have a thunderbird snap, also beta versions are built in the equivalent channel which makes it trivial to try the current upstream status

I know there’s a Thunderbird snap. What I meant is, the next step could be making the Thunderbird snap the default pre-installed version. Of course, if it will be possible to make it as polished as the Firefox snap currently is.

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I agree this isn’t an ideal solution, merely a work-around. The good news is that upstream improvements to the download panel are being implemented, and when they are enabled (hopefully in a not-too-distant future), the need for this TMPDIR hack will go away.

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Not to my knowledge, no. Can you please file a bug to track it?

Thanks oSoMoN , that’s great to hear. :slight_smile:

Apart from the first time you when you click the freshly installed firefox snap it’s really fast to me , i’m really pleased with it.Unless it over complicates things what about a first time click window that informs people that the snap is unpacking & setting itself up for the first time?

It might stop people moaning that FF snap is slow when they realize it’s only for the first run.

We could possibly display some sort of hint when importing an existing profile (which is potentially the most time-consuming first-run task). That would require some design to actually be useful. Note that there is a plan to move the import logic to Firefox itself, which would expose an opportunity for better integrated user feedback.

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For flavours such as Ubuntu Budgie we will see the snap in our jammy dailies soon.

At the moment the snap looks broken due to snap auto-theming having not landed. Any time-frame for the theming aspect for snaps to land? We would obviously want this as early as possible to fully test the look-and-feel of the new firefox with our desktop.

This was originally discussed here, but I haven’t seen a recent status update. @jamesh what’s the current status on theme auto-installation?

As I noted on the snapcraft forum:

Just to add that it is not only Belgium that uses PKCS#11 modules for e-government. Whilst I am indeed Belgian, my partner is Spanish and Spain’s e-id implementation also uses them.

This really needs to be a release-critical issue for firefox snaps.

It is definitely on our priority list to address.

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@oSoMoN: I filed this bug:

User specific font configuration does not survive snap updates

just an heads up, there some bugs with the firefox snap reported here:

should this be tracked somewhere feels like some of the posts gets lost in here…
there appears to be a more extensive explaination of the usecase in this thread here:

This is tracked in a separate post on the snapcraft forum.

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snapcraft version 6 fix Arabic issue :+1:
https://twitter.com/xlmnxp/status/1454789723256393728

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great! thanks @osomon

Very nice, thanks for confirming the fix!
It will make its way to future releases of the firefox snap (and other snaps) as soon as 6.0 hits the stable channel, and launchpad builders start using it.

For the record: Firefox 95.0-1 in the latest/stable channel recognizes the host’s font configuration in /etc/fonts/conf.d. This makes a difference for users with e.g. a Chinese or Arabic locale. Workarounds no longer needed.

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